World Famous TATS Cru Paints Masterpiece to Support Baha’is in Iran

In the early 1980s, Wilfredo "Bio" Feliciano, Hector "Nicer" Nazario, and Sotero "BG 183" Ortiz were considered street vandals. They used wire cutters to cut chain link fences, snuck into train yards, and painted the sides of subway cars in the middle of the night, displaying their artwork on trains throughout New York City. Now, the world-famous TATS Cru, as they’ve become known, is glorified in anthems by artists like Fat Joe and KRS-One, while big corporations including Nike, Ford, and Snapple, regularly commission their talent. 

And this September, in Harlem, they’ve focused their spray paint on creating a giant mural for Baha’i students in Iran. In addition to other forms of persecution, the Iranian government denies Baha’is the right to further education, or from teaching at universities, because of their religious beliefs. 

“Why wouldn’t you want people in your country to have access to education?” Bio wanted to know after hearing about the situation for Baha’is in Iran.

As part of its support for the Not A Crime campaign, TATS Cru, originally from the South Bronx, painted a mural on the Choir Academy of Harlem building on 127th Street and Madison Avenue. The campaign uses street art to advocate for human rights. Not A Crime worked with arts organization Street Art Anarchy to curate and create huge murals throughout Harlem throughout the summer  in the run-up to the United Nations General Assembly Conference, which runs from September 15-September 27 in New York. Delegates from Iran and 170 other countries are attending the session.

The TATS Cru mural, which looks out over a high school, features a rainbow of colors exploding around two kids reading a book, another practicing gymnastics, and another playing basketball. There’s an open fire hydrant blasting water from its sides, a huge pencil, stars, and the famous TATS Cru geometric-style heart pumping in the top left. “Harlem” is scrawled in dark letters across the top.

“The more knowledge we get, and the more educated we become, the more understanding we have of other cultures and that kind of thing,” said Bio about the mural and its connection to the campaign. The mural took less than a day to create. “You know somebody grows up here, and somebody else grows up on the other side of the world. Through knowledge and education is how you learn about other cultures, different ideas, different concepts, and you’re able to come to a common ground. If you don’t have that, I don’t know where you begin,” he said. 

The muralists that make up the TATS Cru group say they are intimate with the idea that culture spreads through education. Members of the legendary graffiti crew were born in New York City at the time that hip-hop was just beginning to make itself known throughout the world. And graffiti was and is an integral part of the hip-hop movement. As a result TATS Cru, has since become recognized as a central player in the movement to educate people about hip hop around the world through graffiti. 

“Back then times were different. Back then it was a subculture in New York City,” Nicer told IranWire, thinking back to early 1980s New York. TATS Cru, which boasted as many as 30 members at one point, grew up in what many people consider to be the birthplace of hip-hop — the Bronx. It was in the Bronx where people like DJ Kool Herc and Coke La Rock combined elements of DJing and emceeing in the 1970s to create a new musical sound, where groups like The Cold Crush Brothers and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were born, and where the Universal Zulu Nation, a hip-hop awareness organization, was originally established. 

When TATS Cru members were growing up, legendary graffiti artists, including Lee, Dondi, and Seen, were the dominate force in creating subway murals in the city. “As teenagers we saw graffiti all around us. When we became 14 or 15 years old it became something that we naturally gravitated towards,” said BG 183. “It wasn’t until the mid to late 80s that we kind of drifted from the subways out into the streets and started painting walls,” he said.  

BG 183 told IranWire that once the crew moved toward doing legal murals on walls at business establishments and other venues, it gave them a chance to communicate with community members, and be understood in a different way. “You gotta remember that when we started graffiti it was only on the subway, so nobody would see what was getting down. But now people can stop, look at it, ask questions, and all this kind of stuff. So everybody starting to get along with us, and calling us by our names — TATS Cru.”  

The name TATS Cru comes from the merging of two South Bronx crews from the 1980s. In a 2006 documentary, TATS Cru: The Mural Kings, Nicer described how it came about. ‘“Before TATS Cru became TATS Cru it was originally TAT. That was a name we had for ourselves when we painted on trains in the 80s.” The additional ‘S’ in the crew’s name came from a rival crew called Terror Squad (TS) run by Fat Joe, the famous rap artist. Fat Joe started creating murals with Brim, who was one of the original creators of TAT — so the name changed to TATS Cru.  

Not A Crime has commissioned street artists from around the world to paint murals in Harlem. Each street artist or group of artists has taken a unique approach to advocating for Baha’i rights in Iran. The TATS Cru mural is the 11th so far in the series. Four more are due to go up, and a concert for the campaign will take place at The Apollo on September 23rd, featuring Saeid Shanbehzadeh, an Afro-Iranian folk artist.