7 Up

Graffiti started as a name on a wall. Before the murals, the gallery shows, and the brand collaborations, a writer picked a tag, found a surface, and put it up where the city would have to look at it. In neighborhoods that were redlined, disinvested, and written off, kids who had no platform built one out of spray paint and made themselves impossible to ignore. Being "up" meant your name traveled further than you could. It was authorship, territory, and proof of existence in one motion, made by people that society ignored. Frank Morrison was one of those kids in New Jersey, and 7-Up pulls from authentic graffiti culture. A small girl stands with her back to us in a red puffer coat with a fur-lined hood, two hair puffs stacked above it, jeans and sneakers, hands tucked behind her. She is dwarfed by the wall. Above her float seven balloons in orange, red, blue, black, gray, green, and pink, each one marked with a white three-point crown, the signature symbol of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti writer who ended up in the world's great museums. Behind her the wall carries a green tag reading 7 UP, which is the title of the painting and the oldest ambition in the culture. To be up is to be seen everywhere. Morrison builds the entire surface out of real street language. White throw-ups cross the top, layered tags run underneath in blue, green, orange, and red, drips fall the full height of the canvas, and the bottom third dissolves into a curtain of running paint. Nothing is decorative. The wall looks the way a wall actually looks after a decade of writers take their turn on it. Against that noise, the girl and the balloons are the only clean, fully rendered forms in the picture, and the contrast is what speaks immediately. The construction here is worth noting. Morrison painted the child in tight oil detail, down to the quilted seams of the coat and the texture of her hair, then surrounded her with spray paint, marker, and drip applied the way he applied it as a teenager. Two techniques he learned thirty years apart share one canvas. The tall 20 x 40 format compresses the composition and forces the eye up the balloon strings, which drive the piece's entire movement. She is small, and the wall is enormous, and seven crowns are rising over her head. Frank Morrison was born in Boston in 1971 and raised in New Jersey, where he was writing on walls before he reached his teens. Touring Europe as a break dancer took him to the Louvre, and he came home committed to painting. He built his style on the Neo-Mannerist tradition, elongated and exaggerated human form, then folded his graffiti practice back into it. Morrison is also one of the most decorated illustrators working in children's publishing, with Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards for Standing in the Need of Prayer and R-E-S-P-E-C-T, the Coretta Scott King and John Steptoe Award for Jazzy Miz Mozetta, and Honor recognition for Little Melba and Her Big Trombone and Let the Children March. That fluency with childhood is visible in every inch of this painting. His work has been shown at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art Basel, and Scope Miami Beach, and he has been commissioned by Swizz Beatz and for Jordan Peele's Get Out. Every canvas he signs carries the notation TTG, for "Thanks To God." 7-Up measures 20 x 40 inches and is offered as a giclee on canvas in a Limited Edition of 25, hand-signed and numbered by the artist and shipped with a certificate of authenticity. Once the edition of 25 sells through, it is closed permanently. Choose the unstretched canvas, the gallery-stretched canvas ready to hang, or the stretched canvas finished in a black or white floater frame. The black floater sharpens the graffiti and pulls the balloon colors forward. The white floater keeps the piece light and lets the drip work at the bottom breathe. A natural fit for a child's room, a nursery, a hallway, a home office, or any narrow wall that needs height.