Graffiti Month: Take Me Back to the River
More images from along the banks of the Hillsborough River through downtown Tampa. Mostly from school rowing crews, but not all. Graffiti is not always what it seems at first glance.
“People in California and the Southwest were accustomed to walls filled with gang graffiti long before the New York subway variety emerged. Public sentiment had long decided, rightly or not, that gang graffiti was a harbinger of danger and crime, and the New York-style graffiti writers in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and El Paso kept the graffiti endemic to their cities at arm’s length. Gangs carried such negative connotations that the new breed of New York-style writers in these cities, while sometimes taking cues from gang graffiti in style and placement, carefully disassociated themselves from it, often having to explain that they were not gang members.” -The History of American Graffiti by Gastman and Neelon
“It’s a myth that all the writers were black or Hispanic. It’s b-s-. The truth of the matter is that graffiti was multiracial. Black, Hispanic, white – you didn’t care, and the guys who did it came in all colors.” -Graffiti writer TKID-170, from The History of American Graffiti
“Graffiti saved me from the gang life that I was going towards. In the neighborhood, you had to be down with the gang life, but with graffiti, that let the gang members say that I was doing my own thing, that I was OK.” -San Francisco graffiti writer TWICK, from The History of American Graffiti
