Of Authority and Authors: The History of Graffiti and Street Art and its Ties to Racism and Class
Chrystal McLaurin
What exactly is graffiti? Pose this question, and the initial images likely to spring to mind are cargo trains, the subway cars of New York City, and street tags. The origin of the word ‘graffiti’ can be traced back to two languages. Initially, it stems from the Latin word ‘graphire,’ meaning ‘to write.’ However, its more direct antecedent is the Italian word ‘graffito,’ signifying ‘to scratch’ or ‘to scribble.’ This etymology is particularly apt for describing the art form since graffiti creators often do not identify as artists in the traditional sense, despite their creative contributions. Within their community, they prefer the title of ‘writers’ because their work, except for character art, primarily focuses on lettering-based compositions. In this discussion, I will use the terms ‘artist’ and ‘writer’ interchangeably to refer to them.
Each writer adopts a unique name to tag, and those who venture beyond basic tagging strive to cultivate a distinctive style that sets them apart. Like other cultures, the graffiti community possesses an extensive vocabulary and slang to articulate various artistic styles, behaviors, skill levels, and other aspects of their sphere. The evolution of graffiti, as we recognize it today, has traversed a remarkable journey from its international origins to its prominent status in the United States.
An image you may conjure beyond graffiti itself is the fight between artists and law enforcement. However, this is a modernist approach to understanding what it really is. If we expand our way of thinking, we will understand that graffiti began when the first humans learned how to use natural resources to etch drawings onto cave walls. Coincidentally, the earliest graffiti mimics the way in which we learn. We draw before we learn how to write and obviously, there would be no such thing as letters in the paleolithic era. Just as in the medieval era where bible scriptures were painted in Cathedrals for parishioners, graffiti in the form of visual imagery would be of value for illiterate viewers. Future civilizations would continue using walls as canvases for a multitude of reasons, especially with the introduction of written languages. For example, ancient Egypt is a home to religious graffiti. During AD 452, in the Isis temple on Philae Island in Aswan, Egypt, visitors making a pilgrimage there etched personal prayers to the goddess on the temple walls. To historians, this is significant because, at the time, the site was the last remaining traditional Egyptian temple in the region due to a Christian takeover.
Heading north to Italy, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius left much of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum intact. In these more sexually liberated societies sprawled with bars and brothels, there is no surprise that the subject matter of graffiti took on a more sexual nature. Some detailed their own and others’ sexual proclivities and accolades. These were, however, interspersed with insulting messages and political propaganda. Can you imagine a society where graffiti was the norm? Well, it was not until the French Revolution that the term vandalism was coined. Amongst the different forms of rebellion of the middle class against the French aristocracy, destroying high art was one of them. We can now see that this was a starting point that negatively marked individuals of a different social class then and for future generations. The question then, is when did graffiti subsequently become tied to race?
This is a story linked to the United States and its ongoing battles between race and oppressive policies. During the Black Arts Movement (1965-1975), murals became an organic way for African American artists to express their message to a wider audience. The artistic movement started in Harlem, New York, with poet and activist, Amiri Baraka where he opened The Black Arts Repertory Theater. Although poetry and theater had the strongest impact for changing the collective minds, you cannot negate the way the intentional focus on the Black aesthetic in artwork of the time became an influence for the following decades of socially conscious artists, especially for muralists. While having its roots in New York, the artistic movement made its way to other Black creative hubs such as Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco, California, and Detroit, Michigan. Muralists focused on images of Black rebellion to an unjust political system that treated them as second-class citizens. They promoted the love of Black features because the aesthetic went against the grain of a society that promoted the White European nuclear family as the standard.
One of the most famous murals of the era was The Wall of Respect in Chicago, Illinois. In 1967, a collective of artists from the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization for Black American Culture decided to paint the outer walls of a building situated at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue. It featured more than fifty portraits of prominent Black figures in all arenas (music, theater, literature, and activism). The mural gained notoriety across the country as well as overseas.
Coinciding with this era of fostering Black advancement, Darryl McCray, who went under the moniker Cornbread, influenced a new graffiti movement that began to flourish in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While his antics would be classified as vandalism, he revolutionized the ways in which artists would create their pieces. Ironically, his journey did not start off with that in mind. McCray originally was interested in posting his moniker everywhere in hopes to impress a female classmate. While doing so, he perfected his unique signature and created what is known today as a tag style. Tag styles are still a prominent writers’ tool today used to get their names recognized. Beyond getting his name out to the public, the medium he used was foreign to graffiti artists before and restructured the way in which artists implement their work: He began using spray paint. Spray paint was both affordable and easy to carry from one location to the next as he was known to specialize in seeking unorthodox sites.
