Last summer, while in another city to attend a conference, I looked out my hotel window and noticed the roofline of the building catty-corner to my hotel. Or rather, I noticed words spray-painted along one of the chimney stacks.
“Real graffiti writers do this illegally.”
My first thought was “how on earth did they get up there to paint that?” That is, generally, my first thought whenever I see graffiti on hard-to-reach places such as the side of railway bridges and pretty much anyplace higher than two stories.
My second – and arguably more interesting – thought was to wonder about the conflict the message seems to reference between graffiti artists who tag illegally and those who paint walls and sidewalks with the approval of the local authority. This led to a longer internal pondering about the nature of graffiti, murals and other forms of street art, what they say about the communities where they appear, and how their messages and acceptance (or lack of) may have changed over the years.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word graffiti comes from “graffito,” and was originally a technical term for ancient handwritten wall-inscriptions that were scratched into wall plaster. The term later came to mean any writing on a wall. I remember becoming aware of the concept of graffiti when I was fairly young, when I came across names, initials, and scatological humor scratched in the paint of public bathroom stalls. This is a specific kind of graffiti known as latrinalia. Veteran James Wayne Cecil, in a 2001 interview for the Veterans History Project, mentioned spotting this kind of graffiti in Oakland, as he was getting ready to leave for the war [timestamp 11:14]:
“You’re processing through Oakland, and that was really a strange time. You were only there a few days, and you knew that you were leaving. You were trying to make your phone call home to family, and girlfriends, whatever you were trying to do and, I guess one of the things that struck me in Oakland was some of the graffiti that was left in the bathroom walls, and that type of thing. It was ‘Mary, I promise I’ll return home.’ And there was just all kinds of messages on the walls there in Oakland, California, of young men promising that they were going to make it, and that they were going to come back home. I guess that’s my greatest – I think it’s kind of strange that your greatest memory before leaving America is what’s written on the restroom walls, but that kind of struck me as people believing in the future and having hopes and dreams that they were going to survive.”
Though the name for this type of graffiti dates to folklorist Alan Dundes’ 1966 article “Here I sit: A Study of American Latrinalia,” this kind of scrawling is not a new thing. Human beings have been leaving a record of our presence on bathroom walls for generations. Likewise, non-bathroom-related graffiti has long appeared in other public spaces, as evidenced by century-old “hobo graffiti” found under a bridge in Los Angeles, the scratchings of Civil War soldiers in places like The Graffiti House, and the cartoon figures drawn on the walls under the Lincoln Memorial.
I imagine if you asked a person whose property was tagged how they felt about it, they would tell you it was a nuisance or vandalism. If you asked janitors, park rangers and historic preservation specialists, they’d point out that many instances of graffiti and impromptu public art contribute to the degradation of physical structures or natural resources and, in some cases, obscure important warnings.
However, if you ask the historians and archaeologists who study historic graffiti, they’ll tell you it is an invaluable historic resource that gives us insight into the everyday lives of people living at the time it was made. This is especially true for places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the graffiti often sheds light on people who might not otherwise appear in the historic record. For the people who engage in the graffiti, it is an art form – one that takes skill to design and carry out without getting caught – and a way to leave some kind of mark on the world around you.
The fact that historic examples exist at all is impressive. Aside from markings literally carved in stone, most graffiti tends to be created with the understanding that the medium is a temporary one. Slogans and names penciled on walls can be erased; those made in ink can be covered by a new coat of paint. Even the words scratched in plaster could, theoretically, be obscured by smoothing a new layer of plaster overtop the words. It was this very transitory nature – or rather, the necessity of using cameras to document finished graffiti pieces – that opened the doors for photographer Martha Cooper, who has been photographing graffiti writers and other forms of street art since the 1970s.
In a 2022 Benjamin A. Botkin lecture, Cooper explained how she first came to photograph graffiti writers and their work in New York City. During her stint as a photographer for the New York Post, Cooper would take her camera out and drive through Avenues A, B, C, and D – often called “Alphabet City.” While wandering the Lower East Side, which she described as “full of vacant lots and vacant buildings” at the time, she encountered many children playing in abandoned buildings. One boy showed her a pigeon coop he had set up on the roof:
“And this same boy, his name was Edwin Serrano, showed me his notebook and explained to me that he was practicing to put his name on a wall. And this was the first time that I understood that the graffiti that I was seeing was actually nicknames. And the idea that he was planning it was incredibly intriguing to me that he was actually a designer and he was designing his name to write on a wall.
