Become Your Dream

SYNOPSIS

Fish trapped in separate glass bowls, staring longingly at each other. Fidel Castro, wearing a Che Guevara shirt and a New York Yankees baseball cap, with the caption Even Fidel is a Yankee. “The Last Supper” in chalk, featuring skeletons as Christ and the Apostles. A tiny bird, chirping, with the blocky legend This Moment is More Precious Than You Think.

Disparate as these messages are, they all exist somewhere on the streets of New York City as artwork created by street artist James de la Vega, described by the New York Times as “a hybrid between a street kid and an Ivy League guerrilla performance artist.”

With a mixture of the political and the whimsical, the violent and the pensive, de la Vega’s work speaks with equal force to the art connoisseur and the casual passerby. Each piece has a distinct agenda, communicated through spray paint, chalk, masking tape, and de la Vega’s trademark “street philosophy”—the inspirational or ironic aphorisms that accompany many of the paintings.

Become Your Dream collects de la Vega’s vibrant and surprising street murals and sketches, along with his studio paintings, together in one definitive print collection for the first time. His eclectic works are linked together by the compelling story of his life, from a street kid in Spanish Harlem to an innovative force in the art world. The book will resonate with counter-cultural art lovers, urban culture aficionados, and anybody captivated by the art of the street.

AUTHOR PROFILE

James de la Vega is New York’s best-known street artist. Born and raised in Spanish Harlem (also known as East Harlem or El Barrio), de la Vega was educated at Cornell University, where he received an M.F.A. in 1994. He spent four years as an elementary school teacher in New York City’s public school system before turning to his artwork full time. De la Vega painted his first wall portrait—a memorial for a teenage drug dealer he knew who had been killed—at the request of the teen’s family in 1993, and has been making studio and street art ever since. He maintains a studio in Spanish Harlem and a store in New York’s East Village. De la Vega lives with his daughter in the Bronx, NY.