BreakPoint WorldView » January 2009

Funny how the places we find the expression of the creative spirit aren't always where we expect: On bridges and pylons, on fences, by junkyards, in the industrial neighborhoods, in the places where the poor people have to live, you can find artistry, serious work by serious people whose only crime is their medium—spray paint. These are the graffiti writers. (Alex Neth)

To be recognized as a graffiti artist, you have to start by tagging a wall at least six times a week. You wake up at 2 a.m. to hit up the side of an abandoned building, train car, or a freeway overpass. It’s sometimes dangerous, often difficult, and always exhilarating.

It’s what used to get Chicago native Milton Coronado up in the wee hours of the morning. It’s what helped him suppress the ache of a broken home life. It’s what gave him a voice.

“Urban youth just have a message to say to society,” he said. “[They] lack something in their life that their home should be supplying, so they seek it outside on the street.”

For Milton, that was certainly true. His mother left his family when he was just five. As a child, crayons and paintbrushes gave him solace. But, as he crossed the line into adolescence, he needed something more—he needed a family. At first, he found it in the junior Latin Kings, then as a part of a tagging (graffiti) crew. Each time he sprayed his name up on a wall was a mini victory.

GRAFFITI WORLDVIEW
Graffiti, albeit typically negative and illegal, has always been a medium for sending a message. The ancients of Ephesus used it to advertise services for prostitution. In Pompeii, Italy, it is preserved in the forms of curses, magic spells, declarations of love, alphabets, and literary quotes. In the 1940s, as a symbol of America’s strength during World War II, GIs left scrawlings of “Kilroy was here” in their wake. Twenty years later, New Yorkers pioneered modern graffiti, and it soon became one of the four pillars of hip hop culture.

In this context, graffiti has become the outcast’s voice to the world. Part youthful idealism, part selfish bravado, it espouses a “me” worldview that gives a voice to the voiceless.

“When [urban youth] throw their name up on a wall, they’re throwing up to be recognized,” Milton explained. “It’s a way to get attention. It elevates them; puts them in a place of self glory.”

In the case of one Virginia teen, it became an outlet for his budding anarchist agenda. In 2004, Washington D.C. residents began noticing a strange image popping up on prominent traffic signs, against store buildings, and on trashcans—the stenciled face of a young man and one word--“Borf.” A year later, police uncovered the man behind the mystery: a young man named John Tsombikos. His friend, nicknamed Borf, had committed suicide and that name and face had come to be a symbol for John for all he considered bad in the world—the state, capitalism, globalization.

Beyond self-glorification, it can also be a territory marker for gangs. For them, their graffiti must be readable enough so that competing gangs know whose turf they’re on. For example, in the DC metro area, it is not uncommon to see scribblings of the notorious Latino gang “MS-13” (Mara Salvatrucha). Other common gang names that often pop up in graffiti include "D St," (Diamond Street), "TCG” (Tongan Crip Gangsters), and "sXe" (Straight Edge).

But belligerent gang graffiti is not made of the same metal as the masterful “wild style” designs of seasoned graffiti artists who transformed the urban landscape from L.A. to Chicago to New York over the past 30 years.

In the nineties, while working alongside several graffiti gurus, Brian Bakke, the former director of an art ministry at an inner city Chicago church, gained entre into an L.A. train yard, a veritable graffiti museum where budding and expert artists could perform daring feats, like hanging upside-down underneath expressways, to show off their work. According to Brian, those who could pull off such artistic and physical maneuvers were considered gods among their peers.

Unlike sketchy “throw-ups,” which take just a few minutes to complete, “wild style” murals are intricate works that can take as long as three days. Unlike the obvious messages scrawled out in gang graffiti, the brilliance behind “wild style” is in its illegibility. Most examples of wild style need a key to unlock—keys as complex as ancient Mayan and Celtic scripts and hieroglyphics.

Despite its impressiveness, wild style is still vandalism. In the late eighties, New York City declared war on subway graffiti. City watchdogs lathered train walls with spray paint resistant lacquer. Graffiti artists responded with everything but spray paint—markers, shoe polish squares—and hit up the windows instead of the walls. Then, they turned to etching instead of painting.