And he said, “Why don’t you take pictures of graffiti?” He said, “I can introduce you to a king.” And so, of course, I had to say yes. And he introduced me to Dondi, who was in fact, considered one of the most amazing graffiti writers of all time. […] I’m interviewing Dondi and Sandy and his friends in his basement, and Dondi was so articulate and so interesting about what he did that I pursued this.
One of the reasons that Dondi trusted me was that when I met him, he had clipped out of the Post – a picture that I had taken that had a piece of graffiti on it that he had written on the wall in the back, the wall behind this little girl who’s swinging on the swing. Of course, he wasn’t interested in the little girl. He was interested in his graffiti. It says CIA on it. That was his crew. The crew was Crazy Inside Artists.
And that was just so amazing to me that you could even identify that little piece of graffiti. It hadn’t really occurred to me that people were noticing who had painted what. And it turned out that, of course, all the graffiti writers could identify exactly the tags and the pieces that the other writers had done. And so I spent some time with Dondi.”
At that first meeting, Cooper noticed that Dondi had a photo album filled with pictures of his work. They had been taken with disposable cameras and were the only proof that the piece had ever been put up somewhere.
“He said that he never would do a piece on a train without a photo,” Cooper explained. “That’s how I fit into this culture. I was able to provide better photos than they could take themselves. And in fact, the photo was always the proof of the piece because the pieces that they painted on trains did not last long. I mean, sometimes they only lasted one day. So if you didn’t have a picture of it, you could just talk about it.”
Cooper’s willingness to travel to the trainyards with these graffiti writers meant she learned firsthand about the different types of graffiti styles. During her lecture, Cooper displayed an image of two train cars painted by a couple – Duster and Lizzie. Each of the train cars displayed a different type of lettering. One showed a style known as straight letters, while the other was a form known as wild style lettering. My favorite example of wild style letters in AFC’s archive comes from Martha Cooper’s work with the Center’s Working in Paterson Project. On a brick wall on East Main Street, a commissioned piece of graffiti advertises “Joey Kay’s Supermarket – American & Middle Eastern Foods.” Surrounding the commissioned sign are other non-commissioned examples of wild style writing. To me, this highlights the contrast between the illegal and sanctioned graffiti writers indicated in the piece I saw in Aberdeen. Here, the line between graffiti and sanctioned work (and, essentially, advertising) is blurred.
In addition to documenting graffiti writers – or style writing, as some preferred to call it – Martha Cooper also documented individuals who were working with similar mediums and locations, but who weren’t using lettering in their pieces. One of these individuals was Keith Haring, who Cooper described as “an arbiter of cool.”
“Keith had started hanging out with graffiti writers and he started painting walls. And this is a very big wall House Street that he painted. He moved all the trash bags. He’s sort of painting pictures of breakers. I regard this as the beginning of street art as opposed to graffiti, because he’s not using letters. He did not get permission for this wall. He was appropriating public space the way graffiti writers do. And as a result, a lot of people started painting walls.”
Examples of this mix of graffiti and street art can be seen in Cooper’s photographs of the graffiti murals at School Number 15, in Paterson, New Jersey.
The distinction of “street art” adds another level to the discourse around works created under the auspices of official permits and those carried out through more clandestine operations. As we saw with the sign for Joey Kay’s Supermarket, not all graffiti is illegal and unwanted. Similarly, some street art reflects an appropriation of public space while other examples are commissioned pieces of public art. Examples of the latter can also be found in AFC’s archival collections, such as this mural depicting the history of Butte, Montana;
this one in the Bonnett Shores Rec Center that succeeds in bringing a representation of the seaside town indoors;
and multiple murals photographed around in and around Chicago, including this one from Little Village;
the murals found in Chicago’s Jazz Alley;
and this one on the corner of Racine and Magnolia, depicting migration from rural Appalachia to urban areas in the Midwest.
