A couple of weeks after he ran away from home, 16-year-old Kunle Martins was skating in midtown Manhattan with a couple of friends. They were on 42nd Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, when they ran into Martins's father, who was waiting for the bus. “Fola,” said the elder Martins, using his son's middle name. “Come on, we're going home.”
It was 1996, just as the New York skate scene was blowing up, and brands like Supreme and Zoo York were gaining a foothold downtown, exerting a strong pull on the young Martins. He'd been going to high school at the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, on 116th Street. That was part of the problem. He wanted to attend the art high school, LaGuardia, where he could develop his gifts for drawing and playing the flute. But his parents blew it for him, he says, and he missed the audition. By his account, things at home weren't great in general.
Martins's father, a Nigerian immigrant, was a sharp-dressed man who ran a magazine for the growing Nigerian-American community and a P.R. agency. His mother was, as Martins put it, a “farm girl” from Virginia. Not so long ago, they lived in a nice high-rise on the Upper East Side. But that didn't last. Money got tight. They drank and fought. They drifted to East New York, in Brooklyn, but got kicked out of that apartment, and were now living out of a hotel in New Jersey.
Meanwhile, certain compulsions drew Martins away from home. From a young age he was a prolific shoplifter, and he was beginning to write graffiti, leaving home early in the morning to catch tags on the way to school; he was also crazy about meeting men, especially older daddy types. Martins had been in New York his entire life, but he always suspected the city had more for him. In 1995, when he was 15, Larry Clark's Kids came out, a film depicting the downtown New York skate scene in all its gritty, horrifying glory, and that was it for him. “I was like, this is what's going on?” Martins said. “There's only one way I can experience this: I kind of have to leave home.”
By the time Martins ran away, he'd already decided he wasn't ever going back. But he'd never said no to his father before, and as they confronted each other on 42nd Street, he hesitated. Then his father raised a hand, as Martins recalls, slapped him hard across the face, and took the skateboard out of his son's hands. Martins's friends watched this unfold, unaware that this angry dude was Martins's dad. One of them crept up from behind and snatched Martins's board, and the three took off down Ninth Avenue. As they skated away, Martins started to explain the situation, but suddenly they were swarmed by police cars. Port Authority security must have called the cops on them for skating, Martins assumed. The friends bolted in different directions, but Martins made it only a couple of blocks before he was cornered. The police officers drew their guns and shouted at him to get on the ground. “I was like, dude, overreact much?” Martins said. He was cuffed and pinned on his belly to the sidewalk. The officers shouted at him, demanding to know where he put the gun. “I didn't have time to think that I was going to be killed,” he said. “I was just like, Oh, this is crazy, you guys are crazy.” Martins didn't have a gun. Eventually, the cops let him go, embarrassed by the mix-up.
“And all that happened within 10 minutes,” Martins said. He'd already made the decision to flee his home, but it was at this moment that he decided to leave his biological family for one of his own choosing. He knew that his new life would come with violence and chaos and danger. But, he said, “It was everything I wanted it to be. It was basically like that every day for a few years. Everything was crazy all the time.”
Martins, who turned 41 this year, lives in a spacious two bedroom apartment at the northern end of Manhattan. One of the bedrooms has been converted into a wardrobe, which houses an archive of sneakers and streetwear that would bring any hypebeast to his knees. Over the years, Martins has worked for Alife and Supreme, lending his artwork to their designs and imbuing those brands with a unique street cred. These days he primarily makes a living as a portrait artist, rendering friends and loved ones in graphite and charcoal on found scraps of cardboard. His living room has been converted into a studio. When I visited, one large wall was covered in nude portraits he had made for a show, “S3ND NUD3S,” which opened this past spring at Bortolami Gallery, in Manhattan, to rave reviews and a coveted spot in the upper-right quadrant of New York magazine's Approval Matrix.
