Home ›› 28 Dec 2022 ›› World Biz
With his nimble fingers and child-like enthusiasm, Danny Cortes re-creates in miniature the hip-hop-infused street scenes of a gritty New York. But what began as a hobby has since brought him fame in the rap community and profitable sales even at Sotheby's prestigious auction house.
"We are adults, but we never stopped being kids," the 42-year-old artist tells AFP. "Who doesn't like toys? Who doesn't like miniatures?"
As he spoke from his workshop in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, he sat among recycled objects found on the streets.
On his table was a current project, the tiny replica of a worn and dirty building facade. Near a bricked-in window, a plastic bushel basket had been hung: a poor man's basketball hoop.
"This represents my childhood," Cortes said, putting touches to the model in his preferred medium, polystyrene.
"Everything looked like this: abandoned, empty, a lot of drugs in the area."
From $30 to $10,000
One of his recent creations is a modest Chinese restaurant with a battered yellow sign and with its red-and-mauve brick walls covered with graffiti.
Standing outside the restaurant -- the real one -- Cortes, sporting a black jacket and a baseball cap over his round face -- smiles as he tells how New York rapper Joell Ortiz, who grew up in the neighborhood, insisted on buying the model, saying, "Yo, I need that."
The price?
"Ten thousand dollars," Cortes says, adding that "the first piece I sold was like $30, and I was so happy that I got $30."
The artist builds collectibles based on the most banal of urban scenes, "the little things that we pass by every day" and pay no attention to, but which collectively form the unique cityscape that is New York.
It just took off
One of his first signature works was a rendering of a simple white commercial ice box -- the kind that sits outside corner groceries, the words "ICE" in block red letters on its side, and often covered in graffiti, which Cortes reproduces with meticulous detail.
