Lady Pink

 Lady Pink, whose real name is Sandra Fabara, is a renowned graffiti artist, muralist, and painter. She was born on June 15, 1964, in Ambato, Ecuador, and moved to the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York when she was seven years old. Lady Pink was interested in architecture, like her father, but she started her graffiti career in 1979 following the loss of her boyfriend. She used graffiti as a form of self-expression and rebellion, and her work empowered women in the male-dominated graffiti subculture.

Lady Pink attended the Manhattan High School of Art and Design, where she was introduced to graffiti. During her senior year of school, she began to exhibit her work while balancing her personal life. Lady Pink was one of the first women to become active in the early 1980s New York City subway graffiti subculture, and she was nicknamed the "first lady of graffiti."

In 1980, Lady Pink created the all-female graffiti crew Ladies of the Arts. Within a few years, Lady Pink began running with the graffiti crews TC5 (The Cool 5) and TPA (The Public Animals). From 1979 to 1985, Lady Pink painted New York City Subway trains. She took a short hiatus in 1987 from painting outdoors, and then from 1993 to 1997, she worked on freight trains with her husband, SMITH (Roger Smith, formerly of the graffiti duo Sane Smith).

Lady Pink was included in the landmark New York show "GAS: Graffiti Art Success" at Fashion Moda in 1980, which traveled in a modified form downtown to The New Museum of Contemporary Art. She played the leading role in the film Wild Style in 1983, and was involved with a book entitled Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. During this time, she collaborated with Jenny Holzer several times for an exhibition at Fashion MODA. Her first solo show, "Femmes-Fatales," was in 1984, when she was 21, at the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.

Lady Pink's studio paintings often use themes of New York City Subway trains and POP-surrealist cityscapes. Some of her pieces are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, as well as the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands. Lady Pink now visits schools to teach students about the power of art and how it can serve as a medium for self-expression and community engagement. Each year she does a mural project with the students of Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Queens.

Lady Pink is married to another graffiti artist, SMITH (Roger Smith, formerly of the graffiti duo Sane Smith), with whom she often collaborates on murals and commercial work. She has created several notable works, including the John Lennon and The Beatles trains, which were painted by Lady Pink and Iz the Wiz as tributes, and the Pink mural at 5Pointz, which was destroyed. Lady Pink's work continues to inspire and empower women in the graffiti subculture and beyond.