This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Fernando Miteff liked his art so much, he gave it away.

Using the graffiti tag Nic 707, he was known for giving scraps of paper adorned with his graceful letter designs and outlines to up-and-coming artists to guide them, and to fans to thank them. And for the last decade he did something most straphangers thought had vanished in the late 1980s: He brought graffiti back to the New York City subway.

But this time, he did it by boarding a train, replacing ads with pieces by some of the country’s best-known and most influential graffiti artists, like Taki 183, and switching them back at the end of his ride.

“I wanted to bring a new ideology to graffiti,” he said in a 2015 interview about his guerrilla subway car exhibits, which he called InstaFame Phantom Art. “I didn’t want to leave a mark that stays. I wanted to leave an impression. As long as you saw and remembered it, I’m happy with that.”