For Martins, the recent gallery show may have further reinforced his acceptance in certain New York art circles, but he's been famous downtown for years. He's perhaps best known as EARSNOT, the founder and de facto leader of IRAK, legends of New York's downtown scene since the late '90s. IRAK is a graffiti crew, a squad with a penchant for shoplifting, an art collective, and a community who have spent the better part of three decades together as a family. Its members include world-famous artists and notorious derelicts alike, and they created a downtown revolution that influenced the shape of art, fashion, and culture on a global scale. The story of IRAK has been decades in the making, and has seen some of the earliest members catapulted into art-world stardom—Ryan McGinley, Dan Colen, and Dash Snow among them. Now, years later, the group's founder is arriving at a kind of recognition that has long eluded him.
Graffiti is a world Martins first waded into as a freshman in high school after noticing a classmate filling the page of a notebook with tags and bubble letters. That student, who went on to become the legendary hand-styler GESHU (like many graffiti writers, he doesn't publicly use his legal name), took Martins around the city and introduced him to the world of New York graffiti, instructing Martins on which writers were in which crews, who had beef with who, who was considered good, and who was a toy. Already a preternaturally skilled draftsman (and shoplifter), Martins began filling notebooks with his own tags, and was soon boosting art supplies to hone his craft—first markers and notebooks, then spray paint. He and GESHU would meet early in the mornings, before commuters were out on the streets, to bomb storefront security gates with spray-painted fill-ins.
Midway through his junior year, Martins dropped out of school and left home for good, bringing along his skateboard and a few cans of spray paint. During the day he wandered, tagging and shoplifting until other kids got out of school. Then they'd meet up at Washington Square Park or Astor Place or the Brooklyn Banks or Union Square. At night he'd sleep on the trains, pinballing between Manhattan and the outer boroughs. He stole everything he needed: food, clothes, paint. Meanwhile, he had met a kid from Bushwick who went by the name WAK STF—a break-dancer, graffiti writer, and, not unusual in this scene, fellow shoplifter. When graffiti writers first emerged in New York in the 1970s, they stole paint to bomb trains, and in the spirit of outlaw culture, that's been the custom ever since.
For both Martins and WAK STF, racking was the preferred nomenclature for those thefts—boosting seemed too retro, and stealing was too obvious. Martins had been cycling through different tags and crew names when WAK STF suggested IRAK. It was a brilliant double entendre, evoking both a pastime intrinsically connected to graffiti and the recent war in the Middle East, which was still dominating headlines. But Martins wasn't feeling it. Most crew names were three letters, and they were almost always acronyms: RYB—Running Your Block—for instance. Martins tried IRAK out a few times, but it didn't stick at first.
Soon after meeting WAK STF, Martins started rolling with another graffiti writer from the Bronx called REHAB. Together they boosted goods that they could sell for a profit to bodegas uptown. But Martins was having some problems with kids in the Bronx—at one point they stole some North Face jackets that he'd stolen himself. So he began to gravitate toward downtown. He dressed more like the skaters and ravers who hung around Astor Place and Washington Square Park, and he and REHAB fell in with a crowd they affectionately called “the crispy white kids.” Martins got to know the regulars—“all the downtown loser kids who were dropping tabs and buying drugs and smoking weed and going to raves,” he told me. That's when Martins leaned into using the tag EARSNOT. At first it was meant to be a rejection of graffiti norms—short names that sounded cool and were mostly illegible to people who weren't fluent in tagging. Martins wrote EARSNOT in big, perfectly lucid script, and people took notice. Occasionally he'd add IRAK to the tag, and that stuck, too. REHAB started writing it as well. The IRAK crew was born.
Martins quickly made a name for himself downtown. His persona was as distinctive and compelling as his tag. He customized his huge pants with panels of fabric to make the legs even wider. He was tall and loud and aggressive. He came out as bisexual, then gay, and would fight anyone who challenged his sexuality. Friends recall stories about him beating the socks off someone for calling him a homophobic slur, then getting down to shout into the face of his opponent, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I was super into the showmanship of it,” Martins told me. “I'd beat people up for calling me a faggot or whatever, and then I would tell them, ‘Now go home and tell your daddy that a faggot fucked you up.’ ”
“I became this sort of downtown omnipresent guy, like man about town,” he added. “Just always around.”
