Chicago Graffiti: Why Fight the Paint?

Invisible except to Blue Line passengers, a light blue “JOEY” scrawled between white angel wings once covered the rooftop of the Mega Mall in Logan Square. That was 1983, when the O/As, the Stylers, the Disciples and other gangs hung on every street corner.

Joey, a gang member of the Spanish Lords, died in the spring of 1983. He ran into an alley where a gang member was waiting with a shotgun.  

He died defending his gang’s turf.

“By 17 I had gone to seven or eight funerals, and I was just like, ‘Wow, is this my future?’” says Flash, who is now 40, and was one of the first to paint in the streets of Chicago. Faced with the opportunity to join a gang in his teens, he chose graffiti. “At that age I was thinking, ‘When is it my turn?’ That’s why I gravitated toward graffiti so much. There isn’t death in it. You don’t pay dues to anyone. You just paint.”

The gang graffiti that dominated the ‘70s gave way to the bold and colorful artwork of graffiti crews. One of the first crews survives today as the Artistic Bombing Crew (ABC), which was founded by Seen and his then-neighbor, BboyB.

“JOEY” was the second and last of the crew’s “gang banger walls,” memorializing gang banger friends killed by members of an opposing gang. A few weeks earlier, “GEORGIE,” another gang banger friend, inspired the first. After a drug deal, his friends heard that Georgie had been rolled in a rug and sent through a garbage disposal. Georgie’s cousin and fellow gang member since age 14, Lemonhead Lewy, left the gang when he learned of his cousin’s death.

“After he was murdered, I went back to the neighborhood to tell them I was done,” says Lewy, now 43. “When you quit, they want to do damage to you or kill you, so I was in hiding for five years.”

But before he left, he paid for some paint and asked his friends in the ABC for a favor. A brick wall was chosen for the first gang banger wall, in orange and brown on a white cloud. Lewy also paid for the paint for “JOEY” before skipping town.

“I was part of ABC and we just did that. We didn’t know them personally,” says Scorpio, one of three who painted the Mega Mall roof. “If you know somebody and you want him to rest in peace, I’ll paint for you. If you have a wall and permission, we’ll do it.”

But the real start of Chicago graffiti came before the gang banger walls, when Angel Perez defected from his gang in Chicago, took a bullet in the knee and left for New York City. Returning in 1979, he called himself “Seen” and introduced a host of ideas for art in the Chicago streets, even painting gang banger walls for Joey and Georgie a few years later.

The impact graffiti had on Chicagoans was unprecedented. “There was nothing better than seeing their faces the morning after fresh paint went up,” says Flash. “Painting [their] names—that just propelled us.”

Since then, the graffiti scene has expanded from the few writers in the ‘80s to include everyone, from middle school-age kids to middle-aged graphic designers. Flash is a mechanical engineer and Tsel attended Columbia College and is opening his own art gallery. Rude, another of the first graffiti artists, has been painting with his 10-year-old son for five years.

As the original, “Old School” Chicago artists are nearing 40, new generations are emerging and styles are blending. Erex, a 17-year-old writer from the western side of the city, is part of a new generation of high school-age graffiti artists. Where the Old School style used by ABC and older artists is prized for its skilled lettering, the newer, “Wild Style,” like Erex’s, emphasizes color and technique over legibility.

Though some writers, like Risk and Trane, use tie-dye colors and peace signs to support the anti-war movement, graffiti wars happen once every year or two. But unlike gang warfare, injuries rarely occur. These are wars of talent. Writers talk to each other on online Internet forums, such as MSN.com and ABC’s web site, posting photos of others’ work and complimenting each other.

Wars concerning piecework, or elaborate artwork that consumes an entire wall, seldom happen because writers honor others’ time and taste. The unspoken rule: if you paint over another writer’s work, what you produce must be better than what you covered.

“With the gangs you’re out there protecting your neighborhood and retaliating against other crews,” says Lewy. “But the graffiti guys were out there to do their artistic talent, to do pieces. Graffiti crews would retaliate just by drawing. They wouldn’t fight hand in hand; they would fight by doing better painting.”

