Signs in the city. Urban narratives in words, images and identities

From subway cars to library shelves, graffiti writing has spanned decades and continents, evolving from an act of rebellion to become a visual language that is recognized and studied worldwide. There are numerous books that recount this transformation, from biographies and critical essays to exhibition catalogs and photo collections. In this selection - inspired by the themes of Museion’s current Graffiti exhibition, which explores graffiti as a lens for observing the urban landscape - we recommend three books that investigate this phenomenon from perspectives that differ in terms of style and setting, but are surprisingly similar in the subjects and emotional tensions they address.

Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude, London, Faber & Faber, 2005

This book tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white boy growing up in the Gowanus district of Brooklyn, in the 1970s. His parents deliberately choose to live in a predominantly Afro-American neighborhood to demonstrate that different ethnicities can live together. But they don’t achieve what they had hoped for. As Dylan rapidly finds himself isolated and bullied. His life changes radically, though, when he makes friends with Mingus Rude, the black son of a once-famous soul singer, who is also mad about Marvel comics and graffiti writing.
“The white kid and the black kid take turns playing lookout while the other tags up. Things are radically simplified: the white kid has stopped looking for his own moniker and been encouraged by the black kid to throw up his perfect replication of the black kid’s tag instead. DOSE, DOSE, DOSE. It’s a happy solution for both. The black kid gets to see his tag spread further, in search of bragging points for ubiquity, that bottom-line standard for a graffiti writer’s success. […] What’s in it for the white kid? Well, he’s been allowed to merge his identity in this way with the black kid’s, to lose his funkymusicwhiteboy geekdom in the illusion that he and his friend Mingus Rude are both Dose, no more and no less. A team, a united front, a brand name, an idea.” (New York Times article When Dylan Met Mingus By A.O. Scott Sept. 21, 2003)

Jonathan Lethem (New York, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His writing has appeared in magazines like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Since 2011 he has taught creative writing at Pomona College, in California, and divides his time between Brooklyn and the West Coast.

Paolo Parisi, Keith Haring. Story of His Life, London-New York, Prestel, 2022

In this second recommendation, Paolo Parisi creates a graphic novel of Haring’s life using reliable sources, especially the diaries he kept from 1978 until his death. The result is an intense and engaging tale that traces the artist’s childhood, his early obsession with drawing, his rise in the art world, and his social commitment, up until his tragic and premature death at just 31 years old.
Using only three colors - blue, red, and magenta - with no shading, and a visual language reminiscent of Haring’s hypnotic alphabet, Parisi captures the reader’s attention, plunging them into the 1970s and ‘80s world of New Wave New York, a time of massive cultural upheaval. A period that witnessed the birth of contemporary art galleries and new underground movements, including graffiti, of which Keith Haring was one of the leading exponents.
This high-tempo illustrated biography zooms in on the artist’s provocations and activism in promoting equality and social justice for LGBTQ+ civil rights and people suffering from AIDS and his fight against racism, violence, the use of weapons, and all forms of discrimination. Through his drawings and iconic figures - his Radiant Baby, “agender” silhouettes, and his Barking Dogs - Haring succeeds in communicating with the entire world.
Parisi’s aim is not only to pay tribute to the man and the artist, but also to share his desire of making art accessible to everyone. As Parisi himself writes in the introduction: “Art is for everybody. It must be public; it is not the exclusive property of private collectors or closed circles. Art reproduces itself in society.”

Paolo Parisi (b. Montepulciano, 1980) is an Italian illustrator and Drama, Art and Music Studies graduate, specialized in visual arts. His great loves - jazz and punk music, literature, contemporary art and graphic design - are reflected in his later works, where he tells the stories of iconic figures like Basquiat, John Coltrane, and Keith Haring. He lives and works in Milan.

Ulrich Blanché, Illegal. Street Art Graffiti 1960-1995, Munich, Hirmer, 2024

In Illegal. Street Art Graffiti 1960–1995, the catalog for the exhibition of the same name held at the Saar Historical Museum in Saarbrücken, the art historian and street art expert Ulrich Blanché offers us a historical-documentary approach to this art form. It is a journey that takes us back to the origins of the phenomenon in the 1950s, before graffiti writing became a global fashion.
Each chapter in the book examines graffiti and street art from different perspectives. Starting with the works that anticipated the mainstream wave between 1952 and 1974, it then focuses on gender issues in the world of graffiti artists, and finally analyzes record cover design and the strategic use of graffiti in the music industry.
To fully understand the reasoning behind the Illegal exhibition, here is Blanché in his own words: “Anyone missing originals in this show should be aware that they do not exist (any more) because they were deliberately not designed to be permanent. Illegal street art and graffiti are works of the moment and/or are bound to the spatial context of their creation. It follows that they do not belong in a museum, while their documentation, some of which was also created illegally and under spectacular circumstances, does. The merit of this exhibition is thus to provide an overview of the significant work, their history and their stories and put them in a historical context. Illegal avoids the usual narrative that street art and graffiti are a New York or Paris invention, from which walls in the rest of the world then proceeded to become colorful. Instead, it emphasizes developments and relationships that go beyond that context.” (p. 6)

Ulrich Blanché is a private lecturer in art history with a focus on street art and graffiti history at the University of Heidelberg.