Through their magnetism and savvy promotion, Martins and the crispy white kids continued to grow the IRAK graffiti crew, and soon more tags appeared on walls next to the IRAK name: SACER, KSER, GLACER, SETUP, AREA, SEMZ, KENT, FANTA, SEMEN, and NEKST. “It was like I sort of had built this thing that was like a little gazebo of shelter from the sun and the rain that my friends could come and hang out in,” Martins said.
Dash Snow was the most dedicated writer among them. He had recently left a therapeutic boarding school for “troubled” teens and approached graffiti with abandon, writing every chance he got. Everyone knew Snow came from money—his grandmother Christophe de Menil was an heiress to a French oil-technology fortune and one of contemporary art's greatest patrons. But, as Martins recalled, any doubts about Snow's credibility were quickly dispelled by his commitment to “fucking shit up.”
“Dash brought a different level of dedication to vandalism and graffiti,” Ben Solomon, an IRAK member who works as an artist and filmmaker, told me. “He was like this missing piece of the puzzle. And it was a catalyst. Dash came back and had this energy and access and dedication. We were like, ‘Oh, shit. Okay.’ ”
By this point, IRAK weren't just repainting downtown; they were rewiring it, making new connections between cultural movements. They brought together skateboarders and fashion models and ravers and blue-chip artists and legendary Bronx graffiti writers and less legendary wannabe vandals from New Jersey. We take for granted that all of these worlds are constantly colliding—fashion and art and music are now all part of one cultural spectrum—but that wasn't always the case. With Martins as a kind of spiritual leader, those who fell under the IRAK umbrella weren't seeking out others who were just like them. That's exactly what they were trying to escape. They were looking for people who were different, as different as they were themselves.
“What is every angry, horny, self-centered, half-depressed, half-manic teenager looking for?” Solomon asked me. “You're looking for a fucking reason, and you're looking for people to share it with. You know? The bond that formed over these simple, superficial things like graffiti, like a jacket, like wanting to be tough, or wanting to be cool or not wanting to be cool—that's just the entry point. What is so dope about IRAK is that the bond ran a lot deeper than that, and has propelled everyone to where they're at today.”
By 1999, IRAK was everywhere. Anywhere you looked downtown you'd see an IRAK tag. “It was evident,” Nico Dios, an IRAK member and cannabis entrepreneur, told me, “that we were rocking very hard.”
Ryan McGinley was in high school, working at a skate shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he first met Martins. This was in 1994. After school, McGinley and his friends would hop on the PATH train into the city to skate at Astor Place or the Banks or Union Square, where Martins was often hanging out. When McGinley met him, Martins was known to most as Kool-Aid, because that's what the name Kunle sounded like. But the two didn't grow close until a few years later, when McGinley came out as gay. “I was searching for a community of people that were interested in the same stuff I was, which was skating and graffiti,” McGinley said (although he himself never wrote graffiti). One afternoon, he recalled, “Someone said to me, ‘Hey, you should talk to EARSNOT, because he's gay.’ And it was sort of unbelievable to me, because he just didn't present as queer.”
Later that night, McGinley nervously approached Martins at Astor Place. “I was really timid and super shy,” McGinley recalled. “I said, ‘I have a question to ask you. Someone told me you're gay.’ He was like, ‘Who's asking?’ I said, ‘Well, I am, because I'm gay.’ Then he's like, ‘What?! Ryan, you're gay?! Fuck yeah!’ We had this big moment where we hugged and it created this immediate bond because there weren't any gay skaters at the time.”
After McGinley graduated from high school he went to Parsons School of Design, in downtown Manhattan, and in 1998 he moved into an apartment on East Seventh Street. “It was kind of a skater flophouse,” McGinley said. “Everyone would come and hang out and stay there.”
By that point the IRAK universe had expanded. McGinley introduced Martins to Dan Colen, a tall and game-for-anything artist from New Jersey. Colen was then going to the Rhode Island School of Design, but he'd visit the city to hang out with McGinley and Snow and Martins. Around this time, McGinley started to jokingly claim to Martins that he was in IRAK. “I'd be like, ‘Well, you don't even write graffiti,’ ” Martins told me. “And he would laugh it off or whatever. But then I realized that a lot of my good friends didn't actually write graffiti. And they had a lot to offer.”
