::The Official Site Of Christian Cortes::

The Story of Cortes and Graffiti in Puerto Rico

on July 26th, 2012 at 4:37 am

CortesNyc Puerto Rico Graff Tour Part 1
{CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIDEO}

In 2009, Cortes was contacted by Bad6 (a graffiti artist living in Puerto Rico) to fly down to the island for a graffiti event. He decided this would be a good opportunity to start documenting his graffiti adventures while on the road. Cortes already had an active following on YouTube for his black book and graffiti videos, but didn’t have any travel content on his channel yet.

Cortes needed help documenting everything properly so he invited fellow artist John Smalls to come along and record his adventure.

Cortes enjoyed watching regular travel videos on YouTube so it seemed like a good idea to mash up the concept of an adventure documentary with his graffiti video style. He called his new series “graff tours“.

The objective was to document the international graffiti culture at a grassroots level in order to show the voyage from the artist perspective and not just a big event/show that a larger company would promote.

Although Cortes is of Colombian decent, he was very familiar with Puerto Rico and it’s culture. He had already traveled there several times with friends and family. This however would be the first time he would experience graffiti culture on the island. He was interested to see the mixture of aerosol art and Latin flavor with-in this tropical paradise.

Bad6 set up different locations around the island to paint. One of them, La Perla, is a famous barrio near San Juan infamously known for being a dangerous area. Painting there was an interesting experience for Cortes because it was so isolated and close to the water. All he could hear was the waves crashing on the rocks behind him and the spraying of paint on the walls. The experience was so inspiring, Cortes returned a second time to paint and plans to return at a future time.

While in Puerto Rico Cortes met many new friends. He met tattoo artists, fine artists, and graffiti artists who shared the same passion for art that he did. Some of the people included Blen167, Mr.Dad, Monchi, Xomi, Orez, Q-One, Gro, and many more.

This was the beginning of the graff tour series. Based on the relationship established with Bad6 and the formation of the HD Crew, the tour continued on to a trip to Europe with Bad6 and Blen167. Later a trip with Bad6, Mr. Dad, and Gro to Ecuador. But that is for another post, for now I present to you the Puerto Rico portion of the graff tour series so far.

Enjoy!

CortesNyc Puerto Rico Graff Tour Part 2
{CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIDEO}