Born Lenny Hilton McGurr, he first picked up a spray can in 1970, aged 15. An only child from a lower-middle class Manhattan home, graffiti provided him with "a solution to my identity crisis" -- a crisis brought on by the news he was adopted.
"My mother, who was black, just came out with it one day," he says. "She said you must never tell your father [a white Irish Catholic]. That evening I became Futura 2000: Futura being a typeface, also a [Ford] car, coupled with Stanley Kubrick's '2001 A Space Odyssey,' a really powerful movie for me. I would have been Futura 2001, but I thought everybody would say, 'Oh, like the movie,' so I just took 2000. It was 30 years away, I never thought I'd live to see it anyway."
Numbers were big back then, with most graffiti writers incorporating them in their tags, often to match the streets they lived on. Futura spent a couple of years harmlessly "motion tagging" subways (inside as opposed to on the outside of trains), and occasionally spraying up buildings in the Queens and Bronx areas of New York.