The Rise of the Seventh Letter

Principal David Garcia couldn’t be happier. “I was a little nervous at first, because, well, it is graffiti,” he concedes. “But when I saw what it did for the kids — they are so well behaved and the grades are up. They know if they screw up, they can’t come out here and paint with these guys.”

Working with nonprofit organizations and property owners has gained The Seventh Letter access to City Hall. In an effort to change city officials’ attitudes toward graffiti, about 20 crew members met recently with Elizabeth Morin, director of Youth Arts and Education in the city’s Office of Cultural Affairs. It was a logical step after the successful “Movement: Hip Hop in L.A. 1980s to Now” event she hosted late last year that included a graffiti-art showcase of city writers and photographers as a way to bridge the gap between lawmakers and young artists. While Morin is personally a fan of the art form, she realizes the momentous effort it will take to change negative perceptions, and also knows what the writers themselves need to do to help accomplish that.

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• Shelley Leopold
• The Bronx
• Belmont (New York)
• Visual Arts
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“It’s part of the fabric of the city. It’s youth culture; it’s alive. I need to be very careful that we do the right thing here,” she says. “I would love to give the artists a place to paint, but there are still so many risks involved. Individuals who still live and behave in a certain way, making it difficult for both sides to get their point across.”

The risks and rewards are well known to the artists. “We have a crew etiquette, we avoid [historic] murals and glass etch — we’re not about flaming personal property or acting out of malicious intent,” says Saber, one of the crew’s most recognized painters. “It’s always about painting dope pieces and getting up. Graffiti is surrounded by an amount of manufactured misunderstanding. The color of the new world order is ‘Palomino beige,’ and 99 percent of the time, it’s a Caucasian individual getting uptight. There should be more yards — like Belmont, Motor, the River — they gave us a chance to practice and create a community.”

Admittedly, he’s not getting any younger and would like to see graffiti progress, maybe even to the point where it’s considered a planned part of the urban landscape, like design and architecture. “My job now as a graf artist is to work with people in developing the bigger picture,” he says. “AWR/MSK have been testing the modern environment for years now, and we’re just scratching the surface of possibility. I want to meet with city planners, architects, developers, and collaborate. I want to use these skills that I’ve built on the street as a viable resource. There is a huge amount of effort and skill that goes into what we do. I’ve risked my life.”

The city’s official stance on this kind of public art hasn’t moved much. All murals require lots of red tape, “irrespective of artistic content,” and along with that come size restrictions, not to mention that owners who have consented to have their walls painted but aren’t aware of city regulations can be fined.

Retna has been running legal walls (collaborating with private-property owners) for 10 years now, and while he admits to a bit of scheming to get those permits, he challenges the city to recognize the solution he offers. “When talking to a property owner about a space, I never once told them it would be graffiti I’d be painting on their wall,” he says. “I try to become the solution to their [tagging] problem. I try to make a culturally important piece for the neighborhood that no one destroys.”

He also believes there’s a disconnect between the importance of historic murals and the new ideas that a crew like AWR/MSK might represent. “I personally love the Eloy [Torrez, best known for the Dearden’s Furniture Store wall on Main Street] pieces, and Frank’s [Romero, ’70s Chicano muralist] stuff is beautiful,” says Retna. “But the youth can’t necessarily identify with them. They’re looking for name recognition, trying to get out there to say, ‘Believe in me.’ It became a graffiti free-for-all with the destruction of the yards — Belmont in particular unleashed it.

“There’s nowhere for kids coming up to get good. New ideas haven’t been allowed to flourish since the ’80s. We love our city, and it’s wrong to think that graffiti is out to destroy something. It’s just the opposite. Maybe it would result in better pieces if you don’t have to worry about getting shot at or sent to jail. But [in reality] a big part of the story is the ‘performance’ and the effort it takes to get your paint together and sneak out of the house, climbing stuff. The effort of what it took to get the art there, just for the recognition. It will happen with or without the city’s help. We’ve already been to jail and paid the fines.”