Graffiti was always the most insurgent of hip-hop’s solidified pillars (emceeing, DJing, and breaking filling out the rest of the furious four fundamental practices). Only graffiti was wholly illegal to practice, the domain of outlaws from its inception, derided as vandalism. Its politically anarchic mode of writing and painting over private and state-owned property represents a self-determinative or self-dominative urge “from the sovereign state of the have-nots.”1 Still, over the past three decades, graffiti has found its footing in legal public, quasi-public, and private art spaces. From its origins of territory-marking, public commemoration, and hip-hop aestheticization to its solidified presence in graphic design, urban studies, and arts education, the form has been popularized and monetized for decades. This shift has generated public art, academic research, gallery shows, and community programs, but it also raises a question: What happens when graffiti is no longer on the street? A participatory art form risks becoming enclosed, its illegal origins still criminalized.
In Boston, nonprofit organizations like Rebel Cause and Street Theory are often contracted to work with local writers and artists for graphic design projects and murals. Co-founded by Liza and Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, Street Theory was named a City of Boston Mural Consultant in 2023, working alongside the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture to produce murals with longtime graffiti writers and street artists like Geo “GoFive” Ortega, Luis “Take One” Taforo, and Dr. Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs. Their affiliated nonprofit, Street Theory Collective, will soon open an art gallery and community space in Cambridge’s Central Square, which Liza Quiñonez noted will be “a dynamic space where artists and communities collaborate to explore and experiment with artistic expressions that create meaningful transformation toward collective well-being.”2
Alongside major commissions for building exteriors, street artists are getting more time to shine in spaces that have historically been reserved for fine arts. As part of Street Theory Collective’s welcome to Central Square this past July, the Wagner Foundation opened “From the Page to the Stage,” featuring sketches and a street-styled, mural-like, wall-sized painting composed by Gibbs, Michael Talbot, Ayana Mack, and SOEMS (Lee Beard). This followed the group show “AEROSOL: Boston’s Graffiti DNA, Its Origin & Evolution,” which opened first at ShowUp gallery in the South End in late 2024 before moving to BLKChip’s Seaport gallery in the spring of 2025. The exhibition presented an intergenerational cohort of contributing graf writers and uplifted the histories of crews like the X-Slaves (now the African Latino Alliance, or ALA). And now at Boston University, Victor Quiñonez’s solo exhibition “Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There)” is on view at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery through December 10, 2025. These shows represent nonprofit and private foundation galleries’ approaches to welcoming graffiti as legitimate art.
When I spoke to some of “Aerosol’s” exhibiting artists, Chepe “SANE” Leña and Timmy “Zone” Allen voiced an appreciation for galleries taking up their work. Lou Jones, a long-time street photographer based in Boston, also offered a positive appraisal of graffiti’s incorporation into gallery spaces. He articulated his understanding of graffiti as an “outlaw” means of expressing culture, community, and creativity. He added that graffiti is anathema to white art institutions, “because it is not derivative of European art forms—we don’t take it from the Renaissance, we take it from a much more creative place, so formal institutions resist it.” Just as jazz and rock-and-roll were once resisted but later incorporated into the mainstream, Jones argued, graffiti should be welcomed, too.
During a panel conversation recorded at ShowUp, Allen, Leña, and artist Barrington “VEX” Edwards reflected on an under-reported aspect of Boston’s graffiti history: In the 1970s, in the midst of Boston’s desegregation struggle, white segregationists spray-painted racist epithets and admonishments across the city and on its train lines.3 Black and Latino writers, and the graffiti movement which they built, responded in kind, tagging and piecing over epithets with their own names and messages. Thus, graffiti in Boston became a reclamatory practice, remaking racist mark-making into affirmations of identity and community.
The City of Boston’s Un-monument | Re-monument | De-monument initiative, implemented by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, made its own attempt at incorporating graffiti into public art via its support of “Spray It Loud,” an exhibition by first-time curators and long-time hip-hoppers Aaron Myers and Edward Galan of A Trike Called Funk. Myers and Galan submitted a proposal to combine their typical work—throwing participatory events that invite attendees, dancers, DJs, and aerosol artists to learn from one another and congregate in public—with a commemorative component, asking aerosol artists/graffiti writers to live-paint work.
Their temporary show at the Civic Pavilion on December 6, 2024, attempted to connect these works (twelve aerosol-styled, graffiti-influenced canvases on stanchions) and graffiti practice in general to hip-hop dance. The center of the show was a dance floor, with a DJ set-up manned by Galan while Myers encouraged attendees to take the floor if inspired. The show’s attendance downtown was engaged, but small; still, the works themselves invited everyday people and communities into the creative process.
As the other pillars of hip-hop were taken over by commerce, industry, and nonprofit activity in the late ’90s and early 2000s, graffiti was welcomed into legal and capitalized realms through a mural arts lens and institutionalized as street art.4 Liza Quiñonez, herself a long-time participant in hip-hop visual arts and graffiti spaces, offered in an interview this March that the City of Boston’s street art strategy “expands an artist’s opportunity to move from just graffiti and letters to … larger scale productions that expand the vision from just graffiti to murals and long-term public art.” From this lens, galleries, nonprofits, and the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture are offering graf writers a route away from criminalization, reinvesting in artists from communities that faced disinvestment just decades ago.
What Quiñonez highlights is a growing schism between illegal graffiti and legal street or mural art. Yet Arielle Gray’s past reporting in Boston Art Review challenges this dichotomy as false and raises questions about propriety and how Boston both incarcerates and venerates graf practitioners.5 Writer and theorist Sabina Andron’s Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City (2023) offers a counterpoint to Quiñonez’s rosy view that street art opens opportunities for graffiti writers, noting that millions of federal dollars were once spent on community murals in the very neighborhoods where graffiti had emerged, effectively funding muralism while criminalizing graffiti. This divide, Andron argues, scapegoated graffiti while professionalizing murals as acceptable art.
Graffiti’s capacity to commemorate and write people into places is radical power. Corralling this people-power may seem necessary to protect the sanctity of private property, but it limits what can be remembered, how, and by whom. It also runs antithetical to graffiti’s spatial logic: an ungovernable practice concerned with writing communities of color into and onto all places, disregarding notions of propriety, and moving this radical energy instead into governed, legible, sanctioned spaces.
