For many, it’s the terrible vandalism that is ruining the city. For some, it can rise to an art form in the right hands. It has been used to mark gangs and a form of political dissent.
Graffiti has been a central part of Los Angeles for generations, a ubiquitous part of the city that has endured many attempts to eradicate it.
But LA’s graffiti culture is in the midst of a huge and radical change.
The usual targets for tags – walls, windows, road signs, lampposts, buses – are always their canvases. But some of today’s brands offer large social media audiences and high-quality leads to build a brand for themselves.
And the world is taking notice.
It started last year when taggers struck the city’s high-rises, changing the city’s skyline.
Recently, they have moved west to several vacant Hollywood Hills homes
The graffiti-filled Oceanwide Plaza in downtown LA
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
“The truth is that it has become bolder, it has grown up, it has become bolder,” said Bruno Hernandez, executive director of the STP Foundation, which offers artists with backgrounds in painting new opportunities in the arts.
“Trends have been changing,” he said. “It’s really growing, and it’s grown. I guess you could say it’s a little more out of control than it used to be.”
The branding of high-rise buildings and mansions has received widespread attention, both in the media and on social media. And Hernandez and other graffiti experts say that may be the point. Brave tags are drawn to dangerous, high-profile places where the chances of getting caught are slim – like an abandoned building – and that can translate into a diplomatic compromise.
The journey from brands leaving their signature styles on street benches to the top of skyscrapers didn’t happen overnight.
In the 1980s, tags on the sides of buses and buildings spoke of a burgeoning street art scene that many viewed as vandalism.
After the 1992 riots, what was considered the proper canvas for the street artist expanded beyond city buses, freeways, and the walls of the LA river and local businesses.
It grew to include the walls that were built around the city blocks that were burned in the riots. While graffiti artists valued a certain sense of anonymity at the time, they were also fascinated by the mythology of risking freedom and safety in order to splash paint on their name and gain recognition, said Stefano Bloch, a former LA graffiti artist who now teaches criminology at a school. University of Arizona and wrote the book “Going All City: Struggle and Survival in LA’s Graffiti Subculture.
“Those walls became halls of fame for graffiti writers all over LA,” he said.
Arturo Gonzalez, founder of the artist collective East Side of the River, said that graffiti in the 1990s was his escape while growing up in East L.A. There was a time when he took it personally when someone tagged over his pictures on the walls, but now, he says, that it is part of the artist’s experience.
A man smokes a cigarette on an abandoned couch under a graffiti-covered wall in July 1992 in LA.
(Ron Eisenberg/Getty Images)
“I don’t paint in rich places with security guards,” he said. “I’m painting a hood where some kid will eventually pass by with a can and mark mine – because it will last longer than the beige wall across the street that gets hit every day.”
But in the age of social media, even a job painted and covered by a disgruntled landlord can be permanent. Therefore, the number of target characteristics of today’s graffiti artists continues to grow as their motivation remains the same: disappointment.
“The downtown buildings were great examples of the space left by the owners,” Bloch said, “It was this kind of space, and the graffiti writers said, ‘Well, nobody cares, but I’m going to go up there to paint my name for everyone to see.'”
Construction of the downtown Oceanwide Plaza skyscraper began in 2015 but was halted, and the towers sat empty as a pile of bare canvas that sat on the downtown lot across from what was then Staples Center.
Others silently observed.
“It’s like you usually want to be big with your marking, and then you go up to where you can reach the size you want,” said a Los Angeles-based artist who hit the towers and asked that his name be withheld for fear of facing criminal charges. He agreed that social media has changed the culture.
“It’s a big cause because you don’t just get to talk or, like, explain the spray that’s in a certain place in the city,” he said. “You can show someone, and there’s all the likes or hearts or whatever goes with it.”
Even a graffiti artist from New York heard about the towers from friends and made a trip to downtown LA to leave his mark.
Who exactly put the first tag on the towers will always be part of the story of the street, but in the past few years Los Angeles has watched as bright orange and green tags in large letters began to appear in the city’s skyline. The buildings received international attention in February after the markers successfully worked on the problem.
Volunteers remove graffiti from outside a post office on Van Nuys Boulevard at Haynes Street in Van Nuys on June 2, 2020.
(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)
Then some months later, another neglected, high-end building was struck, now a Hollywood Hills mansion surrounded by other multi-million dollar homes. Pictures of the colorful mansion were broadcast on the evening news while neighbors called it a long-overlooked blight on the town.
Identifying and taking action on abandoned or neglected buildings involves a lot of planning, said City Councilor Nithya Raman, whose constituency has mansions.
“This process is a long process,” Raman said. “I think this process is really broken, and I think we need to be more effective.”
Raman asked the city to look at how the city is doing after the neglected areas last year, but the final proposal has not yet come up for a council vote.
Historically, the city has had a love-hate relationship with graffiti.
In 2002, newly sworn-in LAPD Chief Bill Bratton said he would “make graffiti a top priority for all police officers” and take a “broken window” tagging approach – meaning police would target any visible crime in the area, no matter what. the youngest. But less than a year later, the secret service formed to deal with the issue was disbanded.
Nearly a decade later, the city was still following the markers. In the summer of 2012, the city sought to fine and impose a gang-like order against a group of artists who tagged the LA River with a “graffiti bomb.” The case was eventually dismissed, and one of the artists involved in the case, Cristian Gheorghiu, known as Smear, was later seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Street artist Cristian Gheorghiu in his East Hollywood garage studio on Feb. 25 2011. Gheorghiu, also known as Smear, was arrested in 2009 for allegedly participating in vandalism with the MTA marking team.
(Los Angeles Times)
Last year, the Office of Public Beautification, which is working on the city’s graffiti abatement program, spent about $11 million to cover about 32 million square feet of graffiti. The city did not provide information about where it is cleaning up the graffiti, and police declined requests for an interview on the subject.
In February, when photos of the city’s graffiti-covered buildings circulated around the world, Council Member Kevin de León called on the city to take over the property’s owner, Beijing-based Oceanwide Holdings, a publicly traded company that ran out of money for the project again. stopped construction in 2019. Although the city sent police to remove the towers, then put up $3.8 million for fencing and security guards, it’s unclear if any action was taken against the developer. De León’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
A street-level view from Hope and 12 streets of the iconic Oceanwide Plaza. A mural of Kobe Bryant is located in the Hope Street parking lot.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
But the city followed suit after the owner of the Hollywood Hills home, foreclosed on the property and foreclosed on it in September after the labeling issues came to attention.
In a statement, Mayor Karen Bass said the additional enforcement is in the way of a “targeted effort to eliminate nuisances throughout the city to address derelict buildings with graffiti and other safety, public health and sanitation concerns.”
At the same time, mainstream culture seems to try to incorporate aspects of graffiti culture while cutting off any cultural context from the work or the people.
Hernandez, of the STP Foundation, said he has received requests from at least one company that is a bishop asking him to take on the task of building a graffiti group.
“I never understood why they would want to do it. I love that they do it,” said Hernandez. “To see a venture capital company from New York come in and want to learn how to do spray painting — in a formal environment — I think … it’s very interesting.”
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