McCray painted both for risk and social awareness. Addressing his more frivolous thrill-seeking ventures, he once spray painted the Jackson 5 private jet as well as an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo: the latter of which has been memorialized by admirers at multiple galleries. On the more socially conscious side of his work, he was known to spray paint police vehicles to address the ongoing brutality that the African American communities faced by their hands and by their rampant racial profiling.
In the early 1970’s in New York, the city saw a boom in street art covering the inner and outer surfaces of subway trains. A series of administrations would begin what they would call a ‘war’ on graffiti, starting with Mayor John Lindsay in 1972. However, a year after his anti-graffiti battles, he started admitting defeat as it was costing the city exorbitant amounts per year without much improvement.
During the 1980s, the fight against graffiti would continue to be proven futile as it became cemented as an element of an already established art form: hip-hop. Hip-Hop had emerged in the 1970s from the majority Black and Hispanic neighborhood, South Bronx, in New York City. One theory of the intertwining of the art and the music was that the flow of the words (art pieces) with the arrows and vivid colors matched the energy and movement of break dancers who would perform to the music. Another probable theory is that because both art forms represented the expressions of the undeserved and disenfranchised Black and Latino youth of the inner city, the two would organically fit. Once music videos were introduced, Hip-Hop acts used graffiti-style art as backdrops. How could bringing this art form to the mainstream be stopped when it was ushered in by artists who had already achieved international success?
Nevertheless, in the nineties, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would continue the effort with compound phases of anti-graffiti legislation. His September 1998 mayoral press release detailed his implementation of multi-agency task forces throughout the city to combat vandalism. For instance, the Department of Consumer Affairs surveyed businesses to see if they properly displayed spray paint to keep them out of the hands of minors. If those businesses illegally sold paint to minors, they would be fined. From forty-three business, he collected a total of $25,000 worth of fines. With the assistance of the NYPD Anti-Graffiti/Vandalism Unit, he created a hotline for neighbors to call if they happened to see vandalism in the process. Between the years of 1998-1999, his administration spent $25 million dollars on graffiti removal initiatives. None of his tactics included any form of creative outlet for these artists that he automatically coined as criminals: it was solely based on punishment.
Giuliani’s zero-tolerance stance was born of the broken windows theory brought forth by the criminologists, George Kelling and James Wilson. Their theory positions that no matter how small a crime may be, it should be dealt with harshly to stop more severe crimes, preventing chaos in the process. There was conjecture that Giuliani was not truly worried about the conditions and safety of poor neighborhoods that housed minorities. His biggest issue was that the subways were the link between the inner city and the suburbs and if he curbed the prevalence of graffiti, it would not spill into rich, affluent, White neighborhoods. His is one tale in a long history of governmental indifference and hostility which continued the divide it forged with Black and Brown communities, creating the resurgence of a former artistic movement: murals. Graffiti was not a dying art and continued evolving through the years. However, there was a shift in the need for bringing awareness to individuals killed by the state. This need generated the Black Lives Matter Movement in the 2010s.
The Black Lives Matter Movement arose in 2013 after a string of confrontations where Black people were killed at the hands of law enforcement. Not only were the officers playing judge, jury, and executioner at these scenes, but in many of those moments, the ‘offenders’ were usually unarmed, and the officers were almost guaranteed to be acquitted. This sparked the creation of the Black Lives Matter organization that fought for anti-racism legislation, to end racial profiling and police brutality, and to help organize protests in the cities where these offenses happened. Seven years later, the tensions that the organization had been battling came to a head. In March of 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed in her sleep during a no-knock raid. Two months later, the world saw the cell phone footage of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, with his knee on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes until he died. Protests erupted across the country and worldwide. Murals of both Taylor and Floyd started popping up. Amongst the commissioned works depicting them, there were impromptu portrait tributes of Floyd and Taylor. Addressing another facet of violence inflicted upon the Black community, in areas of gentrification, especially in California, people started tagging ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The cyclical repetition of socially conscious graffiti and street reveals the unmet needs of Black and Brown communities, leaving them to report and point a finger at the hostility that both the government and society inflicts upon them daily.
The story of graffiti is as old as the first people who marked the cave walls with iron oxide. As stated before, it coincides with the way in which humans learn in the absence of written and spoken languages: We draw first and make representational art as a means of storytelling. Does that reveal an innate want to paint our surroundings and to make our messages accessible to a larger audience? This is the model for multiple generations of artists, especially within underserved communities who not only display their skills but, at times, are also fighting for human rights and dignity. So, graffiti, in turn, can become the words and expressions of people who are not heard. Additionally, one’s perception of the art form can be altered by both knowing and not knowing the history of graffiti, the political climate of any given era, race, class, and where one is positioned within the latter two.
References:
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