An incredible journey describes that of Torrick TOXIC Ablack, a child of the concrete towers of the South Bronx. Barely a teenager, he roamed the city alongside friends Kool Koor and A-One, spray can in hand and dreams bursting in his mind, transforming New York’s walls into clandestine galleries. They were part of the Tag Master Killers crew, fierce rebels who, in just a few sprays, made the entire city pulse. Quickly noticed by Stefan Eins of the legendary Fashion Moda Gallery and later by collector Sidney Janis, TOXIC carved out an inimitable style—raw and free—joining forces with icons like Rammellzee and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom he founded the Hollywood Africans. In the East Village streets, he crossed paths with Andy Warhol, drawn to this world where art appeared suddenly, without warning, in every line and color. “Art? It’s whatever touches you, moves you, grabs you,” he says. His first encounters with beauty came in his brother’s sketches, in the gang lettering in his neighborhood, in the poetry of the first graffiti artists marking the streets of the Bronx. The streets were his school, his gallery, his foundation. At fourteen, he exhibited at Fashion Moda with A-One. By seventeen, he signed with Sidney Janis—a man who rarely gave exclusivity but saw TOXIC’s raw talent and offered him that rare support: shelter and faith in his work. This bond of trust allowed him to create, without restraint, far from the boxes in which youth from the Bronx were too often confined. In New York, he befriended Basquiat, Rammellzee, and the East Village artists, who taught him a new language. “I was a bit wild—I didn’t even know how to hold a fork,” he laughs. Once, invited to an apartment on Fifth Avenue, he climbed the stairs as he would back home and left his mark on the pristine white walls, a quick tag, an unruly wink. These artists saw in him a spirit, not a delinquent, and showed him that art could be something more—something beyond the concrete. Together, TOXIC and his brothers in arms painted, experimented, fused colors. “We were like brothers, almost interchangeable,” he says of A-One and Rammellzee. Painting together meant understanding one another without words, finishing the line the other started. This bond, this rhythm, left its trace on every train, on every wall. Then, he crossed the Atlantic. Milan first, then Bologna, alongside Basquiat, Futura, Keith Haring, and Crash, all gathered for Arte di Frontiera, Europe’s first major graffiti exhibition. Italy was a revelation, Europe a freedom. It was a world away from the shadows of 1980s America, a place marked by racism, violence, and the street’s hardness. For a kid from the Bronx, Europe was an improbable Disneyland, with bottled beer and pretzels, and museums welcoming his art. “I’m not a street artist,” he insists, rejecting the label. “I started in the streets, but that doesn’t define my work’s value. If I were white and from a wealthy family, they’d just call me an artist.” TOXIC shuns categories; the spray can is his first love, but he explores other materials, other supports, seeking depth, textures that go beyond the flatness of spray paint. With his Hollywood African brothers, he seeks not to convey a political message, but to simply be. “My life speaks for me,” he says. Black, born in a Bronx project, to a Puerto Rican mother and a Trinidadian immigrant father, he’s crossed into museums worldwide, free and creative. Graffiti is now taught in art schools, a fact that makes him smile. “We didn’t learn graffiti in college; the street was our school.” The world changes, labels too, and he observes the new generation kindly, without dwelling on the past. If graffiti is now taught, if galleries have opened, TOXIC keeps moving forward. “Don’t go Van Gogh,” he says, a motto that refuses the oblivion and poverty of the misunderstood artist. He remains that free spirit, an artist who reimagines the world, refusing to let history grow stagnant, true to himself and to those who, like him, leave a vibrant trail in the art landscape.