Charlie Ahearn

Wild Style

Legendary New York graffiti artist Lee Quinones plays the part of Zoro, the city's hottest and most elusive graffiti writer. The actual story of the movie concerns the tension between Zoro's passion for his art and his personal life, particularly his strained relationship with fellow artist Rose.

The Deadly Art of Survival

Real-life kung fu master Nathan Ingram stars in this gritty, low-budget martial arts epic as a local karate school owner who clashes with a gang of drug traffickers posing as the owners of a rival dojo. Director Charlie Ahearn (who helmed the landmark hip-hop film Wild Style) used the housing projects next to his New York Lower East Side apartment as his central location in this 1979 classic, shot on a vintage Super 8 camera.

Fear of Fiction

This road movie explores the nature of the bond between twins by focusing on a love affair between a man and a woman, each of whom has a twin brother.

Jamel Shabazz Street Photographer

Documentary following the career of Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz, who captured hip-hop in its infancy long before it became a worldwide phenomenon. His iconic images of kids sporting sneakers and savvy street style caught the essence of hip-hop as it exploded onto the streets of New York. Intimate interviews with Shabazz and hip hop pioneers explore the hundreds of individual stories and urban history behind a revolutionary cultural movement.

G-Man

An exploration of social schizophrenia in which terrorists consult their mothers before planting bombs, and the head of the New York City bomb squad succumbs to his dominatrix.

Doin' Time in Times Square

Documents the view and action outside director Charlie Ahearn's 43rd Street apartment window from 1981 to 1983.

Portrait of Martin Wong

Martin painted the LES ghetto with the most enigmatic realism of bricks to be seen. In 1992 Martin Wong invited Charlie Ahearn up to his Ridge St apartment as he began his autobiographical Chinatown series reflecting his youth in San Francisco and later New York. After he was diagnosed HIV he returned to SF where he later passed away in 1999.

Jane in Peepland

Jane Dickson began her formal career in 1978 after studying at Harvard University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Having moved to New York, she became a participant in the emerging downtown arts community then beginning to incorporate a number of disparate groups of artists, rock musicians, and hip-hop pioneers. After meeting Charlie Ahearn, Dickson joined Colab; she and Ahearn married in 1983. In 1980, Colab secured funding for and presented the Times Square Show, a multidisciplinary exhibit that gathered the work of over a hundred artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and David Hammons and which proved to have long-lasting influence on curatorial programming. In 1982, Dickson proposed and coordinated the “Messages to the Public” series for the Public Art Fund, displaying art texts on the Spectracolor LED billboard in Times Square.