ProfileHe quit fashion to graffiti Hong Kong streets, and it became a business – New York-born Stern Rockwell on tagging Brooklyn as a teen and designing for Cartier and Christian Dior
- Stern Rockwell knew from an early age that he wanted to be an artist, and started doing graffiti in Brooklyn, New York when he was 11, he tells Kate Whitehead
- A spell in fashion design, for Cartier and Christian Dior among others, led him to Hong Kong, where’s he returned to street art and found his own pace
Brooklyn baby I was born in Brooklyn in 1968. My father was a foreman for the New York City Housing Authority and my mother was a stay-at-home mum.
We lived in Brooklyn Heights, across the street from the promenade. You could smell the salt water coming off the Hudson and we had a great view of Brooklyn Bridge and New York City.
The area was just starting to become gentrified and there were a lot of artists and creatives living in the building. One of my babysitters was an established artist in Mexico and my uncle was also an artist and encouraged me to draw. I knew from age five I wanted to be an artist.
My brother is older by a year. He is light-skinned, like my mum, and I came out dark-skinned, like my grandmother on my mother’s side. My brother was also creative, but he went down a more cerebral path with maths, science and electronics.
Bad boys The New York subways in the 1970s ran trains from the ’30s, with wicker chairs and round windows. I remember asking my mum about the black scrawl on the trains. There was a graffiti crew called The Bad Boys and there would be panel after panel of “TBB”.