Growing up in 1970s Little Italy, NYC, Gerard Marinaccio drew on anything he could get his hands on — not as a hobby, but as an escape. The tensions at home, the chaos of the street, the weight of an Italian American neighborhood that didn't understand art as a career.

​Around the corner, Keith Haring was turning graffiti into a cultural conversation at the Pop Shop. Neighbor Vincent Gallo introduced the teenage Marinaccio to a world of artists and musicians — including a bandmate, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who's frenetic linework changed how Marinaccio understood chaos as a language.

But the neighborhood had other plans. Blue collar or nothing. Marinaccio put down the brushes, picked up the bottle, and spent years fighting a war between who he was and who he was supposed to be. Only after achieving sobriety did he return to the work. His first public exhibition — 12 works about pain, beauty, and the struggle within — it sold out.