2009 Ford Flex Art Car by Lee Quinones - Only In New York

The painting extends inside the Flex as well. "They [Ford designers] wanted the interior to be like a living room, and it really is," Lee says. He filled it with poetry - his poetry, in jagged, city-wall lettering on the door panels. The wheel-and-tire combo continues the themes. Lee's own, quickly rendered tag, his spray-can signature from back in the subway days, is incised into the tread of the one-off Michelin tires and matching O.Z. wheels from the Tire Rack. If Lee were to burn rubber in the Flex, he could literally emblazon his name on the pavement of New York. Born in Puerto Rico in 1960, Lee grew up on that pavement, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He started drawing as a kid. "I was always an A-type drawing student," he says. He and his friends made cars to roll down the block "from old wood and baby carriage wheels." Then Lee learned about street painting and was amazed by the democracy of it. "I got really excited when I learned it was done by kids my age." He picked up his first paints and, after learning to turn the can upside down to get just the right control, he developed his own method. He would not just tag walls and cars in the big bubble and box letters used by other kids, he decided. No, he would paint entire cars, making them rolling murals. Amazingly, his parents were encouraging. And his speed kept him out of trouble in the dark car yards. "You had to work fast," he says. "I was never caught. I had a system. I was very disciplined. I was number one on the subway police's ten-most-wanted list. 'We want to get you because you are an influence,' they told me. That was the greatest thing they could have said." Lee's painted messages were implicitly political. The colorful cars were a reproach to the city's neglect of schools and parks. The city was broke. Serial killer Son of Sam was in the news, and one particularly famous headline read "[Gerald] Ford to City: Drop Dead." Lee loved to see one of his cars side by side with a brand-new, unpainted car. "We would leave a new car alone for the contrast. Those cars showed the visuals that were indoctrinated into people's everyday lives, of a silver train with a blue line that represented authority." To Lee, those official cars spoke of an "android" routine, "going to work and going home, going to work and going home."