Beginning in the 1970s and continuing perhaps into the 1990s, someone scratched the word PRAY onto countless phone booth coin boxes and other surfaces in Manhattan and other parts of New York City. These markings showed up everywhere. Eventually a few graffiti writers recognized that someone was in effect beating them at their own game. PRAY's identity remained unknown until a tagger called Zephyr posted his account in 2009, which revealed that PRAY was a homeless woman. Zephyr observed, but never managed to speak to her. (http://hateofthecity.blogspot.com/2010/04/pray.html)
It's good to have Zephyr's word portrait of this elusive individual. He honors PRAY as the "queen of graffiti." As I see it, the content of her work sets her apart from other hyper-prolific taggers. PRAY lived in the world of graffiti, but she was not of it. Her work was not writing, drawing or painting; it was etching. Pray probably used a pen knife to make incisions on hard metal surfaces that could not be removed. If you were to ink the face of one of these coin boxes, remove the ink from the surface, press a page over it and rub the back of the page, you’d produce a negative image of the etched word (but that was probably not PRAY’s intention).
Consider her as a person whose life was devoted to prayer, and to a unique manifestation of evangelism. We can't know how PRAY thought of her work, but it seems likely that she was motivated by its religious dimension, as a personal practice of devotion and as a means of witnessing to the world. PRAY was clearly on a mission. Whether she had chosen this practice or had been called to it, her total dedication to it is obvious. It seems right that Zephyr, who followed her progress, never got to speak with her, since this preserves for her work the integrity of speaking purely for itself. I'm reminded of what Samuel Johnson told Charles Burney about the poet Christopher Smart, who had developed a religious obsession which put him outside the bounds of propriety. Smart had a habit of accosting people in the streets of London, imploring them to pray with him. Johnson commented that it's better to pray too much or too fervently than not at all.
When we turn to PRAY as an artist, we can focus on the sheer extent of her accomplishment, and how slyly it insinuated itself into the public sphere. Your typical graffiti tag is essentially a signature, a sign that primarily represents the writer's presence in a particular spot. Graffiti as such is more of a competitive sport than an art activity. When the content of the tag or sign presents itself as something more than the mark of the imprinter, it can be viewed as art. John Lennon's first encounter with Yoko Ono came in a New York gallery, where he climbed a ladder to read the word that was written on a page that hung near the ceiling. The word was "yes." This charmed Lennon, and he remarked that if the artist had chosen another word, he might not have appreciated the work. Likewise, the word "PRAY'" calls us away from our street-level concerns. It’s disturbing, at first, to see such a utilitarian surface defaced, calling attention to an object that is part of our shared public environment, one which would otherwise stay in the background of our field of vision. And then the message itself is incongruous, not “I was here” or some obscenity, but a gently urgent call to the spirit. You can choose to believe or not believe, to appreciate the interruption, or remain troubled by it.
Finally, there is PRAY the woman, clothed in filthy rags, rummaging diffidently through trash cans as the awestruck Zephyr follows her from a distance. It doesn't matter. If we had not had this image, it would still be obvious that the person who accomplished this work must have been obsessed. By the look of it, PRAY's achievement could not have been a game, an art project, the profession of an amateur or dilettante, religious or otherwise. Only someone as mad as Kit Smart could have done this. Surreptitiously, illegally, by means of continual small acts of petty vandalism, PRAY made work that deepened the experience of daily life in the city, for those who were inclined to recognize it as something more than proselytizing or defacement. The phone booths that were her primary canvas are mostly gone now, though a few remain, and occasionally her work can still be encountered. It always brightens my day when I do.
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