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Editor's Notes

• #2: I’m going to talk about the nature of graffiti, some challenges we have bringing it into our collections, and some ideas on how to go about it. I’m going to focus my talk on the urban graffiti writer not major street artists who have become part of mainstream pop culture because I want us to think about about local communities.
• #3: What is it? Identity, style, status, territory, ego; it’s art, it’s language, it’s global, it’s political, it’s social commentary; it’s a subculture, it’s ephemeral, it’s vandalism, and it’s a business.
• #4: Graffiti is illicit marks in which there has been an attempt to establish some sort of coherent composition…upon a wall or other surface that is visually accessible to the public. It is derived from the Greek word “graphein” meaning “to write”. And the Italian word, “graffito” meaning a drawing or scribbling on a flat surface, originally referred to those marks found on ancient Roman architecture.
• #5: Though it is considered deviant and criminal, the presence of graffiti can also indicate a group of people acting to legitimize their existence in a world where opportunities are little, where voices are suppressed. Writing graffiti is a surreptitious adventure, but that does not make these people’s lives and need for self-expression illegitimate. Whether in a sanctioned location or not, what do you have? Art. Thought. Language. Culture.
• #6: Inherently, graffiti is ephemeral—it does not last; it is a palimpsest—everybody has read/write access; it is pseudonymous—your identity is masked with an alias; and it is both legal and illegal. This photo is a picture of a building where tags and pieces have been painted over, emphasizing the ephemeral, palimpsest and illegal nature of writing.
• #7: Here are just a few basic terms used by the community: piece = graffiti mural, as in “masterpiece”, tag = a writer’s signature, throw-up = name painted with two colors, an outline, and fill; writer = one who does graffiti
• #8: More graffiti basics: flick = photograph of graffiti, bomb or bombing = to paint name in any form on many surfaces, paste-up = wheat-pasted design, blackbook = notebook or sketchbook for practicing, benching = writing on a freight, also called a rolling canvas.
• #9: You generally think of graffiti and graffiti writers as petty criminals. A lot of the time the name of the game is about trespassing and vandalism.
• #10: But graffiti has become mainstream enough for there to be many legal venues for it to thrive as an art form. Murals, community art projects and public art shows allow the writers to showcase their talents. The image on the left shows a giant exhibit that took place in abandoned housing projects across the river from downtown New Orleans. It was as much a show about discriminatory housing laws and practices over the past 70yrs as it was a display of spray can talent.
• #11: Memorials are another big subgenre of graffiti writing. This piece memorializes a high school kid shot in his school in New Orleans this past winter. This is a screen shot from a news report on TV.
• #12: Stencils and stickers are another subgenre of the graffiti world. They can be simple tags or carry a message that is amusing or political in nature, or both. The translation of the Arabic one is “Shut Up”, and the Spanish one means “I decide.” I interpret these both to be statements on sexual harassment.
• #13: Film, photographs, and books are the main media sources for documenting graffiti. It began with photojournalists Martha Cooper and Henry Califant’s 1984 book Subway Art. Today, it’s mainly all online: websites, blogs, social media. These efforts are often crowd-sourced, submission-oriented, international in scope. Mostly homegrown, these sites contain stories, testimonials, sometimes scholarship and are basically giant catalogs of graffiti from around the world. A few major websites also operate as businesses, selling supplies, publications and apparel.
• #14: Instagram has provided a new venue for the graffiti community to thrive. Instagram helps individuals maintain their anonymity and allows them to share their work and promote others. The post on the left is from the Instagram account of a New Orleans based-writer who recognizes that “graffiti needs documentation.” He goes on to say he will create his own zine in an effort to do so.
• #15: Over winter this past year a writer with the alias UZIT died at a young age. He was a sign painter in New Orleans and a graffiti writer. I followed the local writers’ online response to this loss and began to see #uzitarchive hashtags when someone posted a piece of his work. As we see, the graffiti community has found their own repositories of choice thru self-publishing and online public platforms. Should we wait until something like this comes to us or find ways to diversify the American record by including it?
• #16: Something that recently surprised me was the presence of graffiti on Google Street View; this is a screen shot of a building on Google Street View next to my own taken this year. I don’t know what can be done with this, but I’m putting it out there as an experimental way to look at graffiti and local communities.
• #17: But, despite the public accessibility of graffiti and street art, and it’s seeming lack of ownership, it has a legitimate place in the economy and claim by it’s community. We cannot ignore issues of copyright and trademark.
• #18: Collection development has to be strategic and well planned using a documentation strategy. That means targeted documentation of a specific community like the Downtown Collection at Fales Library at NYU or the Cornell Hip Hop Collection, or archivist-as-activist creating a collection like the NOLA Hip Hop and Bounce Digital Collection at Tulane University. But graffiti is a lot more than it’s connection to hip hop, target (with permission, as needed) websites (front and back end), social media accounts, hashtags, other media sharing sites like Flickr, photographers, artists, gallery owners and enthusiasts. No one is going to drop this stuff off.
• #19: Don’t be scared to wrestle with certain fundamentals in archival practice, such as description. Creator, won’t know. Dates, probably won’t know. Provenance—nope, most likely it will be an artificial collection. Format—very diverse. Further description needed: alias, associations (ie, crew name), location of piece, type of piece (tag, stickers, throw-up), format and media used, date of documentation, name of person documenting, brief description of piece.
• #20: Maintaining a collection like this is no different than any other. It’s a hybrid collection, but digital curation will play a greater role.