"The thing about walls is they became big murals": The rise of legal graffiti writing cultures

Abstract

Drawing from interviews conducted with 20 New York City graffiti writers and from unobtrusive observations, this paper seeks to rethink contemporary graffiti writing culture in two important respects. On the one hand, previous scholars have tended to explore graffiti writing as an illegal and criminalized (sub)culture. On the other, they have found it to be a practice that embodies a "critical" stance towards society. This paper shows that since 1990 a subset of graffiti writers who paint with permission has emerged, and that those who produce legal graffiti tend to lead lives and espouse values that most would not hesitate to recognize as "conventional." I conclude by suggesting that graffiti writing needs to be acknowledged as a multifaceted and historically fluid culture.