ALL BIG LETTERS: graffiti and its tools at Haverford College

Modern graffiti is usually dated to Philadelphia in the late 1960s, when teenagers such as Cornbread began writing their names across the city, with New York following within a couple of years. That puts its fiftieth anniversary in 2017, and the first exhibition of the year at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, just outside Philadelphia, takes the date as its starting point. ALL BIG LETTERS runs from 20 January to 3 March.

The curator is RJ Rushmore, editor of the street art blog Vandalog and a Haverford graduate of 2014. His angle is unusual. Instead of treating graffiti as a style to admire, the show treats it as a practice bound up with its equipment, and it starts from the two questions that people outside the culture have always put: why graffiti looks the way it does, and what it is doing on their walls.

Reputation as the engine

Rushmore’s answer is that nearly everything about graffiti, its look, its locations, its risks, can be read as an effort to build a reputation, and that writers do this above all by finding new uses for tools and inventing new ones. Getting a name up enough times, in enough places, to be known for it means taking risks, improvising and being resourceful. The show sits where three things meet: a feel for place, the thrill of something close to sport, and the hunt for fame. The paradox it keeps returning to is that writers want to be seen everywhere while never being seen at all.

The exhibition makes that argument with objects as much as images. On display are custom lock-picking kits made for opening the advertising cases in bus shelters, pipes of pressurised PVC loaded with paint, homemade markers, and a spray can with a bicycle mirror fixed to it so that the person using it can keep an eye on what is happening behind them. Each sits beside the kind of work it was designed to produce. The emphasis, as the gallery puts it, falls less on graffiti as art than on the craft of actually doing it.

Fifty years on one wall

The historical sweep is handled through photographs. Pictures of BLADE’s whole-car pieces on the New York subway in the 1970s hang close to shots of the Philadelphia writers GANE and TEXAS painting within the last few years, so that the distance between the first generation and the current one is visible at a glance.

More than twenty artists take part. Graffiti comes from FAUST, NTEL, CURVE, EKG, BLADE and Adam VOID. Stickers and other artefacts come from DB Burkeman, Evan Roth, Lee George Quiñones, Stikman, Loiq and Smart Crew. The photographers include Martha Cooper, Katherine Lorimer, who works as Luna Park,, Steve Weinik and Aric Kurzman, recording graffiti where it lives. Tools and interventions come from Jordan Seiler, whose bus shelter keys belong in exactly this company, Biancoshock, Fumakaka Crew and Egg Shell Stickers.

A short film made for the show by Peter English pulls some of this together, drawing on archive footage of Seiler filmed by Aymann Ismail for Slate and on Smart Crew’s own Smart Fools video, with music by Watermark High.

Around the show

The exhibition opened on 20 January with a talk and a reception. A curator-led walk through Brewerytown, the Philadelphia neighbourhood that has become a hotspot for street art, graffiti and sign painting, took place on 18 February, and Adam VOID ran a do-it-yourself zine workshop. The accompanying texts include an essay by Rushmore and another, “On Utility”, by the critic Carlo McCormick. The John B. Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities supports the show, and the college keeps a record of the exhibition online.