Decoding the walls
What graffiti can teach us about our world
From the vivid murals of the Castleberry Hill neighborhood to the aerosol-laden walls of the Krog Street Tunnel, Atlanta is a city of street art.
“Whenever I travel in the U.S. and talk to graffiti writers and tell them that I live in Atlanta, they have huge respect” for the city’s street art, saysJulia Tulke, assistant teaching professor in Emory’sInstitute for Liberal Arts.
With scholarly interests that meet at the intersections of visual culture, cultural anthropology and urban studies, Tulke has long been drawn to the physical aspects of cities others may not notice.
“When I travel with friends,” she says, “I always go down alleyways because I want to take a photo of something. My friends are like, ‘What are you even doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Can’t you see?’”
At Emory, Tulke aims to illuminate the cultural and historical significance of graffiti writing for a wider audience. Students in her “Visual Culture” and “Graffiti and Public Art” classes study two collections at theStuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Librarythat showcase the art form.
She also co-organizes thePainted City Tour, which takes members of the Emory community and wider public to graffiti and mural hotspots around ATL. The free bus tours, which feature different artists as guest hosts, take place twice a year, in spring and fall. Antar Fierce, a graffiti historian, archivist and documentarian, hosted the inaugural tour last April.
Laura Asherman, director of the Ethics and the Arts Program at the Emory Center for Ethics, and Katie Ericson-Baskin, Ingram Director of Education at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, help organize the tours, which are co-sponsored by Emory Center for Ethics, the Institute for Liberal Arts, the Carlos Museum and theEmory Initiative for Arts and Humanistic Inquiry.
For Tulke, street art is never just paint on a wall. To learn about graffiti’s larger significance, one should start with the basics.
A door becomes a spray paint can on a back entrance of Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville neighborhood.
From the vivid murals of the Castleberry Hill neighborhood to the aerosol-laden walls of the Krog Street Tunnel, Atlanta is a city of street art.
“Whenever I travel in the U.S. and talk to graffiti writers and tell them that I live in Atlanta, they have huge respect” for the city’s street art, saysJulia Tulke, assistant teaching professor in Emory’sInstitute for Liberal Arts.
With scholarly interests that meet at the intersections of visual culture, cultural anthropology and urban studies, Tulke has long been drawn to the physical aspects of cities others may not notice.
“When I travel with friends,” she says, “I always go down alleyways because I want to take a photo of something. My friends are like, ‘What are you even doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Can’t you see?’”
A door becomes a spray paint can on a back entrance of Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville neighborhood.
At Emory, Tulke aims to illuminate the cultural and historical significance of graffiti writing for a wider audience. Students in her “Visual Culture” and “Graffiti and Public Art” classes study two collections at theStuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Librarythat showcase the art form.
She also co-organizes thePainted City Tour, which takes members of the Emory community and wider public to graffiti and mural hotspots around ATL. The free bus tours, which feature different artists as guest hosts, take place twice a year, in spring and fall. Antar Fierce, a graffiti historian, archivist and documentarian, hosted the inaugural tour last April.
Laura Asherman, director of the Ethics and the Arts Program at the Emory Center for Ethics, and Katie Ericson-Baskin, Ingram Director of Education at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, help organize the tours, which are co-sponsored by Emory Center for Ethics, the Institute for Liberal Arts, the Carlos Museum and theEmory Initiative for Arts and Humanistic Inquiry.
For Tulke, street art is never just paint on a wall. To learn about graffiti’s larger significance, one should start with the basics.
Graffiti has a long history
The urge to write or draw on walls has been around a long time, says Tulke.
Ancient cave paintings in France depict images of animals people saw every day.
In World War II, American soldiers peppered battle tanks and other spots with the words “Kilroy was here,” accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a man peeking over a wall.
These cave paintings of a now-extinct species of bison and other animals rendered some 30,000 years ago in France might be considered early forms of murals or street art, says Julia Tulke. Credit: Getty/Atlantic-kid
Examining graffiti from any era can teach us a lot, she says.
“We can look at when people are moved to write on walls, especially in moments of crisis, as a barometer of the political climate of the time. And we can look at the ownership of space and the politics of belonging and representation.”
Ancient graffiti peppers the sides of many excavated buildings in Pompeii, which was buried under many feet of volcanic ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Credit: Getty/FotoGablitz
Take “latrinalia,” which is a fancy way of describing what people scrawl in bathrooms.
Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, published a book about bathroom graffiti in 1935, entitled“Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary.”
“He had to self-publish,” says Tulke, because publishers considered the subject matter too crude to print.
Today, scholars laud Read’s work as critically important; it includes some of the earliest published references to terms coined by the American LGBTQ community.
Questions of taste and legality have always dogged critical conversations about graffiti. “People can look at it and categorize it as either art or criminal vandalism,” Tulke says. “But that’s the least interesting way of looking at it.”
She believes it’s more productive to approach street art with curiosity. “I tell students to think about creative practices like these as something that holds knowledge about what’s going on at a particular moment in time.”
