She walks down the alley. Her hand’s in her bag, fingers gripped around her brush. She finds the wall. Kneels, unrolls her handmade poster. Quick swipe of paste on the paper, another on the wall. The poster goes up, then she uses her bare hands to smooth the surface, fingers pressing the paper into cracks. Car lights splash. She turns her face away. Another quick layer of paste once the car is gone, then she’s off: brush in the bag, hat over her eyes. Back in the car, she cleans her hands without turning on a light. Sticks the brush in a baggie. Turns the radio up, checks the clock. 2 a.m.
It’s just another night in the life of a graffiti girl.
Graffiti has evolved from the tags of Taki 183 and Cornbread, which were remarkable in 1960s New York and Philadelphia, respectively, for their sheer abundance, and the bravado of the kids risking life, limb and arrest to get their name up.
Now on the street, you’re just as likely to see “masterpieces” as you are to see tagged names or initials. Today’s street art encompasses posters, paste-ups, altered advertisements, sculptures made of plastic bags, guerilla knitting and gardening.
And more and more, street art is the dominion of women. Elle recently ran a piece profiling female graffiti artists in New York. The New York Times published an essay proclaiming graffiti by women as an important tool of social justice, citing women’s street art during the Arab Spring.
Graffiti girls are having their moment. But for female graffiti writers, it’s about much more than a shift in popular attention. For women who make street art, graffiti is not a “movement” as the Elle article declared; it’s a lifestyle, a way of seeing and altering the world—and women are creating it for their own reasons whether anyone is paying attention or not.
Oakland, California artist and poet Angela Simione turned to street art as a reaction to the death of artist David Wojnarowicz, and the anniversary of her mother’s death. One night, she saw a white couch abandoned on the street: “I looked at it and thought, “That’s a nice, big canvas…” I kept walking but I kept thinking about the couch… I got about two blocks away and then turned around.”
Simione wrote a Wojnarowicz quote on the couch. “I needed to know I was alive and the only way to know it was to write,” she says. “Out in the open and on the street. The only way to know it was to say something.”
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Ah, gentlemen. I see we’re all here and on fire in time for the meeting. Shall we begin?
