John Fekner Luv Flowers 1970

Installation, Paintings, Projects, Street Art

The Teenage Years

Fekner’s first outdoor work was the phrase Itchycoo Park painted in large white letters on a park house of a Queens playground in 1968 with his friends Robert, Harry, Dennis and Pat while Steve played the lookout.

On Friday night, August 15th, 1969, before leaving from Itcyhcoo Park to go to Woodstock with Robert and Steve, Fekner created his 2nd text-based work of hand-cut letters out of paper. The phrase White Lake Or Bust, pertained to the upstate location of Bethel where the concert was originally scheduled, was taped on the inside windows of a Chevy station wagon driven to the Woodstock Music and Art Festival in upstate New York.

The following summer, Fekner painted two murals entitled Luv Flowers on two backyard walls; one in Jackson Heights, NY and the second in Canoga Park, California.

During the summer of 1968, 69 and 70, Fekner worked as a messenger at 841 Broadway at 14th Street in NYC and constantly used the city subways at that time. The amount of graffiti on subway lines, walls and buildings was not noticeable at that time.

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