Graffiti is the rough draft of political protest and self-promotion; it helps explain “speaking statues” (Mary Beard, Pompeii) wherein Greek. Roman, and American citizens vandalized statues to reclaim their civic voice. Lord Byron, Goethe, and the creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein were practitioners. The focus on Mexico and Los Angeles, by experts in the field of graffiti, promises to shed light on graffiti as political protest.
Getting Up, by Craig Castleman, launched the field of graffiti studies, as did films such as “Style Wars” and “Wild Style”. Foundational texts are by Christian P. Acker, Nancy MacDonald, Henry Chalfant, Jeffrey Ian Ross, Joe Austin, and Jeff Ferrell. Susan Phillips’ The City Beneath and Wallbangin’ demonstrated how graffiti reveals the suppressed history of Los Angeles; Japanese intern camp detainees inscribed graffiti on the walls; a weapons inspector wrote “Kilroy was here" on World War II bombs. Former graffiti artist Stefano Bloch was a homeless graffiti artist named “Cisco”, before he became a postdoctoral fellow at Brown. Bloch’s Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2019 with a blurb by Noam Chomsky. Too often scholarship focuses on North America, however. Our three scholars widen the focus to include Chile, Mexico, and Caribbean nations, an international approach I also took in Words of the Prophets: Graffiti as Political Protest in Greece, Italy, Poland, and the United States (Brill, 2023/ Haymarket 2024).
There will be 3 papers presented by experienced academics, from a range of disciplines.
Prof. Guisela Latorre (Ohio State) will speak on “Contesting the Corporate City Aesthetic: The Graffiti Takeover of Los Angeles’ Oceanwide Plaza”. She considers how “street art’s presence in the urban landscape often signals a disruption of the business-as-usual model that normally shapes the neoliberal city in the United States and elsewhere. Graffiti, in particular, functions as a criminalized signifier of urban blight, an exemplar of the deteriorating metropolis.” Prof. Ivor Miller (Boston University) employs a term called “urban marronage” to explain the massive Caribbean migration to NYC since the 1940s and the impact of Caribbean praxis in this metropolis. He shows how the particular aesthetic forms of the self-trained painters are reflected in specific examples of urban art. Prof. Ever Osorio (University of Pittsburgh) discusses the so-called “vandalization” of national monuments in Mexico City, in particular the graffiti intervention of the “Winged Victory,” commonly referred to as “the Angel” –“a 148 feet tall statue in the center of the most important avenue of the city– that took place during a day-long protest on August 2019 and that were rearticulated in 2025 during protests in different monuments and urban spaces. Women’s testimonial writing on the crisis of feminicide and sexual violence was one of the main elements that made this graffiti spectacular, for this reason an independent group of restaurateurs emerged to protect the graffiti from being removed before it was documented and archived by experts.”
This panel makes use of early, mid-career, and senior scholars, who have published book-length monographs on graffiti in the fields of Chicana studies, art history, women’s studies, and American studies: Aerosol Kingdom, Walls of Empowerment and Democracy on the Wall. The contribution of Latinx artists and women to graffiti has been overlooked; this panel contributes to a more diverse and cosmopolitan perspective (email with Prof. Susan Phillips, August 2025), one that responds to recent events "just in time".