“Graffiti kids have amazing creativity,” Brian explained. “[They’re] very bold, fearless, and they have a message, they just have to be redirected.”

That’s just what happened for Milton. After his father died in a tragic car accident seven years ago, Milton, then 21, gave up graffiti art altogether. Four years later, he met two pastors who showed him that his artistic talent was a gift from God. Urged on by their support, he took his artistic flair back to the streets, this time legally, and with a Christian message.

In July 2005, he secured permission from a park in St. Louis to do a mural that read “Impact Your World with Jesus.” He invited local taggers to help him. As they worked on the mural, Milton shared his faith in Christ. As a result, one of the guys told Milton he wanted to become a Christian.

“That was a big wake-up call for me,” Milton said. He realized, “I can really serve God with this!”

With encouragement from the pastors, Milton started a full-blown graffiti ministry.

“Legally, if you see some graffiti on a wall, you talk to the owner of the wall and ask if we can clean it over,” Milton explains. “Cleaning it over” is just white-washing it. “Then, we ask if we can paint a mural.”

Usually, he has to show the owner a simple sketch of the mural he wants to create, usually something with a Christian message. If the owner is opposed to something explicitly Christian, Milton will suggest a mural with a generally positive theme. For example, peace or unity.

He asks members of his church, Hinsdale Filipino-American Seventh Day Adventist Church, and members of other local churches to pray with him for the outreach. Then, he invites members of local street tagging crews to participate. If local taggers contribute, they won’t have an incentive to tag over it.

Sometimes they pass out flyers. Sometimes local taggers just come. The music, food, and drinks usually help.

TRANSFORMING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE
More than a decade earlier, Brian had tried something similar. Although his mother was an artist and his father a pastor, Brian never thought to put the two together. Not until he found himself working at Uptown Baptist Church in a neighborhood that vied for the attention of multiple rival gangs, a place where as many as six kids could be killed in the same week.

“It dawned on me there that there was this huge and growing subculture that really needs to be communicated with,” he said. The only problem—graffiti kids are naturally mistrustful of adults, particularly white adults.

One day, after three years of breaking up fights, Brian finally found what he needed to gain their trust—a long wall enshrouded in gang graffiti. But to clean it up and paint over it would have been a virtual death sentence. Then, he met the local president of the Latin Queens. Although she initially mistook him for a cop, he convinced her that all he wanted was to paint over the wall. She told him she’d look into it.

A week later, she came back with an official report from the Latin King Nation (LKN) that Brian could do his thing and they wouldn’t touch the mural.

The next three days involved a near run-in with the local police force, an opportunity to share the Gospel with at least 40 members of the LKN, and a gigantic wild style of “Peace” spelled out across the entire wall (see slide show). They did a second mural, this time with the help of the gangs. In an attempt to show the members what they were doing to each other, Brian based this mural on Genesis 4: “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil.”

Instead of continuing to fight over the wall, gangs started protecting it. Over the next few years, Brian and his crew organized many more murals, including an 80-foot-long depiction of the prodigal son and Jesus in blue jeans and boots. According to Mark Jones, a pastor at Uptown Baptist, community residents saw these murals as “beacons of hope.” Children and elderly members of the community began contributing to the murals. Some residents began picking up trash and creating city gardens. And some of the original graffiti kids took their creativity to the big leagues, like one who went on to work for Disney.

And gradually the intersection of Sheridan and Sunnyside began looking a little less like the hood and a little more like a real neighborhood.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Christ plays in many places. In sports, music, and literature. Why not in graffiti?

“Why shouldn’t you pray for and consider this?” Brian asked. “Simply this, graffiti is everywhere.”

Zoe Sandvig is a staff writer with PFM, featured regularly in Inside Out and Jubilee magazines, as well as The Point blog. She has also been published in the Washington Times and WORLD Magazine.

Terms

• Tag: signature; usually a taggers nickname
• Bomb: to paint many surfaces in an area
• Piece: a large, labor-intensive painting
• Top-to-bottom: a piece that spans height of a train car
• Throw-up: larger than a tag, smaller than a piece
• Wild style: complex, colorful, intricate pieces; usually difficult to read

Photos used with permission. In slide show, photographs 1 and 2 by Brian Bakke. Photographs 3 and 4, as well as the cover image, by Richard Herard.