Lance De Los Reyes (1977-2021) was born in Houston, Texas, and moved to Southern California in his adolescence. By the late 1990s, he began tagging the urban landscape and writing graffiti on rooftops and trains. His path crossed with Shepard Fairey, with whom he lived and worked for two years before leaving the West Coast for New York City. During his time in California, De Los Reyes attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied painting, sculpture, performance and video. Upon moving to New York in 2002, he worked as an assistant to artist Donald Baechler, who become a cherished mentor. Baechler’s guiding spirit and affecting presence in De Los Reyes work echoes the symbiotic relationship of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a collaborative exchange he admired.
As a graffiti artist, De Los Reyes tagged as his alter ego RAMBO for nearly fifteen years. His text-based street art was ever-present in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, ubiquitous throughout New York’s five boroughs. Scrawled on billboards over the Brook- lyn-Queens Expressway, or found on trucks and walls of city buildings, his iconic upside-down crowns and cryptic poetry, written in all-caps lettering, reads as a type of shamanistic message or offering.
Lance De Los Reyes first exhibited with The Journal Gallery and Peter Makebish in New York. In 2014, The Hole presented a defining solo exhibition, Lance De Los Reyes: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, exposing the artist’s ambition and talent as a studio painter. During his lifetime, De Los Reyes continued to exhibit his work widely with Elliott Levenglick Gallery, New York, NY; Circle Culture Gal- lery, Berlin Germany; Shrine Gallery, New York, NY; Allouche Gallery, New York, NY; Racket, Miami, FL; and Ross Sutton Gallery, New York, NY.
A prolific and visionary creator, the Brooklyn-based artist and poet died on November 4, 2021 in New York.