A Peek Inside LA's Graffiti Culture

LA Graffiti Artist Apocalypse Chic

I expected to encounter glitz, nerve-shattering traffic, and the allure of my favorite hotel on last week’s whirlwind 5-day trip to Los Angeles. But I also got schooled in street art and its fascinating culture on the streets of a once-desolate downtown arts district. 

Political graffiti

I do see the embarrassing, bougie irony of paying money for a private guided tour featuring an art form whose appeal, if it has any, is in its perceived underground and illegal underpinnings. Nonetheless, we still hoped to experience something new. 

Now, Joe and I owe our budding appreciation for graffiti to a fast-talking, contagiously passionate tour guide named Kevin, aka Apocalypse Chic -- a career artist who turned his practice to graffiti once he got a taste of its culture and possibilities.

While I, along with most of the uninitiated, previously looked at graffiti as offensive visual pollution and a form of vandalism, a world of discovery awaits anyone open-minded enough to reconsider.

A snowman in LA

The first thing we learned on our tour was that some graffiti is sanctioned -- even commissioned by corporations -- and perfectly legal in LA and other cities as well. 

Graffiti crews are not criminal street gangs. And not all graffiti artists are kids with cans of spray paint. In fact, some of the artists whose works we saw are in their '70s and have been practicing for decades.

Today’s ubiquitous spray paintings cause most people to overlook this art form’s origins in ancient Egypt and Rome. Graffiti emanates from artists’ primal urge to claim public spaces with their names and their creativity.

Our tour included multiple sightings of just-painted
tags by the artist yuck.

The three main kinds of graffiti consist of tags, pieces, and throw-ups. New to all this, I still get confused between tags and throw-ups.

Most graffiti artists begin with tagging. “Tags” are simple markings intended to announce an artist’s presence to other artists. These artists are sometimes more interested in having dialogue with each other than with the public. This includes eradicating each other's work, as in the case of the prolific yuck (above). Yuck's fresh tags probably lasted less than twenty-four hours.

Section of a series of "pieces"

“Pieces “— short for masterpieces — are large-scale, intricate murals first seen in 1980s New York subway trains. Compared to tags and throw-ups, they take much time to create and often involve brush strokes instead of spray paint.

Finally, “throw-ups” are not vomit. Almost always done with aerosol paint, they are intentionally simplistic bursts that are “thrown up” on surfaces as quickly as possible. Throw-ups are “typically the writer's moniker in large ‘bubble-letters’ with or without a fill.” (I confess to using Wikipedia for clarification.)

A throw-up with fill on a dumpster

One last terminology lesson: “getting up” requires no urological intervention. It happens when a street artist climbs high to do his thing. Every street artist must at some point get up to gain the respect of other artists.

A few of LA’s graffiti artists include Shandu One, Size, Tempt, and Little Ricky. Not all of them work in paint. In fact, stickers were all over. Sticker graffiti is all the rage among street artists in Florence, Italy these days. 

An illegal yarn bomb

We also learned about “yarn bombs” -- displays illegally affixed to poles by renegade female street artists. I might have walked by these tiny knitted or crocheted creations without noticing. They are fascinating feminist expressions within a larger street art culture still dominated by males and misogyny. 

Apocalypse Chic told us that almost all artists working in graffiti accept its inherent impermanence. A surviving creation from 2019 is considered ancient. He insisted that it in no way bothers him when another artist or authority erases his art.

By Saturday evening, we were back in West Hollywood, anticipating our return to crisp fall Northeast Ohio weather and our beloved Xander and Link. But our ninety-minute tour in sweltering downtown LA forever changed the way we will look at street art that we always took for granted.

Sticker art behind bars