With McGinley and Colen down, the purpose of IRAK became more vivid, and the eclectic character of the crew took shape. “It's the reason I wanted to move to New York,” McGinley told me, “and why I think many people do: to create a community. Everyone who is part of IRAK came out of some kind of chaos in their family. We all were magnets to each other, and we all were searching for a new chosen family.”
Martins and Snow, in particular, seemed destined for each other. They came from disparate backgrounds, but they had a similar charisma, a very high vandalism IQ, and the kinds of differences that made them better as a team. Snow was wiry, fearless, and intensely paranoid. Martins was tall, built, and deliberate, a fortress of bravery and self-confidence.
“I think that they really respected each other,” McGinley said, “first and foremost, as graffiti artists and people who are really dedicated to their craft and willing to go to the edge to get their name seen and promote the crew. Just a healthy sense of rebellion and danger.”
“They really complemented each other,” said Cheryl Dunn, the filmmaker and photographer whose documentary about Snow, Moments Like This Never Last, was released this summer. “They were both estranged from their family. They were street kids and they connected on this beautiful level. I don't think that either of them really dwelled on their background. They were like, this is who I am. They were really living in the moment and surviving. And together, they had a better chance of survival.”
For some, survival meant a place to sleep at night. For others, it meant an opportunity to become an artist and thrive in a creative community.
By the end of the '90s, the IRAK family included graffiti writers from all over New York—they were white and Black and Asian and Dominican, gay and straight, guys and girls, lovers of hip-hop and punk rock, practitioners of fine art and vandalism. No longer the misfits of Astor Place, they were at the vanguard of hanging out. Their first spot was AREA's parents' town house in SoHo—there they could smoke freely and drink forties in the basement. Then there was Le Poeme, a French restaurant run by the mother of Snow's then girlfriend and later wife, Agathe Snow, where IRAK would party almost every night. McGinley's apartment on East Seventh Street was another locus. And later, Snow's apartment on Avenue C.
“I think we all wanted to live in a similar world,” Dan Colen told me. “Which was not a reality at the time. And we tried to create that fantasy. Of course, we went out and we partied, but that really wasn't our priority. It wasn't the real core experience we were looking for, which was the much more intimate exchange.”
Inevitably, there were drugs. Not just weed and ecstasy and LSD but Special K, coke, angel dust, quaaludes, and heroin. There were wild, endless nights. IRAK were famous for tagging downtown, but it was the lifestyle as much as the graffiti that spread their legend beyond the downtown scene.
As IRAK grew, McGinley was developing as a photographer, constantly taking pictures of the crew and eventually starting to publish them in Vice. In 2001 the magazine, then a free glossy catering to the emergent Williamsburg hipster class, published a story by filmmaker and writer Bruce LaBruce called “The Vice Guide to New York Graffiti,” which ran along with McGinley's photos. The story chronicled several nights out with the IRAK crew, including McGinley, Snow, Martins, and another IRAK writer dubbed Semen Spermz. Snow was 19 and married to Agathe by then. He was, LaBruce wrote, “diminutive and cute as a fucking button, with epic tattooage and a killer smile.”
“That one particular night I was writing about was mind-blowing because we were watching the inauguration of Bush while high on opium and God knows what else,” LaBruce told me. At one point, they went to the roof of McGinley's building so he could take photos of Snow, who danced on the ledge seven stories above the pavement. LaBruce found that he could hardly watch. “That encapsulated for me how intense they were and how reckless,” he said, “but also really super passionate and damaged—like they were invincible or fearless.”
Another night, they made their way to a trendy spot where they drank for free and did lines off the table. Outside, Snow lit a pile of discarded Christmas trees on fire. Someone called 911 and the IRAK crew split. The next day they returned to the scene to find that the blaze had set a car on fire and that, according to LaBruce, it “may have slightly exploded or something.” Snow had left town before the sun came up.
