ABSTRACT
Contemporary “hip hop” graffiti—today the dominant form of public graffiti and illegal public art in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere—took shape some twenty-five years ago as a distinctly local and urban phenomenon. Emerging in the Bronx and other New York City boroughs as part of a home-grown hip hop culture, this form of nongang graffiti was developed by inner-city kids as a stylized system of subcultural status and street-level communication (Castleman 1982; Ferrell 1995a, 1996; Lachmann 1988). “Tagging” subcultural nicknames on walls and subway cars, painting larger two-dimensional “throw ups” and still larger, multicolored “pieces,” hip hop graffiti “writers” and the “crews” they organized illicitly remade New York City’s public spaces and public meanings.
