What was it like to work with city officials—people are supposed to be against “graffiti” or often tasked with preventing it? No one has been tasked with preventing graffiti. City workers usually remove it after it has shown up. The timing is such that now, whether because of budget cuts or acceptance of decades of graffiti, city departments are considering including writers as part of the community and implementing pro-art programs as anti-vandalism initiatives. Inclusion is always better than exclusion and adversity. Often these are people who are preventing revolutionary change, so for them to embrace it, there’s going to be a learning curve. I am hopeful the will to press forward overcomes the bumps in the road.

If you run an arts commission, public art department or visual arts organization in any US city, and you don’t know one thing about writing culture, you’ve got to consider that you are already behind the times, and are not the leading edge of taste-making or current art history. 100% of the time people are going to go to bat to preserve a Rivera, or Orozco, or Siqueiros mural in their hood before some Chihuly glass because their murals have more relevance to the people. Public artists must remember with whom they are communicating, and what they are communicating about.

Interview by Mark Harvey,

publisher and creator of Fluxion Magazine. Click here to view the digital issue of Fluxion IV.

45 www.artizenmagazine.com