Graffiti's Origins and Radical Role Across Millennia

Much like music or architecture, the presence of graffiti is often so baked into a city’s fabric that people might pass by it without as much of a glance.

But the art of graffiti stretches across millennia, revealing the hopes, fears, joys, amusement and, perhaps most profoundly, the experiences of marginalized people. Tagging, one of the most common forms of graffiti—typically a simple inscription of the writer’s name, pseudonym or personal marker—has helped historians identify everyday people in antiquity whose lives might not have been otherwise recorded.

In the ancient world, particularly within the Roman Empire, the historical importance of graffiti is partly due to the lack of comprehensive census records. In Hatra, Iraq, for example, nearly 500 instances of graffiti markings—also called graffito—were found on walls, tombs and religious structures dating to around the fifth century. Places such as Pompeii, Jerusalem and Syria still house myriad inscriptions and engravings that detail everything from dirty jokes and poems to prayers and professions. Some writers were even in dialogue with others through either graffiti images or text.

Archaeologists have also gleaned information about the lives and conditions of enslaved and imprisoned people from graffito during this period. The prevalence of graffito is not only a way for people to be counted and remembered, but also influences how those in later generations reflect upon history. 

“Whether it's somebody in a prison and writing graffiti on a wall, all of those people are shaping the worlds around them in really powerful ways,” says Karen Stern-Gabbay, a history professor at Brooklyn College. “They might not think about it that way, but there is an impulse that you're changing and shaping the world around you, whatever level of agency you have in society.” Many of these ancient taggers were “often non-elites,” she explains, people who asserted a sense of power through their graffiti writing. 

In ancient times, tagging could serve as a form of self-promotion, allowing individuals to showcase abilities such as writing their own name when literacy was far less common and often limited to those of higher social status.

Graffiti has also long been used to amplify subcultures. In the 1950s and 1960s, many graffiti writings were inspired by Pachuco culture, a Mexican American youth subculture that emerged in the U.S. Southwest. Pachucos were known for their distinctive style—most famously the zoot suit and lowrider cars—as well as their slang, music and cultural identity. They helped expose broader communities to Mexican American culture, particularly throughout Los Angeles, that were pushed to the margins of society due in large part to discrimination. 

As their visibility grew, graffiti became more deeply embedded in street life and identity. Gang culture—and gang graffiti—intensified from there. Artists such as Chaz Bojórquez, who helped to define the art form as street art, had their symbols adopted by gangs. Tagging became a way for gangs at large to mark their territories in a manner that lends itself to graffiti’s defiantly self-important nature.

“We're egomaniacal, but we're also territorial,” explains Stefano Bloch, a graffiti writer, cultural geographer and associate professor at the University of Arizona. “There's something to be gained by saying, ‘I was here.’ And there's even something else to be gained by saying, ‘I was here, and you're not allowed to be here because I'm here.’" 

Gang graffiti was often hidden in alleyways and side streets, unlike the highly visible work that emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s from non-gang artists like Taki 183 and Cornbread, whose tags spread across public areas such as subways and freeways. By comparison, gang graffiti like Savage Nomads' and the Ghetto Brothers’ across New York City, spoke directly to a specific audience, conveying messages that often eluded the average passerby.

The association with gangs contributed to increasingly aggressive criminalization of graffiti in the 1970s and 1980s. While ancient graffito was often seen as “a sign of respect,” says Stern-Gabbay, cities like New York, under mayors John Lindsay and Ed Koch, regarded it as defacement to public property and took extreme measures to eradicate it. 

Around the same time, subcultures of then-nascent hip-hop and graffiti—largely led by economically disadvantaged Black, Latino and white people—began to merge in the Bronx. They were led by figures such as Fab 5 Freddy and Dondi, whose writings directly and vividly balked at the criminalization of street art. Due to the increasingly dangerous measures law enforcement would take to prohibit graffiti, such as adding barbed wire, taggers were creative in their efforts to “get over” on cops.

Female graffiti artists, such as Lady Pink, Claw Money and Charmin 65, contended with fraught social conditions through their art, while also challenging gender norms in the hypermasculine scenes of those subcultures at the time. Although both made significant strides to help magnify the voices of marginalized people, sexism and hostility were still rampant. 

As often was the case with graffiti writers, these artists and others represented people who were on the margins of property ownership. Graffiti particularly became a way for them to claim space, however illegally, at a time when many were facing the repercussions of gentrification. Meanwhile, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring helped bring attention to social issues such as the crack epidemic, AIDS, safe sex, colonialism and class struggle that disproportionately impacted these subcultures.

Social and political commentary persists in the 21st century in graffiti culture, though it has become less dangerous to navigate and is embraced by art galleries and art lovers more than ever before. 

For some, that presents a double-edged sword. Fewer arrests are universally understood as a good thing (low-level offenders in New York City can now avert potential jail time by taking an art class instead). But the fame and feverish mythology around figures such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey (who designed Barack Obama’s “Hope” poster for his presidential election) has some people asking whether the art has lost its edge.

“There's still those graffiti writers who are like, ‘That's not graffiti,’” says Bloch. “‘If you're not willing to be arrested for it and bloodied over it and you don't have to climb up on buildings in the middle of the night to do it, it's not graffiti. It's graffiti art or street art—or it's some other thing.’"

A similar thing could be said about referring to paintings as graffiti when, historically, graffiti indicates carvings. However you define it, the evolution of graffiti helps establish a greater curiosity around the people who shape different histories, even amid efforts to erase them.