The thing that was truly indelible about the IRAK crew wasn't just the marker tags and spray-painted fill-ins that covered the city, or the drug binges and street fires and notorious fights. It was the intense intimacy and shamelessness in how they carried themselves, as seen through McGinley's lens. They seemed to always be naked, strung out, dripping in blood and semen and God knows what else, passed out in bed together or tenderly holding one another.
“Even though it was wild and crazy, there's a certain sincerity about it,” said LaBruce. “That Kunle and Ryan and Dash were all these little glamorous dreamboats. They were all very magnetic and photogenic. They were just super open-minded and they recognized that this was problematic in those scenes. I don't think you can underestimate the fact that Ryan and Kunle are both queer.” At the time, graffiti and skateboarding were not just full of latent homophobia but intensely anti-gay. “But they didn't make it into a cause or anything,” LaBruce continued. “By their own coolness and their own amazingness, they make the case that it was cool to be queer.”
Martins's earliest artistic ambition, as a young teen, was to make a drawing for everyone in the world. He especially wanted to get them into the hands of people he didn't know. “They're going to be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” he told me. “And it's like, ‘Cool, you don't like it, awesome. I'll just keep Johnny Appleseeding drawings to people who don't want them.’ ”
His graffiti followed a similar impulse. EARSNOT was meant to be noticed by everyone, not just graffiti writers. Martins said he wanted to infect people with the idea. And it worked. Not long after he started to write EARSNOT, he started hearing people talking about it.
“I remember the rush of emotion,” he told me. “It's kind of like drinking or smoking weed for the first time. It was like, ‘What?! Name recognition, this shit is dope. I'm going to do this again.’ ”
Inherent to graffiti is a kind of paradox. As McGinley explains it, “Graffiti is a compulsion. There's a specific kind of person—somebody who wants everyone to know who they are but to remain completely anonymous at the same time.”
And that compulsion could be all-consuming. “Kunle and Dash were never not tagging,” said Colen. At times Martins would write 50 or 75 tags in a day. He was so prolific that, in a sense, his dream to make a drawing for everyone in the world came true. But eventually his chaotic lifestyle began to catch up with him, and in some ways his path began to diverge from the rest of the crew's.
“I was still racking,” Martins told me, “but every once in a while I would get caught or go to jail, and it was wack. And Dash was just living with his grandmother and able to go out every night and party and write graffiti. And I was still doing that, but I had to go to work the next day and figure shit out. If I got caught and went to jail and got out, I had this case with a public defender and it was hard fought, and I might have to do time. It just sucked more. I had to be smarter about it.”
At the same time, McGinley, Colen, and Snow were on their way to art-world stardom, and Martins played no small part in their success.
“He was profoundly inspiring,” said Colen. “His whole persona was really incredible. It had an immediate impact on my work. Most artists' work is about themselves in many ways, but when I met Kunle I was still very young and developing as an artist and in a way engaged in that idea for the first time where it was like, ‘Well, it has to be about me.’ And like, ‘What about me is it about?’ Then to meet somebody whose persona was so vivid and clear, so much clearer than my own—he's consistently been a source of inspiration.”
In 2003 and 2004, McGinley had solo shows at the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1. Snow was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2006. Colen began showing at Gagosian Gallery in 2006. In 2007, the three of them were featured on the cover of New York magazine under the headline “Warhol's Children.” The story was actually a profile of a very reluctant Dash Snow. Martins made a brief appearance as “a guy named Ace Boon Kunle,” who gives a brief, lovely soliloquy about shoplifting. (“I'm smooth,” he says in the New York magazine story. “I'll make it sweet.”)
“I think it was a complete travesty that [Martins] wasn't on the cover,” said Blair Hansen, who in the aughts worked at the gallery Peres Projects, which represented Dash Snow and Dan Colen, and who has recently curated a show featuring Martins's work. “Especially now that I know from Dan that he was a beacon for Dan and Dash so much. That was really where the river of influence started, so he should have been on the art journey with them.”