More common than piecework wars are tagging wars, which happen once every year or two when a member of one crew has a personal issue with a member of another. Almost every graffiti artist begins his or her career as a tagger, or someone who writes his or her name on store windows, telephone booths, train cars and other visible public places. The easiest way to get attention from an experienced graffiti artist, or an invitation to join a crew, is by “bombing” the city, or tagging as much as possible in one night.

Friends often join different crews (though reluctantly), creating a web of all generations and races. This network of graffiti artists is considered one of the “four elements” that have defined hip hop culture since the early ‘80s, along with rappers, break dancers and DJs. Much cross-over exists between the elements, and many rappers started out as graffiti artists. BboyB break dances and paints.

Though Graffiti artists’ first goals were to differentiate themselves from gangs, crews borrowed ideas from gangs to identify themselves as writers. In wearing jean jackets with graffiti on the back panel, they mimicked the sweaters worn by gang members with gang colors and logos. Chicago writers also adopted gang members’ habits of crossing out and rewriting a disliked person’s name upside-down on a wall or window—which never happened in New York City’s and others’ graffiti movements.

“This was our environment,” says BboyB, who co-founded ABC with Seen. “We tried to separate ourselves from the gangs, but you end up doing the same things. It’s now become a part of Chicago culture.”

But unlike gangs, crews never used graffiti to mark imaginary boundaries or create territories. Graffiti is a culture that creates art with a purpose.

“Graffiti is letter forms. It’s an art,” says BboyB. “It’s about a word. A letter. An identity. It comes from a name, or something that’s attached to a person. It makes you famous without having the fame.”

While graffiti artists color Chicago, city officials coat every effort in “dooky brown” — Tsel’s name for the tan color sprayed by the city’s 14 Graffiti Blaster paint trucks to erase writers’ work. Less often, Mayor Daley’s Graffiti Blaster program, begun in 1993, will use one of the 13 “blast” trucks to wipe off paint with baking soda under high water pressure.

“I can spend 16 hours over two days in a weekend, and in 12 seconds I can watch that machine cover everything in brown,” Flash says. “But then it becomes just another canvas and it’s easy to put something new on it.”

In addition to the dooky brown punishment, Chicago charges writers with a felony and the highest fines in the nation for illegal work – up to $1,000 and jail time for a repeat offender. Because piecework is almost always done on permission walls, only tagging, which is done on public property, creates a legal problem. Because tagging is only necessary for a beginner to be noticed, many established artists, who now have families, less free time, and more to lose from getting caught, are tagging less and spending more time with “permission walls.”

“I’ll watch a wall for a couple of months, see it painted over a few times in dooky brown, and then ask the owner of the store, ‘How would you like to not have to tell the city each time the gangs come?’ and I show my portfolio,” says Flash. His job in ABC for the last five years has been scouting for permission walls this way.

Once a crew has permission, as many as 15 writers contribute, adding their own names and illustrations to the wall. Each “production” has a general theme, such as a cave with stalactites, that each writer paints around or incorporates. After a couple weeks, the writers will return, let the building owner know they are part of the crew with permission, and cover the wall with a fresh layer of artwork.

The style is constantly evolving, from the gang influences of the Old School technique, which emphasizes legibility, to the European and Wild Style techniques, which take pride in their illegibility and letter shapes.  

The Mega Mall roof has since been coated in a fresh layer of tar, but “JOEY” has already infected generations with the love for graffiti culture. The reasons for graffiti writing never changed; it is a source of talent, respect and camaraderie without dues, guns, punishment or initiation rituals. It provides a skill and an alternative to gang life.

“In many ways, graffiti saves people’s lives,” says Tsel, who has been featured in and is now opening an art gallery. “It saves you from whatever you could have done. I could be doing 50 years in prison for something, but painting gave me an opportunity to be an artist. It gave me something in my life that was positive.”