Photographs by Dick Evans
The first time I met KASE* was at a wall in Queens, NY in 1998 . I came as guest of Zephyr and Dr.Revolt. Lady Pink was there and Erotica and Clark among others. Kase rolled up on me and said he was down with my family's characters. He kept calling me Mode and I kept correcting him "no, its Bode not Mode" then he would say “ok Mode!” In the short conversation we had, there was mutual respect and that’s all that matters. I let him call me what he wanted to.
I met him later in 2010 at a group show and we both knew each other’s proper names and he signed my book and we took a pic together. I never saw him again. I teamed up with Mace from SF and I did the graffiti angels that would meet him in the great train station in the sky and Mace did the KASE piece. It was monumental meeting The Man, The Legend.
* KASE (born Jeff Brown) was one of the pioneers of the art form known as graffiti that was birthed and popularized in the streets of the South Bronx. KASE managed to complete over 100 pieces on the NYC subway system before 1980, though he had only one arm due to a subway accident when he was 10 years old. KASE passed away on August 15, 2011 from complications due to lung cancer, but his work and artistic influence lives on in today’s graffiti artists.
Sources: Mark Bode and The Source (www.thesource.com)