About the Artist

A defining voice from New York’s Lower East Side.

Angel ‘LA II’ Ortiz emerged from New York’s Lower East Side graffiti scene and developed a highly distinctive visual language rooted in dense lettering, rhythm, repetition and graphic mark making.

His practice became closely associated with collaboration, most notably through his extensive work with Keith Haring during the 1980s. Their combined visual languages appeared across paintings, objects, sculptures and clothing, creating a body of work that connected graffiti, downtown culture and the international contemporary art world.

Over the following decades, Ortiz continued to work with artists from different generations and disciplines, maintaining a collaborative practice that has remained central to his identity as an artist.

The Exhibition

Collaboration as a living artistic language.

The Great Collaborator brought together a new generation of artistic partnerships, reflecting the way Ortiz’s visual language continues to operate in dialogue with other artists.

The exhibition featured collaborative works with STIK, Shepard Fairey, Mr. Doodle and Mark Kostabi, each bringing a distinct visual vocabulary into conversation with Ortiz’s lettering and mark making.

Rather than presenting collaboration as a stylistic exercise, the exhibition considered it as an exchange of authorship, influence and visual identity.

The Collaborators

Artists from different generations brought into conversation.

Richard Hambleton

Historic collaborations preserved within the exhibition.

Alongside the newly produced collaborations, the exhibition included works created by Ortiz with the late Richard Hambleton before Hambleton’s death in 2017.

These works connected the exhibition to an earlier generation of New York street art and demonstrated the breadth of Ortiz’s collaborative practice across different periods of his career.

Their inclusion allowed the exhibition to move between historic and contemporary partnerships, revealing collaboration as a continuous thread within Ortiz’s artistic life.

Exhibition Highlights

Curatorial Context

Forty years of artistic exchange brought into one exhibition.

Ortiz’s career demonstrates how collaboration can become an artistic language in its own right.

From the Lower East Side to partnerships with internationally recognised artists, his work has repeatedly crossed boundaries between individual styles, generations and cultural contexts.

The Great Collaborator brought these relationships into focus, examining both Ortiz’s historic influence and his continuing relevance within contemporary street and urban art.

From the Founders

Exhibition Details