New generation of graffiti taggers hitting high-profile targets

LOS ANGELES — For many, it’s ugly vandalism plaguing the city. For others, in the right hands it can develop into an art form. It is used to mark gang turf and as a form of political dissent.

Graffiti has been a central part of Los Angeles for generations, a ubiquitous part of the cityscape that has withstood many attempts to eradicate it.

But LA’s graffiti culture is in the midst of a very loud and brash change.

Taggers’ traditional targets – walls, windows, street signs, lampposts, buses – remain their canvases. But some modern-day taggers are taking advantage of larger social media audiences and better-known audiences to make a name for themselves.

And the world is taking notice.

It started then last year taggers hit abandoned high-rises downtown and transformed the city’s skyline.

More recently they have moved west to some vacant areas Hollywood Hills mansions

“The reality is that it has become bolder, bigger and bolder,” said Bruno Hernandez, executive director of the STP Foundation, which gives artists with graffiti backgrounds new opportunities in the arts.

“The norms are changing,” he said. “It’s definitely evolving and it’s gotten bigger. You could say it’s more out of control than ever.”

The labeling of skyscrapers and mansions has received a lot of attention, both in the news media and on social media. And Hernandez and other graffiti experts say that may be the point. Bold taggers gravitate toward risky, high-profile locations where the chance of getting caught is low – such as abandoned buildings – and that can translate into social media credibility.

The journey from taggers who left their signature styles on street benches to the tops of skyscrapers didn’t happen overnight.

In the 1980s, tags on the sides of buses and buildings spoke of the burgeoning street art scene that many saw as vandalism.

After the 1992 riots, what was considered a good canvas for the street artist expanded beyond the city buses, freeway overpasses and walls of the LA River and local businesses.

It grew into the walls built around the burned city blocks by the riots. While graffiti artists at the time valued a degree of anonymity, they also liked the folklore aspect surrounding risking freedom and safety to spray paint their names and gain recognition, says Stefano Bloch, a former L.A. graffiti artist who now studies criminology teaches at the University of Los Angeles. 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 all over LA,” he said.

Arturo Gonzalez, founder of the East Side of the River artist collective, said graffiti was an escape for him in the 1990s while growing up in East LA. There was a time when he took it personally when someone tapped his murals, but now says that’s part of the artist experience.

“I don’t paint in wealthy neighborhoods with security,” he said. “I paint in the hood where eventually a kid comes by with a can and tags my can – because it will last longer than the beige wall across the street that gets polished every day.”

But in the age of social media, even work painted and covered by a disgruntled property owner can become permanent. And so the number of targets for today’s graffiti artists continues to grow, even though their motivation remains the same: fame.

“The downtown skyscrapers were perfect examples of space being abandoned by its owners,” Bloch said. “It became kind of a fringe space, and graffiti writers said, ‘Well, no one cares about it, but I’m going there.’ up there to paint my name for all to see”

Construction on the downtown Oceanwide Plaza high-rise began in 2015 but stalled, leaving the towers empty as a trio of naked canvases spanning an entire city block across from what was then Staples Center.

Some quietly noticed.

“It’s like most of the time you want to go big with your tags, and up there you can go as big as you want,” said a Los Angeles-based graffiti artist who stormed the towers and requested anonymity for fear of criminal charges. He agreed that social media has changed culture.

“It’s an important factor because you can’t just talk or describe a spray that is somewhere in the city,” he said. “You can show it to someone, and there are all the likes or hearts or whatever that comes with it.”

Even a New York-based graffiti artist heard about the towers from friends and made a trip to downtown LA to leave his mark.

Exactly who placed the first tag on the towers will remain part of the street lore, but in recent years Los Angeles has seen bright orange and green tags with giant letters appear across the downtown skyline. The buildings received international attention in February after a particularly successful run of taggers made the problem impossible to ignore.

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 as neighbors called it in a plague long ignored by the city.

Identifying and taking action on abandoned or neglected properties involves a lot of red tape, said City Councilor 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 think we need to work more effectively.”

Raman asked the city last year to look at streamlining how the city deals with neglected properties, but a final proposal has not been brought before the council for a vote.

Historically, the city has had 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 take a “broken window” 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 set up to tackle the issue was disbanded.

About a decade later, the city was still chasing taggers. In the summer of 2012, the city tried to impose a fine gang-like command about a group of artists who marked the LA River with a ‘graffiti bomb’. The case was eventually dismissed and one of the artists involved in the case, Cristian Gheorghiu, also known as Smear, was later on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Last year the Community Beautification Officewhich runs a graffiti abatement program for the city, has spent about $11 million to cover up about 32 million square feet of graffiti. The city has not provided information about where it cleans up graffiti, and police have declined interview requests on the subject.

In February, as images of the graffiti-covered downtown skyscrapers circulated around the world, Councilman Kevin de León asked the city to take action against the property’s owner, Beijing-based Oceanwide Holdings, a publicly traded company that had run out of financing for the project. Construction stopped in 2019. As the city sent police to clear the towers, $3.8 million set aside for fencing and hired security, it is unclear if any action was ever taken against the developer. De León’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

But the city went after the owner of the Hollywood Hills home, issuing a lien on the property and foreclosing on it in September after news of the tagging gained attention.

Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that more enforcement is coming in the form of a “citywide targeted nuisance abatement effort to address abandoned buildings with graffiti and other safety, public health and cleanliness issues.”

At the same time, mainstream culture seems to want to adopt elements of graffiti culture while breaking the cultural context that comes from the work or people.

Hernandez, of the STP Foundation, said he has received requests from at least one venture capital firm asking him to organize a team-building exercise through graffiti.

“I never really understood why they would want to do it. I think it’s great that they’re doing it,” Hernandez said. “To see a venture capitalist company from New York come in and learn how to make graffiti with spray paint – on a legal surface of course – I think is quite… super interesting.”