“Just Another Color Of Paint”: Shifting The Way We View Graffiti In Seattle.

Three large names catch the morning light, printed in vibrant colors down the side of the old
Fisher Flour Mill on Harbor Island. The fourteen-story-tall silos have become a canvas for any
artist daring enough to make their mark, but underneath the colorful exterior lies a complex, often
unseen culture.

Graffiti, especially in downtown Seattle, has a complex story.

For some city residents, it’s a form of property destruction or a sign of delinquency. For others,
graffiti blends into the city’s noise, plastered on the roofs of buildings and the undersides of
bridges during our morning commutes. For some artists in Seattle, it’s a misunderstood, diverse art
form born from the experiences of marginalized communities, and a means of expression and
resistance.

Graffiti first caught Jordan Jones’ attention as a kid growing up in New York City, where she would
point out every piece she could see while driving through the suburbs. “To me as a kid, it felt
shocking, right?” Jones said, “Because they’re doing something illegal and kind of illicit
in that way, but they’re also making something beautiful and colorful.”

Today, Jones is an artist and the director and curator of the Jacob Lawrence gallery at the
University of Washington. Throughout her career, graffiti has influenced the way she views public
artwork. The cycle of painting, and then painting over the graffiti, she said, is almost like a
gallery.

Artists, Jones said, are often presented with a bargain. They can meet their audience more
immediately, and as she put it, viscerally, by avoiding the roadblocks of the art world. Or, they
can work through traditional avenues, which Jones says are often heavily influenced by race and
class.

“Certain artists find their way more easily through those systems and are given the skill sets and
toolkits to make those sorts of avenues more available to them.” Jones believes art should be
challenging, and while street artists like Banksy have been, as she put it, “bought into” more by
galleries, she doesn’t believe there’s anything intrinsic that sets it apart from other graffiti.

This is what makes graffiti so unique in her eyes. It’s detached from the often discriminatory
barriers in the world of public art. In her words, graffiti works because it brings the art to you.

This art form has created a unique, complex culture that Alec Iacobucci, a Ph.D. candidate in the
archaeology department at the University of Washington, says many people don’t understand. In 2019,
Iacobucci helped create a UW course focused on the growth and history of graffiti in Seattle.

Through the lens of this course over the past six years, Iacobucci has learned that graffiti
culture in Seattle is a cultural “twofold.” It’s an art form that is both available for anyone to
view and so insular that the average viewer will rarely, if ever, learn about the artists behind
the work.

“Graffiti is always against the rules,” he said. “So, they try to police it. Profanity and slurs
are really frowned upon, especially anti-Semitism and Nazi stuff. Any graffiti writer who’s worth
their salt will make a point to cover that up as quickly as possible, because that reflects badly
on the community.”

The raw, unfiltered nature of graffiti is exactly what drew Rafael Flores into the culture when he
was growing up in Seattle’s Central District.

Today, Flores is a professor of cinema at San Francisco State University, but his connection to the
changing world of graffiti and hip-hop has defined his perspective on art and media. In 2013,
Flores produced “The Blank Canvas,” a film in which over 100 artists were interviewed on the
hip-hop, art and graffiti scene, mapping, as he put it, the gentrification of hip-hop in Seattle.

Today, when Flores returns to a Central District he barely recognizes, he sees graffiti as a means
of pushing back against a changing culture.

Since 1970, the Central District has remained a striking example of gentrification, going from a
population of roughly 90% Black and African American residents to roughly 18% in 2020, according to
a map by The Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project. He believes graffiti in areas such as
the Central District is a direct response to gentrification, describing it as similar to the way a
graffiti artist might retaliate if another artist covers their work.

Graffiti and tags are “a way of protecting your neighborhood,” said Flores. “Gentrification is a
turf war, in essence, right? So it’s an expression of saying, ‘this is our neighborhood.’ Just
because you came and brought your corporation into my neighborhood, doesn’t mean that you own this s—, right? And so that’s an act of protest.”

Iacobucci says this extends to more than just the Central District, remarking on the rise of
graffiti during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as another example of artists’ reactions to
social, political and economic changes. “There’s political messaging, there’s individual, personal
messaging, there’s communicating with other artists. There is so much to it that is beyond just
public beautification,” he said.

It’s difficult for some artists, then, to reckon with the City of Seattle’s response to graffiti.
Each year, the city spends an estimated $6 million cleaning up graffiti, and in July of this year,
the City Council approved legislation that would charge people caught painting graffiti up to
$1,500, and hold them liable for cleanup fees.

This coincides with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s longstanding One Seattle Graffiti Plan, which seeks to
replace graffiti with sanctioned artwork. But, artists like Flores believe that this harms the
meaning of graffiti as a genuinely unfiltered art form. “If I commission a graffiti artist to paint
a mural,” said Flores, “then I’m the one who ultimately gets to decide what gets painted on the
wall.”

“I think it’s odd,” said Desmond Hansen, a West Seattle-based muralist and former graffiti artist,
“that it’s the most traditional art form that we have from the U.S., and yet it’s the one that, in
every city, they try to combat and get rid of.”

Hansen said that as long as the work is respectful and self-aware, it’s healthier to accept it as
part of our identity than to reject it. As he put it, “It’s just another color of paint.”

Jones believes much of that rejection comes from a lack of perspective–a perspective that she
thinks the city needs to change. “I think it falls in with broken window policing, and ideas of
what a ‘blighted’ neighborhood looks like. We need more visual vocabularies of what a city can be.”

To the majority of Seattle residents, graffiti is a footnote. A logo painted on an underpass, or a
name scrawled on a light pole during a morning commute. But, beneath the outer layers is a
community of artists who grow and respond with vibrant color to every change in their
ever-changing environment.

Flores believes graffiti can be a force for good.

It is “an act of defiance against picking up a gun,” he said. “It’s using art to create and to
mitigate conflict.

“If you want to lower crime rates, if you want to lower violence, then you must embrace these other
alternative forms of self-expression. Otherwise, we’re going to have no pressure valve to
release that pressure, right? And it will build up, and then eventually explode.”