That journey wasn't always as glorious as it may have seemed. “It's like rich, pretentious, snotty bullshit a lot of the time,” Hansen told me. “Dash didn't want to deal with that any more than he had to, and it sucked his soul in certain ways. I would imagine that Kunle would have observed that and it immediately, really turned him off. Also, to be honest, maybe the heroin turned him off. Maybe he was just like, ‘Who are all these fucking clowns playing with this shit like it's fun or cool, and it's just not?’ ”
Snow, Colen, and McGinley may have had mixed feelings about the rarefied world of fine art, but they used the opportunity to push their work into provocative new dimensions. For “Nest,” a 2007 installation by Snow and Colen at Deitch Projects, the SoHo gallery, the two, along with a couple dozen friends and other artists, re-created one of their infamous hamster nests. What's a hamster nest? It's when the artists “tear up phone books, roll around in their mess, and do drugs until they feel like hamsters,” the critic David Velasco explained in Artforum.
Meanwhile, Martins had started working at Rivington Club, a boutique for the streetwear brand Alife, which had opened on the Lower East Side and quickly became a nexus for all things downtown, with EARSNOT squarely in the center. He launched the IRAK streetwear brand, which he's been operating on and off ever since—mostly selling just enough of the graphic tees, hoodies, and hats he designs to give some away to friends. But he didn't exactly see the opportunities for himself that were available to Colen and Snow and McGinley.
“I was a super angry dude, which was welcomed in the late '90s, early 2000s,” Martins told me. “I was needed. Downtown was not super friendly. I was so mentally immature or whatever. I was so involved with myself. I was very self-absorbed and friends with Ryan and Dash and Dan who had super white-hot art careers. It's like, ‘I'm the talented guy! Come on, give me money!’ ”
Success, money, infamy, and credibility came to those three young artists with apparent ease. Martins's life was more complicated. He didn't have all the same privileges. His personality was too big. He was intimidating and aggressive. He was Black and he was gay. And so he wasn't as easily marketable for the gallery system or the New York press. What Martins got, at the time, was just the infamy and cred.
Still, it was a scene in which cred very much mattered. Virgil Abloh recalled for me what it was like hanging out downtown in those days: “Kids like me and Heron Preston were like a generation of young scrappy kids, just hanging out on Orchard Street and Lafayette, skating in between the Lower East Side and SoHo and Chinatown. And we were seeing Kunle, A-Ron [Bondaroff], Ryan, Dash, they were sort of like the seniors, if you will. And we were like the freshmen.”
Abloh would go on to launch his own global fashion line, Off-White, and become the men's artistic director for Louis Vuitton. Last year at a fashion event, he wore an IRAK hat as an acknowledgment that Martins had helped pave his way. “There's just so much talk, and buzz, and boom within streetwear today,” he told me. “When I copped that hat, I was like, ‘I hope that kids know how important IRAK was, and just how it lived in the crevices of the street.' Obviously I've made a career, but I'm linked to that. And so I always keep underlining and underscoring it.”
By the mid-2000s, IRAK's legacy as a kind of street-level incubator for up-and-coming stars of the downtown scene was solidified. Martins was celebrated and revered as a gatekeeper and a force of influence, but his private struggles were far from over. In 2005, he appeared in the graffiti documentary Infamy, in which he's seen tagging the streets of New York and working at Rivington Club. Soon after the film's premiere, police came to the shop and arrested him. Unlike many graffiti writers, Martins hadn't concealed his identity when he was being filmed or photographed.
He was outraged, but not entirely surprised. “I'm not some dirtbag loser graffiti writer,” he told me of his mindset at the time. “I'm Kunle Martins; I happen to write graffiti. I've got a lot of stuff inside of me. I don't know where it's going or how it's going to end up, but I don't want to box myself in as a ‘graffiti writer.’ So yeah, I'm putting my face out there. I'm not ashamed of anything about myself. I just didn't naturally feel the shame. And then, when they came and arrested me, I'm like, ‘Okay. Touché.’ ”
Martins's arrest resulted in five years of probation, which meant he was subject to drug tests. For the first time in his life, he had to try to keep his nose clean.
