LOS ANGELES — To many, it’s ugly vandalism that blights the city. For others, it can rise to a form of art in the right hands. It’s been used to mark gang turf and as a form of political dissent.
Graffiti has been a central part of Los Angeles for generations, an omnipresent part of the cityscape that has endured many attempts to stamp it out.
But L.A.’s graffiti culture is in the midst of a very loud and brash change.
The traditional targets of taggers — walls, windows, street signs, lampposts, buses — remain their canvases. But some of today’s taggers are leveraging larger audiences on social media and higher-profile targets to make a name for themselves.
And the world is taking notice.
It began last year when taggers hit abandoned downtown high-rises, transforming the city’s skyline.
More recently, they have moved west to several unoccupied Hollywood Hills mansions
“The reality is that it’s become more brazen, it’s become bigger, it’s become more daring,” said Bruno Hernandez, executive director of the STP Foundation, which gives artists with graffiti backgrounds new opportunities in the arts.
“The norms have been changing,” he said. “It’s definitely evolving, and it’s gotten bigger. I guess you could say it’s more out of control than ever.”
The tagging of skyscrapers and mansions has garnered widespread notice, in the news media and on social media. And Hernandez and other graffiti experts say that might be the point. Daring taggers are drawn to risky, high-profile locations where the chances of getting caught are not so high — such as abandoned building — and that can translate to social media cred.
The journey from taggers leaving their signature styles on street benches to the tops of skyscrapers did not happen overnight.
In the 1980s, taggings on the sides of buses and buildings spoke about the burgeoning street art scene that many viewed as vandalism.
After the riots in 1992, what was considered a proper canvas for the street artist expanded beyond the city’s buses, freeway overpasses, and walls of the L.A. river and local businesses.
It grew to include the walls built around the burned city blocks from the riots. While graffiti artists valued some sense of anonymity in that era, they were also enamored with the folklore aspect around risking freedom and safety to spray-paint their name and gain recognition, said Stefano Bloch, a former L.A. graffiti artist who now teaches criminology at the 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 across L.A.,” he said.
Arturo Gonzalez, founder of the artist collective East Side of the River, said graffiti in the ‘90s was an escape for him while growing up in East L.A. There was a time he took it personally when someone tagged over his murals, but now, he says, that is a part of the artist experience.
“I don’t paint in wealthy neighborhoods with security,” he said. “I paint in the hood where some kid is going to eventually roll by with a can and tag my s— because it will run longer than the beige wall across the street that gets buffed every day.”
But in the era of social media, even work painted and covered by a disgruntled property owner can become permanent. And thus, the number of targets for today’s graffiti artists continues to grow even as their motivation stays the same: notoriety.
“The skyscrapers in downtown were perfect examples of space that was left abandoned by the owners,” Bloch said “It became this kind of fringe space, and graffiti writers said, ‘Well, nobody cares about it, but I’m going to go up there to paint my name for everyone to see.’”
Construction on the Oceanwide Plaza high-rises downtown began in 2015 but stalled, and the towers sat vacant like a trio of naked canvases occupying a full city block across from what was then Staples Center.
Some quietly took notice.
“It’s like you usually want to go big with your tagging, and up there you can go as big as you want,” said a Los Angeles-based graffiti artist who hit the towers and requested anonymity for fear of facing criminal charges. He agreed that social media have changed the culture.
“It’s a major factor because you don’t just get to talk or, like, describe a spray that’s somewhere in the city,” he said. “You can show someone, and there are all the likes or hearts or whatever that go with it.”
Even a New York-based graffiti artist heard about the towers from friends and made the trip to downtown L.A. just to leave his mark.
Who exactly put up the first tag on the towers will remain part of street lore, but over the last few years Los Angeles watched as bright orange and green tags with giant lettering began to appear in the downtown skyline. The buildings gained international attention in February after a particularly successful run by taggers made the issue impossible to ignore.
Then months later, another neglected, high-profile building was hit, this time a mansion in the Hollywood Hills surrounded by other multimillion-dollar homes. Images of the colorful mansion were broadcast on the evening news while neighbors called it a blight that had long been ignored by the city.
Identifying and taking action against abandoned or neglected properties involves a lot of bureaucratic red tape, said City Councilmember Nithya Raman, whose district is home to the mansions.
“This process is a long process,” Raman said. “I think this process is really broken, and I do think we need to be working more effectively.”
Raman asked the city to look into streamlining how the city goes after neglected properties last year, but a final proposal has not come up for a council vote.
Historically, the city has 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 officers” and taking a “broken windows” policing approach to tagging — meaning police would target any visible crime in a neighborhood, no matter how minor. But less than a year later, an undercover graffiti unit erected to deal with the issue was disbanded.
About a decade later, the city was still going after taggers. In the summer of 2012, the city sought to fine and place a gang-like injunction on a group of artists who tagged up the L.A. River in a “graffiti bomb.” The case was eventually dismissed, and one of the artists involved in the case, Cristian Gheorghiu, aka Smear, was later featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Last year, the Office of Community Beautification, which operates a graffiti abatement program for the city, spent about $11 million to cover up roughly 32 million square feet of graffiti. The city did not provide information about where it cleans up graffiti, and police declined interview requests about the topic.
In February, when images of the graffiti-covered downtown skyscrapers circled the globe, Councilmember Kevin de León asked the city to take action against the property owner, Beijing-based Oceanwide Holdings, a publicly traded company that ran out of funding for the project and stopped construction in 2019. While the city did send in police to clear the towers, earmarked $3.8 million for fencing and hired security, it’s unclear whether any action was ever taken against the developer. De León’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
But the city did go after the property owner of the Hollywood Hills home, issuing a lien against the property and fencing it off in September after news of the tagging had gained attention.
In a statement, Mayor Karen Bass said more enforcement is on the way in the form of a “citywide targeted nuisance abatement effort to address abandoned buildings with graffiti and other safety, public health and cleanliness concerns.”
At the same time, mainstream culture appears to be trying to co-opt elements of graffiti culture while severing any of the cultural context that comes from the work or the people.
Hernandez, of the STP Foundation, said he has received requests from at least one venture capital company that asked for him to host a team-building exercise through graffiti.
“I’ve never really quite understood why they would want to do it. I love that they do it,” Hernandez said. “To see a venture capitalist firm from New York come in and want to learn how to do graffiti with spray paint — on a legal surface of course — I think it’s kind of … super interesting.”
