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CHRIS RWK

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A child of the 1980s, Chris RWK cites an eclectic array of creative influences, including comics, cartoons, and even old-school Hollywood monsters and the classic comedy duo Abbott and Costello. “All that stuff might seem odd as influences, but I think the comedy and sincerity influenced me,” he muses. His paintings frequently recall past conceptions of popular culture that are forever embedded in his psyche’s cache.


Chris began drawing at a young age and kept with it even as his friends stopped or moved on to other activities. “Then, I found graffiti,” he says, recalling “skateboard ads, stuff with graff in them,” and the work of legendary artist Keith Haring (Chris RWK would walk by Haring’s original street art in Manhattan’s Bowery neighborhood). “Around 1988 is when I got into graffiti fully, my brother and all his friends were doing it,” Chris recalls. Although none of Chris’s own peers were creating graffiti, he finally found his people when he started high school. “I met Said, Col, Fade and a few others,” he says. “That’s when I really started doing stuff. We’d leave school and go paint abandoned spots.”


After earning an Associate’s degree in Fine and Studio Arts from Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Painting from City University of New York’s Hunter College, Chris launched Robots Will Kill, an arts website dedicated to community and exposure for artists and media often disregarded by the mainstream art world. “This was before everybody had websites,” Chris says. Although at first he conceived of the site as a way to showcase his own work, he soon realized he wanted other artists to be able to show their work as well. “I knew what it was like to be rejected with no legit reason, so we turned the website into more of a gallery for other artists, and we focused on things like graffiti, sticker art, stencil art—all things that were overlooked by the mainstream,” he explains.


But Chris was still committed to his own creations and characters, such as his iconic robot POBOY (Prosthetic Organic Bot Of Youth) which he painted on the 69th floor elevator corridor at 4 World Trade Center. “The WTC was amazing because I would go there with my dad as a kid,” Chris says. “So knowing I contributed to something there was amazing.”


Chris painted his robot characters on the steel i-beams at the site of the future 2 World Trade Center, hoping for “a fun interaction with some of the robots and the people as they walk by, and the crowd that it creates,” he said at the time—and the results did not disappoint. “It was great hearing this lady saying how happy it made her, seeing something down here that wasn't just construction stuff,” Chris enthused on-site at the time. “And then I had a family that stopped by before, they were walking their dog, and he thanked me for bringing something colorful and exciting into the area.”

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