About the Grey Organisation
The Grey Organisation’s origins can be found in the Punk movement and 70’s youth politics; its founding members had also been members of the Anarchist Street Army, a loose collective of young punks and anarchists from several inner city London Schools.
They undertook a series of direct art actions, including an attack on Cork Street, then centre of London’s art establishment, in which they covered some of the city’s most famous galleries in grey paint. They also organised live concerts, directed films and took part in exhibitions. Towards the end of the eighties they were living in New York designing album covers and art directing music videos for Tommy Boy Records, Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and MTV.
What may seem like a strange turn of events was in fact a fateful meeting of two very different pioneering groups. This is the previously unknown story of how the Grey Organisation and De La Soul produced one the most well known Hip Hop LP’s of all time.
Read NEW YORK CITY, HIP HOP IN THE DAISY AGE, SUMMER 1989, an essay by Toby Mott, 3 Feet High and Rising cover artist & Grey Organisation Founder
View the 3 FEET HIGH AND RISING print
About Toby Mott
Toby seems, at first glance, to be from an entirely different world to that of De La Soul's 'D.A.I.S.Y. Age' but this is an artist who defies pigeon-holing and straddles conventional categorisation with an easy self assurance.
When the Grey Organisation disbanded in 1991, Toby Mott pursued a solo career as a painter, exhibiting at White Columns in New York, The Thomas Soloman Garage in Los Angeles, Interim Art in London and being represented for many years by the Maureen Paley Gallery. Later as a designer Mott founded the iconic fashion brand Toby Pimlico.
Most recently, whilst continuing to make work of his own, he has been curating exhibitions and events for The Mott Collection, an archive of British punk fanzines and other visual ephemera; and Cultural Traffic, a roving global platform hosting artists, independent and experimental publishers together with dealers of vintage books, ephemera and pop culture.