“I was angry at everyone else for being able to party and write graffiti when they wanted to,” he said. “I had to go to work and I was mad at the world. There were no parents that I'm close to that I can just go back home to. I have to pay my own rent. I have to do this drug program. I have to do probation. There are no lawyers. Only public defenders. It's just me. And I fought for all these other weirdos. I was the one making sure that they didn't get beat up at these parties. I was the one that was the inspiration for all their artwork. And now who's looking out for me? Nobody. I was angry for so long, had resentments against everybody for so long, just because I just felt like everyone else was reaping all the benefits from my hard work.”
The recession that began in 2007 set Martins back even further. The Alife offices where he spent most of his time eventually closed, and in 2010 he lost his apartment. It took a while for him to realize that he wasn't just couch surfing—he was homeless again. “I was like hanging out with people just so that I could eat without telling them that,” he said. A friend suggested he go on food stamps.
Meanwhile, tragedy struck IRAK. Joey Semz died in 2007. Then Snow died of a reported overdose in 2009. Crew members Sean Griffin, Joey Newfield, Kent Ochjaroen, and Jesse Geller would all pass away between 2012 and 2020. “Everyone thinks they're invincible,” recalled Solomon. “Joey Semz dies, we're like, ‘Damn, I guess we're not invincible.’ And then when Dash died we're like, ‘Oh, shit. We're really not invincible. The invincible guy died. That's fucked up. What are we supposed to do?’ ”
Martins never got into shooting heroin, and he was vocal in his disapproval of it to those in IRAK who did. He had his own substance issues—E and K and crystal and coke, which were around the gyms, gay clubs, and sex parties where he was hanging out when he wasn't with his art and graffiti friends. But by 2010, when he became homeless for the second time and was forced onto food stamps, drugs and graffiti were no longer interesting to him. His friends were dying, and in 2011 his father, with whom he had recently reconnected, died, too.
“It was like, ‘I don't really want to hang out with people. I don't feel good,’ ” he recalled. “I was a little estranged. I had just gotten off probation, but everything seemed to get worse. None of the work that I was putting in during probation paid off. I was in my thirties and had nothing to show for it. And my other friends were mega famous. And it just made me feel really bad.”
Martins was homeless until 2013, when he finally got his own place in a low-income housing unit in the Bronx (where he lived until last year). There he could finally begin trying to settle into a normal life. He got a job at a supermarket in Brooklyn Heights, but it didn't last long. Then in 2017 he was hired by Supreme, where he worked in both the Brooklyn store and the warehouse. But that didn't last either. Eventually he started making art, at first pieces based on his tag, which he sold via Instagram. But he was also doing some portraits again—he'd made a few over the years, though he'd mostly discarded them or given them away.
One of those early portraits now belongs to Colen. “The thing with Kunle that's so amazingly wild is that he defied all universal norms for the concept of beauty,” Colen said. “The men that he's always been with are very specific—they're not young, and they're not thin. They're not the things that we typically think of as the most desirable thing. This drawing, it was one of either his boyfriends or somebody he had a crush on, and it had a real tenderness to it. You would think Kunle is a crazy artist who makes crazy-ass shit. And what he makes is the most classical thing, but it's timeless and in a way it's almost the hardest thing to do, right? Because people have been doing it forever, but he does it in such a special way.”
In 2018, Martins started dating the artist Jack Pierson. (The two are no longer together.) They first met in Florence a decade ago when the two of them, along with other IRAK-adjacent artists and downtowners, modeled for a collection by the designer Adam Kimmel. When they met again at one of Colen's openings, the connection between them was confirmed. They shacked up almost immediately. Pierson saw that Martins was constantly being asked to participate in art shows, and he, along with Timothy Curtis, a graffiti friend who had entered the gallery world, encouraged him to push his work in new, more challenging directions.
“Usually they wanted a tag or a taglike thing,” Pierson told me. “And Dan Colen and I thought, If you're going to be in these art shows, do something a little different. You do these beautiful portraits. Develop it. He took the suggestion, I think. And the sensibility was always really raw and immediate, and very sensitive and considered at the same time.”
Martins's mission as an artist has always been about connecting with people—bringing people into his world, or bringing a little piece of his world to them. “Graffiti is a means to an end of making friends,” said Pierson. “And so is portraiture on a certain level. Kunle saw that what he wants most of all is to be part of a community, and especially a community on the streets of New York.”
