Doze Green (b. 1964) came up in New York as one of the original architects of hip-hop culture. He started writing graffiti in his Manhattan neighborhood in 1974, was painting subway cars by 1976, and the following year joined the Rock Steady Crew—the group that turned breakdancing into an art form. Writing as DOZE TC5, he learned the discipline directly from graffiti legends like RAMMELLZEE and DONDI White, then sharpened it at New York’s High School of Art and Design.

Over the decades he has moved off the trains and into galleries without ever leaving that foundation behind. His paintings and murals are built from tangled lines and fractured, cubist figures—human forms caught mid-transformation, part portrait, part cosmology. The geometry of breakdancing, the calligraphic energy of tag-writing, and later influences from Edo-period Japanese art and metaphysics all fold into a single, restless visual language rendered in everything from spray paint to gesso and sumi ink.

Between stints art-directing and helping found the BARNSTORMERS collective, Green kept painting walls, and his large-scale work now appears across the United States, Japan, and Brazil. Few artists trace a straighter line from the subway yards of the 1970s to the contemporary gallery, carrying the whole history of the culture with them.