In the 90s, Adam Cole, a.k.a. COST, revolutionized street art culture by catapulting the wheatpasting medium to an international phenomenon. An elusive character, COST wore masks in photos, ran from the police, and became mythic after dropping out of the street art world from 1996 to late 2010, when he designed a newsbox for Showpaper in November. So it's no surprise that COST now returns to with an awesome Showpaper cover, drawing off the gritty, boldfaced aesthetic of his newsbox design — check it out, above.
Back in December, COST and I met up at the Mars Bar to chat about the creation, theft, and recovery of his newsbox for the Local East Village. Read on for some outtakes from our conversation, and grab a copy of COST’s Showpaper issue while you still can.
JP: Do you feel, with this Showpaper project, you’ve connected the old school and the new school, in terms of the graffiti world?
COST: I’ve been told in the past that REVS and I bridged the gap from graffiti to street art. It’s spiraled into what it is today. We didn’t initiate everything we’ve done, but we’re the guys who ran with it, and we created a blue print for the whole graffiti and street art world. Now, if you follow that blue print, you can produce work and get recognized. There’s a way to do it, and people are going about it, and this whole scene blossoming. When we were doing it, we weren’t accepted; we were shunned for it. It took time to digest what we were doing. We were changing the approach to graffiti and street art at the time. If I don’t make a dollar in my life off this stuff, that’s fine, as long as people know I was there when it started to take off. You can have a guy like Derek Jeter who makes 20 million dollars a year and what not, but Willie Mays will always be Willie Mays.
