JonOne

John Andrew Perello, known as JonOne, was born in 1963 in Harlem to parents from the Dominican Republic. Around 1980 he started writing on subway cars and walls as Jon 156, after the street where he grew up, and in 1984 he co-founded the 156 All Starz crew, which grew into an international collective.

From the tag to the canvas

In 1987 the French graffiti writer Bando invited him to Paris, and he has lived there ever since. At the Hôpital Éphémère, an artists’ squat in a disused hospital in the 18th arrondissement, he began to paint on canvas. JonOne describes himself as an abstract painter who uses the codes of the street: drips, loops and repeated strokes accumulate until the signature dissolves into an all-over field of colour and rhythm.

Recognition in France

In 2015 his large canvas Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, a response to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, was installed at the Assemblée nationale and reproduced on a French postage stamp. The same year he received the Légion d’honneur and an Air France Boeing 777 flew in his livery. Collaborations with Guerlain, Daum crystal and the Gien faience works followed.

Museum retrospectives and Miami

JonOne took part in Né dans la rue – Graffiti at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2009. Major solo presentations include L’Empire des signatures at the Fondation Clément in Martinique (2017), La Tentation du décor at La Piscine in Roubaix (2023), his first museum retrospective, and a survey of forty years of work at Fluctuart in Paris (2025). In December 2025 his solo exhibition El Tiguere opened at the Museum of Graffiti in Wynwood, Miami, with a working studio inside the museum.