LA II (Angel Ortiz)

(American, born 1967)

LA II (Angel Ortiz) is an American Pop and graffiti artist. Appreciated for his unique blend of influences ranging from Chinese calligraphy to pictograph-like cave paintings, his oeuvre is characterized by its bright colors and energetic scrawl. Born Angel Oritz in 1967 in New York, NY, he grew up in Puerto Rican family living in the Baruch housing project. He adopted the moniker LA II, which stands for Little Angel, and began tagging from early age. “I was 10 when I first started tagging. The street was my canvas,” he once explained. “I lived on the Lower East Side, and so those were the streets that I hit.” Ortiz met Keith Haring while tagging at the age of 13 in 1980, and the two quickly became friends and collaborators, influencing each other’s technique and style. Ortiz travelled around the world with Haring, acting as his assistant and contributing to many of the famous artist’s installation paintings, usually by filling the spaces between Haring’s lines with his own mixture of densely packed symbols. Since the untimely death of Haring from AIDS at the age 31, Oritz has continued his own career despite often being overlooked within art history and Haring’s legacy in particular. In 2008, he famously tagged his name in a restored Haring outdoor mural without permission. Today, Ortiz’s works are in the collections of Pepperdine University in Malibu, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others. Ortiz lives and works in New York, NY.