Futura is the pseudonym of Lenny McGurr, born in 1955 in New York City. He grew up on 103rd Street in Brooklyn during the boom years of train bombings.

McGurr was introduced to graffiti in the late 1960s and early 1970s while walking to school. Inspired by his favorite film, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a book Future Shock written by futurist Alvin Toffler, the young artist chose the superhero pseudonym Futura 2000.

He began painting illegally on New York City subway trains and walls in the early 1970s, becoming known for his radically different approach to graffiti. He introduced abstraction to a previously letter-based art form by covering entire carriages of the city's subway trains with his expressive paintings.

Futura can be considered the follower of some of the most important abstract expressionist ideas. He is the first artist to have covered an entire train car with abstract graffiti. Based on more graphic rules, at the beginning, his expressions developed into complex geometry, to reach today a more liberated form, where a freer composition and colors are at the base. Living legend of the graffiti movement, illustrator, photographer, sculptor, stylist and graphic designer from New York, Futura – also known as Futura 2000 – is one of the main actors of the current international scene of urban art.

A contemporary of SAMO, Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton, Cope2 and many others, Futura helped define the graffiti movement of the early 1970s by moving it away from lettering and towards a more abstract and painterly style.