"Mr. Patterson's world has been the downtown demimonde of squatters,
anarchists, graffiti taggers, tattoo artists, junkie poets, leathered
rock 'n' rollers, and Santeria priests."--The New York Times
For the first time ever, legendary photographer and videographer Clayton
Patterson--who Anthony Bourdain described as the "archivist of all
things Lower East Side"--is the subject of a biographical graphic novel
anthology. Like no other, Clayton has documented the often-overlooked
people and cultural contributions of New York's Lower East
Side--sometimes finding himself in perilous situations as a result.
For decades, Clayton has, as his friend Ai Weiwei puts it, "relentlessly
devoted himself to a kind of culture that examines authority." Best
known for his documentation of the Tompkins Square Riots in 1988,
Clayton lived at the intersection of numerous underground cultures, from
drag queens to punks, gangbangers to tattoo artists, breathing in the
same creative energy that gave life to Keith Haring, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, the Talking Heads, Blondie, and other New York icons.
In a time when the future of the city is threatened by
hyper-gentrification, Clayton, whose work has documented the creative
DIY underbelly of the Lower East Side, has become an icon of an
increasingly vanishing New York. Now, in the tradition of Harvey Pekar's
American Splendor, eighteen artists pay tribute to him in this graphic
novel anthology--the first biography of this iconic artist intertwined
with a rich history of the Lower East Side over the last thirty years.
With artwork from Miles Anderson, Nancy Calef, Roberto Castro, Seanne
Catedral, Maegan Dolan, Esteban Erlich, Ray Felix, Max Hirnbock, Sasha
Kimiatek, Jesse Lambert, Summer McClinton, Ben Moody, Natania
Nunubiznez, Fabrice Sapolsky, Dov Smiley, and Chris M. Wilson.