The Chicago Ethnic Arts Project collection (AFC 1981/004) includes several interviews with artists involved in some of these murals, including one with Carlos Cumpián, from Movimiento Artistico Chicano (MARCH). This group was responsible for creating six murals in and around Chicago. Cumpián also worked with a multinational artist group known as the Chicago Mural Group. His interview provides insight into the logistics of planning and carrying out large-scale public art installations:
“One of the things that goes into a mural, if I can do it in a nutshell real quick, is, alright, choosing a site, making sure it’s visible to the public, coming from what direction, right? You’ve got to keep all of that in mind. And its height. Then, the quality of the wall. What condition it’s in. Whether or not it needs prepping, you know? If it needs to be sandblasted or what. All of that has to be taken into account. And then even before you can go that far, it’s good to – if you’ve got the wall site, then you have the agreement of the landlord. If it’s a landlord, then it’s nice to know how long his lease is on the wall, on the place, or whether or not he plans to sell it, is what the question is. And if it looks good, you know how much energy, effort to lay into that wall, get going. If it averages more than 5 years, then you’re doing good.
Of course, murals – they’re visible to all the external elements of this particular region, that are being done. The life expectancy of most murals is anywhere between five and eight years. If we’re doing good. Because of the conditions of the weather.
Anyway, one of the key things then is having community support. Community involvement at the beginning, to consider what they would like expressed, displayed by these muralists. And the muralists actually have to make, if they care to – if they care to really reflect a community – a survey. They have to do their own survey and get in contact with parishes and clubs and outfits, groups. You know? And get into some discussions, and talk to, stop people on the street, and ask them “what would you like to see up there, in terms of,” you know, expressed. And people have definitely done that. And those are the murals that turn out to be the most well preserved and greatest appreciated.”
Amongst the photographs of Chicago’s murals are a few that highlight the interplay between sanctioned murals and illegal graffiti writing. The graffiti photographed on a Polish mural in Chicago
and the spray paint-obscured faces on this mural from Sheffield in Chicago
illustrate the risk that public murals can face from those intending to deface them. Cumpián spoke about this conflict in his interview, as well:
“There’s incidents where – for one, I was living over near Fullerton, where there was a mural that had just been completed, no more than a few months. And some drunk landlord in his 40s, this fella – I was unemployed at the time – this drunk landlord in his 40s, it was during the middle of the day, gets out of the bar and goes to his car, pulls out two buckets of paint, and splashes it against the mural and it’s gray, gray paint. And it was a beautiful mural. Now, a Puerto Rican youth was across the street in a park and noticed this, and chased the guy. And tackled the guy, and the guy scrambled away and got to the bar. The Puerto Rican youth went away and called the police, and they had the guy arrested because he didn’t – he went back into the bar to boast about what he did. The cops got in and arrested him for defacing property, so on and so forth. But it was kind of, like, really turning the tables. It’s like, here’s this youth defending property for the first time, in a sense. These are kids that hang in parks, which could or could not be gang people, or club people, but here they are doing this because they feel like a real affinity for what the murals are saying.”
One of the things I noted as I examined these photographs was the intersection between sanctioned murals that reflect the communities where they are found (as Cumpián mentioned) and the large-scale product advertisements that were also often painted on the sides of buildings. It’s an interesting juxtaposition between community-led public art and marketing.
The Pioneer Market Portuguese Mural and the advertisement for the Pioneer Supermarket require a certain amount of artistic skill and a similar preparation of the wall before beginning the work. Each example would have required a significant investment of time to complete, due to their size. Only one of these, however, is likely to engender the same sort of community pride as the defaced mural that Cumpián referenced.
The involvement of the youth in Cumpián’s story reminded me of both the young man – Edwin Serrano – who introduced Martha Cooper to her first graffiti writer and the youth involved in a downtown window-painting expedition documented in the Pinelands Folklife Project (AFC 1991/023).
All of the approaches to public art covered here — the sanctioned public art pieces and the clandestine work of graffiti writers and other street artists — made space for children and youth in a way that the elite art world does not. In addition to providing a public place to nurture their burgeoning talent, both the underground graffiti world and community-led public art projects become places where these youth can express their individual identities and exert at least a little bit of control over a world that often leaves them few other outlets.
