Step outside in any city, and you’ll likely see graffiti everywhere. Often reflecting political tensions, cultural shifts and personal stories, it was born from a need to claim space, protest and be heard. Originating in 60s New York, young artists from marginalised communities turned to scrawling on subway stations and trains, demanding to be seen in a city that tried to erase them. Across the Atlantic, London’s graffiti scene exploded from punk and sound system culture, favouring speed and repetition over style with crews like DDS, with artists like Tox, Fume and 10Foot. Graffiti is a living archive of urban life, capturing the pulse of a city, and in recent years has transcended its vandalism label to become a radical form of storytelling and resistance, and influencing global youth culture. It is an act of defiance finally getting its recognition in changing the course of art history, largely due to artists including Blade, DAZE, Futura 2000, Keith Haring and Lady Pink.
At Museion in Bolzano, Italy, a new exhibition titled Graffiti, curated by Ned Vena and Leone Radine, reframes graffiti’s past and future. The exhibition is a critical reckoning with how graffiti has shaped – and continues to shape – the culture of cities, youth and art itself. Central to this phenomenon is the invention of the spray can in 1951. This fast and accessible material transformed every wall, train and alleyway into a potential canvas.
“When I think about the culture of graffiti, I think about how it connects people from very diverse backgrounds,” Brooklyn-born graffiti artist, DAZE explains as we sit in the central piazza in Bolzano. “The illegality of it, its origins, it has this inherently political nature. Even if you’re not political yourself, the act of doing something uncommissioned makes it political.” He continues to explain that before he picked up a spray can, he was just like any other curious kid, wondering: Who did that? And why? “Then I met people who were actually going out and painting,” he says. “They answered some of my questions, but I ended up with even more. Before I knew it, graffiti had taken over my whole life.”
In New York, crumbling infrastructure, racial injustice and economic abandonment largely impacted marginalised African American and Latinx youth who were navigating that chaos and turned graffiti into a language of survival. The exhibition traces this arc across two floors of the museum. The exhibition guides visitors through a visual timeline from the spray can’s invention and early graffiti artists from the downtown NYC scene, including works by Seen, Zephyr, Dondi White and Blade, to graffiti’s complicated embrace by the contemporary art world from collaborative works by Martin Wong and LA2, Jenny Holzer and Lady Pink to Heike-Karin Föll and René Daniëls. The rest of the exhibition explodes into an imagined cityscape, showcasing films including Chantal Akerman’s documentary film News from Home (1976), which consists of long takes of locations in New York City, capturing how graffiti subtly reflects the urban atmosphere and silent expression that underpins the film’s meditative tone. Free-standing utility boxes and NYC bins scrawled in graffiti by Klara Lidén present graffiti not as something frozen in time, but as a living, breathing force.
At the heart of Graffiti is a tension that has always defined the movement: the push and pull between graffiti as fine art and graffiti as an act of resistance. “What I hope this show does, first and foremost, is inspire young graffiti writers,” curator Ned Vena explains. “I want them to recognise that graffiti isn’t just a subculture. It has massively influenced the world of art.” By placing graffiti into the museum, Graffiti confronts a long-standing prejudice: the idea that only certain forms of expression deserve preservation. For too long, fine art institutions ignored graffiti’s urgency and complexity, and often its beauty, because it was messy and uninvited. Yet this perspective doesn’t acknowledge that urban spaces and cities are not made of clean lines and pristine surfaces – they are moving, shifting environments.
Artists like Lee Quiñones understood this from the start. His subway car murals weren’t just artistic statements; they were public cries for recognition. Artists like Blade, Lady Pink, and contemporary artists including R.I.P. Germain and Clayton Patterson continue to prove that graffiti has an important cultural contribution to make, as vital today as it ever was. Drawing on London’s secret weed markets to show how graffiti becomes a coded survival strategy in a city where visibility can be as dangerous as it is necessary, R.I.P. Germain worked with street artists to create Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars (RA(CG)E) (2024), a free-standing shopfront with its shutters drawn down, graffiti covering its face.
The work challenges the societal structures that shape underground economies, exploring “false fronts” of buildings that appear to serve one purpose but function as something entirely different. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Josephine Pryde’s model train weaves slowly through the exhibition space, with life-like renderings of British Rail carriages from before privatisation in Great Britain, covered in graffiti. “The graffiti on the train acts as a kind of filter, it’s a layer through which you view the piece,” Pryde says. Armando Nin’s delicate candle soot canvas works speak to graffiti’s long history of resourcefulness. His ghostly, fragile markings recall the earliest instincts of graffiti writers to scratch and burn their names into existence, using whatever materials they could find. Nin reminds us that graffiti was never about permanence; it was about surviving erasure.
Today, spray paint is just as vital to youth culture as it was 50 years ago. Across the UK, from London’s tower blocks to Bristol’s abandoned factories, graffiti remains a visual protest, a coded language, a way of claiming space in a city that still tries to police and push certain people out. Whether tagging in back alleys, making political murals, or building underground scenes, young people use spray paint to negotiate their realities. Graffiti at Museion isn’t about taming graffiti; it is an exhibition honouring its continuing legacy, in all its radical, contested glory. It’s about recognising that in order to understand a city, you have to read its walls.
Graffiti is now running at Museion in Bolzano, Italy, until 14 September, 2025.
