ABSTRACT
Graffiti marks and illuminates contemporary urban culture, decorating the daily life of the city with varieties of color, meaning, and style. In Denver, Colorado, as in other cities throughout the United States, Europe, particular forms of graffiti incorporate particularly different styles and meanings. Emerging out of Black neighborhood and street gang cultures of New York City, hip hop from the first incorporated new styles of music, dance, and graffiti. During the mid-1970s, neighborhood “Dis” like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and Grand Wizard Theodore provided music for house parties, on-the-street block parties, and other neighborhood gatherings. As the young practitioners of hip hop were constructing their own music and dance, they were at the same time inventing in their graffiti a new vocabulary of street imagery and visual style. By the mid-1980s, then, hip hop graffiti writing had spread not only through the boroughs of New York City, but to cities throughout the United States—among them Denver.
