By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
EAST VILLAGE — A celebrated street artist who was arrested the night before the opening of his latest exhibition spent weeks on Rikers Island while his East Village gallery show floundered, not even earning him enough money to post bail.
Angel "LA II" Ortiz, whose month-long show at the Dorian Grey Gallery on East 9th Street ended last week, missed the March 12 opening of his exhibition after getting arrested for tagging an East Village building.
Instead of laying low after spending 24 hours in lockup, Ortiz got busted again for vandalism a couple weeks later — earning him an extended stay at Rikers Island, where he is currently awaiting his next court appearance.
"I thought this would be the home run," said gallery owner Christopher Pusey, who organized the exhibition, which drew artists like David Byrne and Kenny Scharf to the opening.
"I miscalculated a number of things," he said, "including LA."
Ortiz, 44, declined a jailhouse visit by DNAinfo last week to talk about his situation, but his absence for much of the exhibition made sales slump to the point where he didn't even pocket enough to post bail.
He earned accolades as a teenager in the 1980s for his creative collaboration with pop artist Keith Haring, who sought out the young Lower East Sider after noticing his graffiti tag around the neighborhood.
But three decades later, the same street signature that drew Haring to Ortiz proved to be his undoing.
"I do what I do," Ortiz told DNAinfo after his first arrest, noting that "the streets are my canvases."
However, police saw things differently after finding dozens of Ortiz's tags spray-painted throughout the East Village, including one on a mural of late musician Joe Strummer on East 7th Street and on Scharf's own high-profile piece on the famous Houston Street wall.
After his second arrest, for writing graffiti during the early-morning hours of March 28, Ortiz told police he expected to get nabbed.
"I shouldn't have done it," he told officers, according to the criminal complaint. "I knew sooner or later I was going to get arrested."
Friends who have been speaking with Ortiz and visiting him in jail said he is doing fine and hopes to be released this week.
"You know how many times I had arguments with him because he was going to do graffiti?" said Ramona Lugo, who's been letting Ortiz work out of her framing shop on East 11th Street.
"He knew not to do that, [but] he's still got that mentality. That is the mentality of the graffiti artist."
Ortiz is schedule to appear in Manhattan Criminal Court on Weds., April 27. His attorney could not be reached for comment.
Pusey, who previously brushed off Ortiz's initial arrest as "poetic justice in some twisted way," explained that his stint in jail prevented the artist from producing new works over the course of the show, as well as staging events like painting at the gallery in person on weekends.
"He has a tough time playing the game," said Pusey, who only managed to sell one of Ortiz's paintings and a handful of less-expensive prints. "It's alright being a bad boy, but there is a point where you have to channel it forward, and not to Rikers."
