Bronx museum explores graffiti's controversial place in history

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of New York in 1927 that, “the restlessness … approached hysteria.” 

He could have said the same of New York in the 1970s: the markets were crashing, the buildings were burning, the drug wars were growing. And amidst it all, furtive figures wearing gas masks and carrying cans of spray paint, would “bomb” subway cars — writing graffiti on trains. They ran the gamut from an individual leaving his tag in permanent marker to a crew spray painting a mural across multiple subway cars. 

Graffiti writing was the visual manifestation of hip-hop culture, which developed in the South Bronx in the 1970s. 

It has always been controversial. 

Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York, called graffiti a “quality of life offense,” likening it to pickpocketing and shoplifting, in the hip- hop documentary Style Wars. But graffiti also has had its defenders, who describe it as art, an expression of identity for people who are locked out of mainstream culture. “What is seen as chaotic or dangerous, is actually democratic dialogue,” says Sergio Bessa, director of programs at the Bronx Museum. “[There was] this exhilarating sense of freedom — the city was a canvas.”

Forty years on, graffiti has become part of the urban iconography, and while not encouraged, it no longer exists in the realm of outlaws either. Graffiti has been appropriated by commercial and mainstream culture, as well as in fine arts.

In its ongoing exhibit Bronx Lab: Style Wars, that opened on July 19, the Bronx Museum follows the course graffiti has taken since the 1970s, exhibiting works that explore graffiti without being graffiti themselves. The exhibition asks the question: what is style? 

It begins with Rigoberto Torres’ plaster cast of the graffiti artist Daze (whose real name is Chris Ellis), the archetypal graffiti artist of the 1970s, with his cans of spray paint and his mask. Also opening the exhibit is “Stop the War,” a mural on canvas by graffiti writers Tats Cru, the well known crew from Hunts Point, whose work has been featured in commercial and corporate venues.