The Ongoing Work of New York City Graffiti Writers During the Covid-19 Epoch

Abstract

In April 2020, the New York City graffiti cleanup program was suspended, and a moratorium was placed on the NYPD’s response to graffiti reports, in order to channel policing efforts toward the Covid-19 crisis. As a result, the city with its empty streets and closed essential businesses became an open canvas for graffiti writers. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter looks at the return of middle-aged graffiti writers after having been absent for decades. “The game” has changed. Through their experiences, I revisit a classic anthropological inquiry, how a person reads the unwritten. Rephrased in the graffiti context, how do graffiti writers re-read unwritten codes of conduct of New York City graffiti? In this ethnography, what we assume to be solitary acts of writing and reading names on New York City surfaces like walls, trains, highway overpasses, and billboards are very much grounded in the unwritten codes of conduct that are found in social interactions between graffiti writers, those on social media, “the city,” and law enforcement. I analyze the dynamic interplay between these in the act of reading. As becoming always happens in the middle, where the human subject is always under construction, always unfinished, I describe how inventiveness and plasticity might operate in the writers’ return to the New York City walls as they re-read the unwritten codes of conduct. Consequently, I touch upon the intricate problematic of how to live alongside, through, and despite the profoundly constraining effects of social, structural, and material forces during the contemporary pandemic.