Chris Riggs is a New York street artist, painter and muralist whose colorful LOVE tags have traveled from city walls to galleries and murals around the world. He grew up between Manhattan and Long Island City at a time when the trains and walls were covered in color, and as a little kid he would come home and draw all the bubble letters he had seen on the street. An art school on the corner, where a friend’s mother worked as a full-time artist, showed him that making art could be a real life.
Art ran in the family. His father, a businessman who loved art, sent him to art classes, and his grandfather, a chef from Italy, painted folk art on the side. Chris lost his father when he was still a young boy, and from then on he felt like the man of the family. He kept making art anyway. As a teenager he and his friends painted big, colorful pieces in tunnels and abandoned buildings, and he paid for his paint by buying spray cans wholesale and reselling them, which also connected him with many of the city’s street artists.
Winning a school art contest put his artwork on posters across the subway, his first step into the official art world while his friends were still tagging the stations. He made his own clothes as a club kid, painted on plywood he found in the street, and ran a restaurant uniform business to pay the bills. Then came “Chris Riggs for Mayor”: campaign-style posters with his name, taped to poles all over Manhattan. It once got him arrested (the case was dropped), and it sold a lot of paintings to people who got the joke.
When the internet arrived, Chris started selling directly to collectors online, and one of his buyers turned out to be Justin Bieber, who was living in Brooklyn near some of his murals. He met his wife on Myspace in 2010, and together they built the business side while he kept painting. Today he paints murals and commissions in places like Germany, France, England and China, shows with galleries around the world, and keeps growing his black-and-white style, his LOVE tag style and his flowers. His goal now is simple: to spread peace.
