Richard Hambleton was an American-Canadian graffiti artist best known for his recurring motif of a black-silhouetted figure known as the Shadowman. Along with his contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton painted directly on the streets of New York and achieved success during the art boom of the 1980s. “I painted the town black,” he once said. “They could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a nuclear holocaust or even my own shadow.” Born on June 23, 1952 in Vancouver, Canada, he studied at the Vancouver School of Art before beginning his Image Mass Murder series in 1976. These works mimicked the look of chalk outlines used by police during ...