My MICA schoolmate known as E-3, who chose this succinct configuration of characters for its sci-fi quality and graphic symmetry, liked to use plastic condiment bottles filled with paint to splatter his tag on the ground à la Jackson Pollock. The history of graffiti art is long and complex.Īs you might imagine, innovations in this ancient art form abound at art school. The Latin root of “graffiti,” graffio, means “a scratch or scribble.” Inscriptions and figure drawings by common people have been found on the walls of ancient ruins such as the Catacombs of Rome and at Pompeii.

This particular practice harkens back to graffiti’s ancient roots. Some writers incise their tags into the backside vents of air-conditioner units protruding out of apartment windows. Writers may also carve their words onto surfaces using a small blade, glass cutter, or other sharp stylus. A writer might have on their person, while prowling the streets for fresh surfaces to tag, several oil-based markers of various colors, a few prefab stickers, a can or two of spraypaint, and a range of nozzles for different line widths. and “Hello, My name is…” stickers before going out to bomb. Writers will also make prefab tags, known as slaps, writing their words on U.S.P.S. The media of choice among most writers are spray paint and oil-based markers. Taggers often work in small crews so one can watch for cops while others go to work on a freshly painted wall. Choose a handle or nickname, ideally one not too long or polysyllabic, as you’ll need to get your word up quickly and be gone. But because it’s criminal, don’t use your real name when tagging. It’s also political, a way of taking back the streets. Why would anyone want to tag? It’s a way of announcing yourself to the world, that you exist, that you were there. Graffiti art “pieces” (top row) and “fill-ins” (bottom row) in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District of Baltimore (2018–2022).

The urban landscape is the graffiti artist’s canvas, both for sketching (tags) and for larger masterworks (pieces). Pieces are the largest and most complicated designs that can fill up a whole wall with wild, interlocking compositions of cryptic scripts rendered in an array of vivid colors. Fill-ins tend to have a more bubbly feel to them. Tags are quick one-offs, made on the fly fill-ins, slightly larger outlines of the same single-line word, filled in with two or more colors. At art school in the ‘90s, they were de rigueur. Tags are the cryptic, one-word pseudonyms graffiti artists scrawl across mailboxes, signs, walls and other surfaces around cities and towns. In the late 1990s, I attended one year of art school at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore where it seemed like everyone I met had a tag.

Spray paint tags