By SHAYLA LOVE           

Outside of Clark’s window on Lowell Avenue in Longwood, the 6 train rumbled from its underground tunnel and into the sunlight of the above-ground tracks. Clark was eight years old when he looked out of his apartment and noticed something he considered beautiful. The subway car was spray-painted from top to bottom in bright colors. The names “Duster” and “Lizzie” shone from the surface of the car.

He ran out of his building into an empty lot and searched for something to paint with. He found a broken statuette and scratched an image onto the sidewalk. By the time the train rolled to a stop above him, he had created his own tag and name, and a new identity. “It’s burned into my memory,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

Clark the Tagger
Clark FLY I.D. is his full artist name now, declining to reveal his birth name. It can be seen painted above a mural named “Blessed” on Webster Avenue and 205th Street in Norwood, along with something unexpected:  Clark’s phone number. The mural was painted by Clark and his crew member, GARCIA, with permission from the deli. The majority of his work done in recent years has been legal and commissioned graffiti, unlike the street scrawls of his youth.

Clark donated this mural, an adaptation of The Creation of Adam fresco by Michelangelo, the classical artist. Clark said he wanted to paint something that a passerby could identify, and then re-interpret upon closer examination, once they realized that Adam was not Adam, but a tagger.

“I believe that when I was a kid, I destroyed a lot of the neighborhood,” Clark said. “And now that I’m older and more talented, I can give back. And this is my way of giving back: painting a free mural.”

Clark’s crew is also named FLY I.D. and it originally stood for “Infinite Destruction.”  Clark spent his teenage years in the 1980s tagging subway cars and writing his name on walls. He stole paint to support his hobby. “It’s a rush that we got, when we’re painting something illegal and we’re able to walk away from it,” he said.

In the early 1990s, Clark got a job with the Yonkers Community Action Program (YCAP) to paint legal murals to spread awareness of HIV and AIDS. Like the 6 train outside of his childhood window, Clark emerged from the dark. He painted during the day in plain sight where people could question him about the painting and his techniques.

“It changed my whole outlook on my life as an artist,” he said. “Knowing that I could touch one person with the message I painted on walls about how to protect themselves and how serious HIV and AIDS is. People could come up to me and say, ‘Wow. This is beautiful.’

Clark decided to redefine his and his crew’s alias. Infinite Destruction was his mentality of the 80s, but he had changed. While on a bus back from Yonkers, his friend uttered the five words that have since defined Clark’s crew: FLY I.D., Forever Living Your Infinite Dreams.

Opposition
Clark’s story of transition from illegal to legal painting doesn’t resonate with a local policy maker who fights to keep the streets clean. Assemblyman Mark Gjonaj, representing the Norwood area, said that he doesn’t care for street murals, whether they were painted with permission or not.  His zero-tolerance policy is borne out of the abundance of graffiti scrawls surrounding parts of his 80th Assembly District.

“It’s a gateway to crime,” Gjonaj said. “There could be one tagger who goes over another piece, and it can beget violence. Most of these kids who are tagging may not be employed. It raises the question of where they’re getting the money for the spray paint. It’s quite an expensive habit.”

He believes that some of the painters are talented, but that tagging results in gang or crew affiliations. He doesn’t think that city streets are the appropriate setting for this type of expression.  Gjonaj said if he were to get his way he would “paint over every mural that exists out there.”

Clark said that while every politician has had a stance against graffiti, he’s not going anywhere. “If somebody comes and paints over my wall, that’s okay,” he said. “I’ll just go paint another wall in another community. If they say I can’t, I’ll do it illegally. If that’s doesn’t work, I’ll do it on a canvas, they can’t stop me. It’s how I feel.”

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.