Our favorite street artist, Poster Boy, was arrested last month.

If you don’t know who he is, Poster Boy is New York subway artist, who’s work appears seemingly at random in Metro stations all over the city. With a razor blade has his only tool, Poster Boy slices art out of all those awful ads that get in your face everyday on your way to work (for a quick introduction to him, take a look at the video below). We’ve mentioned subway vandalism and scratchitti a few times before, but Poster Boy is our favorite criminal/artist, and certainly the most known. He’s been written about in New York Magazine, the Guardian, and his arrest has been covered by the Times. Every time I take a train in this city, I covet a chance to see a new work in person, on the platform, where I’m forced to study the same oversized faces and beguiling slogans daily.

I learned of his arrest when I passed a box for the New York Press, a magazine I’d never seen before, and saw in red comicbook lettering, over a neon green background, the headline “Who is Poster Boy?” I grabbed the paper, the display copy since the box was empty, and opened to the article. Poster Boy, real(?) name Henry Matyjewicz, was arrested last month at a soho gallery, where they were displaying a new work he’d done with Aakash Nihalani (the guy who makes those tape-cubes on the sidewalk). It was a completely legal piece of art, but the show opening advertised a live appearance by the outlaw, and so some plainclothesman showed up and busted him (apparently he was nabbed because he was bragging to some girl that he was Poster Boy, when he probably should have kept his mouth shut; but can you blame him?).

There’s an interview with Henry Matyjewicz, not Poster Boy, in the paper. It’s pretty interesting. For possible legal reasons, but hopefully more artistic and ironic reasons, Matyjewicz separates himself from Poster Boy, referring to him as if it were a different person. He talks as if Poster Boy is more than a person, and instead a movement, that he, Matyjewiscz, sometimes agrees with, and sometimes doesn’t. He even says that sometimes he wishes he could be more like Poster Boy. It’s an interesting interview, not great, but still worth checking out. I’m not sure the writer’s intentions, and he sometimes makes Matyjewicz sound like an idiot, but you can find the article here.

As a final note, the piece Poster Boy was showing at the gallery the night we was arrested, the piece above the article, ironically features a cut-out from Medea Goes to Jail.

Check out his flickr page, too. Maybe you’ve seen his work before, and just not realized it.

(oh, and he’s not really our first guest. We were talking about trying to get him, but it’s hard to do an interview from jail.)