These cave paintings of a now-extinct species of bison and other animals rendered some 30,000 years ago in France might be considered early forms of murals or street art, says Julia Tulke. Credit: Getty/Atlantic-kid
Ancient graffiti peppers the sides of many excavated buildings in Pompeii, which was buried under many feet of volcanic ash during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. Credit: Getty/FotoGablitz
Children were pioneers
A case in point is style writing, the bright, impressionistic lettering that many people consider synonymous with the term “graffiti” today. Practitioners of this form don’t draw; they write. Many examples of style writing are so baroque that many viewers may not recognize them as lettering.
This piece of style writing is one of many in Atlanta’s Mechanicsville neighborhood visited by Emory’s Painted City Tour in April. The abstract letters spell out the name of the artist, Sheva, a Southeastern style writer who is respected in the form. Photo by Antar Fierce.
Bright stylized letters in bright pastel purple, pink, green, orange and blue decorate a metal fence. They spell out “SHEVA.”, image
The practice was started in the early 1970s by teenagers and children, some as young as 10 or 11, living in Philadelphia and New York neighborhoods that were largely Black and Puerto Rican.
At the time, “you had urban environments that were very desolate and hopeless,” says Tulke. The nation’s manufacturing sector was collapsing, taking with it many working-class jobs. Meanwhile, white flight from cities had stripped urban neighborhoods of tax revenue and consumer spending. During this era, New York City experienced a severe financial crisis.
“And crises like this always particularly affect kids,” says Tulke, “because they find themselves suspended with no sense of a positive trajectory for themselves.”
This early example of style writing was sprayed on a subway car in New York City. Photo courtesy Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.
Young people began writing their names and simple drawings on the walls of buildings, treating the urban landscape as a “canvas for creative play and exploration,” she says. Soon, these young urban scribblers developed monikers like “Blade” and “Friendly Freddie” and began spraying these on the sides of subway cars.
In a 1971articleentitled “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” The New York Times interviewed a prolific graffiti writer who had helped seed the new trend.
“I don’t feel like a celebrity normally,” the 17-year-old told the reporter. “But the guys make me feel like one when they introduce me to someone. ‘This is him,’ they say.”
“This article really makes name-writing a youth-culture phenomenon,” says Tulke.
It helped inspire teenagers and kids around the city to pick up cans of spray paint. Style writing became inextricably linked with hip-hop, a musical form getting its start in New York’s Bronx neighborhood around the same time. In the decades since, both art forms have influenced culture and fashion around the world.
A style-writing inspired mural by Atlanta street artist Dr. Dax adorns ABV Gallery in East Atlanta.
A swirling collage of primary colors and pastels completely fills a brick wall. The words “Dr. Dax” are painted in small, cursive lettering in the upper right-hand corner., image
Murals and style writing adorn this wall on the south side of the CSX lot on Wylie Street, along the Atlanta BeltLine.
A wall lining a sidewalk and a two-way street is covered in stylized graffiti of many bright colors., image
The“MSK Wall”in Atlanta’s West End, the first stop on April’s Painted City Tour, offers an example of style writing’s rich sophistication and diversity in Atlanta. Each section of the façade was painted by a different style writer in the MSK Crew, a loosely organized group of graffiti artists active in Atlanta and other cities across the country. Photo courtesy Ackerman & Co.
The facade of a warehouse is brightly decorated with graffiti-inspired murals created by different artists, image
Rose Library archives help tell graffiti’s story
The Rose Library houses about 1,500 photograph slides of many of the earliest instances of style writing, taken byJack Stewartbetween 1970-78. Stewart, a classically trained artist born and raised in Atlanta, was captivated by New York’s graffiti.
Jack Stewart captured this photo of New York City style writers in 1972. This and other early images of style-writing graffiti culture are housed in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.
Stewart’s estate also entrusted the library with his PhD dissertation, “Subway Graffiti: An Aesthetic Study of Graffiti on the Subway,” which street artists refer to as “the Bible.”
The Rose Library houses Jack Stewart’s dissertation, which is considered the earliest scholarly engagement with style-writing graffiti. Pictured here are drafts and an MTA bus schedule belonging to Stewart.
Anothercollectionfeatures photos of Atlanta graffiti taken by H.J. Parsons in the 2010s.
When Tulke’s students see the photos and slides for themselves, they “always remark on how [style writing] is not just something that appeared and was kind of fully developed at birth,” she says, “but something that really became a collective process of aesthetic development.”
The Rose Library materials help students learn “how to look at walls as a repository of information,” Tulke says. “That’s what graffiti essentially is. It’s kind of an archive in its own right.”
Celebrating Atlanta’s public art scene
Strolling down many blocks in Atlanta these days yields views of colorful murals and daring style writing.
Tulke asks her students to also look for what she calls “civilian graffiti” — non-stylized scribbles left by everyday folks in public places. And she directs students’ attention to artwork inspired by street art, like the mural created especially for Emory by Senegalese graffiti pioneer Docta. The piece, which traveled from theCarlos Museumto Oxford College Library, now hangs in Callaway Memorial Center.
“I invite my students not to think about graffiti as just a thing that exists elsewhere — you know, a cool [piece by famed graffiti artist] Banksy that just went up in London or something,” she says. “Instead, I ask them to reconsider their own environments and look more closely. I think we are so much better off when we do.”