While Martha Cooper made a distinction between graffiti and street art (the latter defined by the lack of lettering) in her Botkin lecture, she made it clear that she considered graffiti as worthy of inclusion in contemporary art galleries:
“I have seen a change, but there’s still an unwillingness for contemporary art museums to look at graffiti as art. And there are some incredible pieces out there, I’m talking about – we’re not talking street art now. That’s graffiti pieces, graffiti lettering. And I don’t understand these museums. It’s like there’s a blindness. I mean, the color combinations! the skill! Like, try painting with spray paint. It’s completely difficult. And, you know, they have different kinds of caps that go on the cans so that you can make wide spray or little tiny lines. And the skill that some of these writers have in doing these pieces and they can do it quickly is extraordinary.
I’m hoping you’ll look at it with a new eye when you leave here and maybe tell your friends. […] What could be more contemporary art than graffiti? It’s – to me – this definitely ought to be included. And while Haring is included, Basquiat is included in these museums, you do not generally see hardcore graffiti writers in museums today, and I hope that will change in my lifetime.”
The next time you go out for a walk in your neighborhood or city, I encourage you to keep an eye out for examples of these public artistic expressions. Who do you think made them? What medium did their creators use? What might they be telling you about your community?
Additional Resources
In addition to Martha Cooper’s Botkin lecture, more of her graffiti photographs are available for research as part of the American Folklife Center’s Working in Paterson Project collection (AFC 1995/028).
Three additional collections – the Henry Chalfant collection (AFC 2025/002), the City Lore collection (AFC 2025/001), and the Martha Cooper collection (AFC 2023/022) will also feature examples of graffiti, street art, and other public art installations. These collections are currently unprocessed and access is limited. Please contact the American Folklife Center to inquire about access.
Interested in reading more about graffiti, murals, and other forms of public street art? Dive into these other posts from the Library’s blogs:
- COVID Recollections: “Walls Speak and People Need to Listen” – An Interview with Dr. Heather Shirey and Dr. Todd Lawrence about the COVID-19 Street Art Archive. By Doug Peach. March 17, 2025. Folklife Today
- Pandemic Folk Architecture: Outdoor Dining Sheds and Urban Creativity on the Sidewalks of New York. By Nancy Groce. November 8, 2021. Folklife Today.
- Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with Primary Sources. Guest post by 2024 LOC Junio Fellow, Kathleen Rowley. September 3, 2024. Teaching with the Library: Primary Sources & Ideas for Educators.
Check out these Library presentations on graffiti and murals:
- “Graffiti, Folklore and Community Life: Photographing Contemporary Culture” – In this Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture, photographer Martha Cooper shares some of her favorite photographs and discusses how she got involved in photographing contemporary culture such as graffiti writers
- “Conversation with 2024 NEA Heritage Fellows Fabian Debora and Rosie Flores” – Chicano muralist Fabian Debora, in a shared interview with fellow 20024 NEA Heritage Fellow Rosie Flores, discusses the impact his culture and personal history have had on his art.
- Debora’s page on the NEA’s National Heritage Fellows site includes links to a video about his work and an additional interview.
- “Making Sense of Ancient Graffiti” – Rebecca Beniel explores the historic graffiti revealed during the excavation of Pompeii
- “Candido Portinari’s Murals” – João Candido Portinari, son of Brazilian painter Candido Portinari, discusses the murals his father painted at the Library of Congress.
Planning travel either here in the U.S. or abroad? Make a plan to visit these museums:
- If you’re in the Washington, DC area, plan a visit to the 14th Street Graffiti Museum or check out the murals at the DC Alley Museum
- Miami: Museum of Graffiti
- Netherlands: Visit STRAAT museum for street art and graffiti
- Can’t travel? Check out this virtual program from the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Gallery
For more on historic graffiti:
- The Ancient Graffiti Project provides a digital resource for learning about the graffiti of Herculaneum and Pompeii
- Visit The Graffiti House in Brandy Station, Virginia to learn about preserving Civil War-era graffiti
- Learn about the Historic Graffiti Society’s ongoing efforts to preserve historic graffiti in Washington State
- The UK’s National Trust includes resources about historic graffiti found at National Trust sites