But there were old habits that died hard. During their first few months of dating, Pierson observed Martins smoking weed daily and would learn he was doing coke occasionally, and one day he confronted his partner: “Oh, I see. You're a drug addict. I'm in love with a drug addict.”
By then, most of the surviving members of IRAK had all gotten sober. But Martins felt like he didn't need to go through that process, that his drug use didn't rise to the level of friends' who were on heroin. “So I was like, ‘I told you guys not to do that. I don't have to get sober.’ ” But Pierson's comment struck a chord. “That was the first time somebody called me a drug addict,” Martins said. “That's when I got sober. I've been sober ever since.”
In 2019, at the New York gallery Shoot the Lobster, Martins had his first solo show, “Portraits: Looking Like a Snack.” The canvases were discarded pieces of cardboard on which Martins had drawn his friends, family, and lovers in pencil from passport and driver's license photos. In 2020 he had another solo show of portrait drawings, this one at the Lower East Side gallery 56 Henry. “His time finally fucking came,” Blair Hansen, the curator, told me. “This guy is such a fucking superstar. It's just written in him so deep.”
Martins spent decades carrying IRAK on his shoulders, but he never got the chance to explore his own art practice. Through his portraiture, he's forging ahead with a new kind of self-assuredness—and carrying the IRAK legacy in every pencil line.
“I don't really know anyone else in that group who chose a format and really sunk into it as hard as he did,” Hansen said. “He is able to excavate other people through his portraiture because he is so solid. It just is easy for him to see others and easy for him to connect to others, and easy for him to imagine himself in proximity to others. Those drawings convey that ease and intimacy, and they're so unfussy and uncomplicated, and just so direct.”
Martins has found other ways to explore a more direct approach to design. The IRAK brand has been steadily releasing new products for a few seasons, with eagerly anticipated drops online and at Dover Street Market. On IRAK's Instagram page, Martins promoted new gear in photo shoots with McGinley, Colen, Solomon, and other O.G. members of the crew. And he's recently explored other projects, too: A Supreme x Comme des Garçons SHIRT collaboration used his handwriting as a graphic motif on shirts, pants, and leather jackets; he released a sneaker with Adidas (a re-creation of one that first came out in 2007); and he recently collaborated on tees with Colen's Hudson Valley nonprofit, Sky High Farm. The anger of his younger years is mostly gone, replaced with a deep sense of gratitude. “I'm super lucky to be alive right now,” Martins says. “I'm super lucky to be able to make stuff that other people like. I used to wish for years that I could make a living at making art and that I would just be happy and not have to be angry all the time. And that's how my life is today. I don't have to be angry.”
Success in the art world came to Martins much later than it did for many of his friends. But it seems that it came at the right time. “It's one of the most ridiculous parts of human nature, but it can be really challenging to watch your friends succeed,” Colen told me. “I think, as an artist, there's a paradox that's built into success. In so many ways success is like the antithesis to our original goals as an artist, to subvert and explore transgressive ideas, you know? In a crew of friends, it's a complicated thing to navigate. I think in many ways it was too complicated for Dash to navigate. There's no right way to do it, and if anything it's the hardest to succeed at a young age.”
The remaining members of the original IRAK will tell you they're still a family. “We're still alive,” McGinley said. “If you look at our crew, so far we beat the odds. There's a lot of people who have passed away from suicides or from drug overdoses. When Kunle and I get together, we talk about that a lot. There's a perseverance and a spiritual reason that we're still around.”
For Martins, it seems, the reason they've endured has never been clearer than it is today. “Absolutely everyone has trauma,” he told me while we sat in his home studio. “It doesn't define me. I'm not the things that have happened to me. I've survived all those things. It's actually a really great story. Today's the best day of my life so far. Yesterday was the best day of my life before today. And so on and so forth.”
Noah Johnson is GQ's Global Style Director.
A version of this story originally appeared in the GQStyle Fall/Winter 2021 issue with the title "The Untold Story of IRAK, Downtown New York's Most Legendary Graffiti Crew."