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An Undercover Look at Letterform Archive’s Graffiti Collection
For the past five years, our library of graffiti zines has provided a rare snapshot of an underrepresented art form and the dynamic community that sustains it. Graffiti writer and type designer Kel Troughton discusses his role in assembling the collection.
In many ways, graffiti is letterform innovation in its purest form. Its practitioners—known as writers—are constantly inventing new ways to depict the alphabet and its combinations, developing intensely personal styles while pushing the boundaries of legibility. Similar things are said about calligraphy, lettering, and type design—all of which fill design collections—and yet graffiti is commonly separated from these traditional crafts, and often ignored by museums except for work broadly defined as “street art.”
In 2020, led by Collections Director Kate Long Stellar, Letterform Archive recognized this discrepancy and looked for ways to increase the representation of graffiti in our collection. We were fortunate to be already connected with someone who was part of the culture: Kel Troughton. A friend of the Archive since its beginning, serving as a volunteer and then a Type West instructor, Kel has been an active participant in the Bay Area graffiti community for two decades and helped us invite in a world that is famously secretive and skeptical of established institutions. Our partnership led to three initiatives: building a permanent graffiti collection at the Archive (2021–2024); the exhibition Subscription to Mischief (2023), co-curated with Greg Lamarche, David “Chino” Villorente, and Kate Long Stellar; and the show’s catalog.
I sat down with Kel to revisit these unique curatorial projects and learn what it means to give graffiti its rightful place in a letterform repository. — Stephen Coles, Associate Curator
Graffiti Zines of the 1990s
Hardcover, 7½ × 9⅝ inches, 320 pages
Stephen Coles: Talk about your role in the project. How did it start and what were you responsible for?
Kel Troughton: I came in as the curatorial consultant responsible for developing this new collection of graffiti material alongside Kate Long Stellar. There was some discussion about what the material would look like, and I was at first convinced that purchasing piles of photos from photographers or graffiti writers around the Bay Area would be a good use of the time and space available. But Kate pointed out that Letterform Archive doesn’t hold photographs as much as it does printed material. And so our focus shifted toward building a big reference library of some really rare and special books that are significant to the graffiti writing community. A lot of these are small-run, out-of-print art books from twenty to thirty years ago. Filling the Archive’s shelves with those was a big part of the project, but my own personal focus was on bringing in graffiti magazines.
Before teaming up, Kate and I were both advocating for collecting graffiti, believing that it deserved more substantial representation at the Archive. We developed a plan: I would work to bring in material, catalog it, and contextualize it. Since graffiti is very much its own insular, pretty criminalized world, and it doesn’t fully translate to the type and lettering communities, it made a lot of sense that someone with a graffiti background could best represent the art form.
Collecting, educating, and bringing people into the Archive were some of the main objectives. We also dug into what terms are used by the graffiti writing movement and how to label work, and I shared this vocabulary with the staff, too. Terms can be really important to the graffiti writing community, and also to librarians who want to present the work correctly.
SC: So the Archive’s graffiti collection has books and magazines, and I understand there are maybe some posters or prints as well.
KT: Yeah. There are a decent number of posters and prints that help tell the writing community’s story. I was already buying this stuff as a personal collector, so once I started working with the Archive, it was really easy for me to help find the next new print or zine.
One amazing addition to our collection came from a friend who has since passed away, Hybrid TCI. He brought in a series of posters during a research visit that showcased images of the best freight trains his crew painted each year. They did this for a handful of years, and these posters have ended up being one of the best documentations of freight train writers in North America. From his telling, there are only a few people who have the full set. Hybrid also lent us a vintage spray can for the exhibition, and he was a huge supporter of the Archive, not just the graffiti collection.
All images in the gallery below are hi-fi captures. Click an image to enter fullscreen view, then click or pinch to enlarge.
Eventually, I started inviting people to come in and see the work, and that was pretty exciting. I reached out to people who are really important in the graffiti story, like Greg Lamarche, an East Coast writer with deep roots in the community and the creator of Skills magazine, an important early graffiti zine first published in 1992. I knew him from when I interviewed him in the mid-2000s for a blog.
Coles: As you say, it was really important to bring some of the writers into the Archive. Did those visits result in other things being offered or collected?
KT: Totally. The older generation had a lot of books in mind for us. They were like, “Oh, do you have this one? Oh, you need to write that down.” Eventually, that led to people telling other people, who would bring huge boxes of graffiti magazines for the Archive. So, we have this amazing stuff from these really wonderful people that writers are already excited about. And in the margins or in the ads of the magazines there are little handstyles by those people. It was great to get to share those details with the next group that would come for a research visit. We captured all that information in the collections database, too. I geek out about provenance (an object’s history of custody, which I learned about from my librarian friends here), and I think others in the graffiti community do, too.
Coles: To your point about how special it is that a lot of these things are here, where do people usually see these kinds of materials? Are there other institutions that have them? Are they accessible?
KT: I’ve heard of some institutions or libraries that have specific collections. Cornell’s hip-hop collection has 250,000 items, many of which include work by significant individuals in graffiti, such as PHASE 2.
Not many other places I know are collecting at our scale. There’s the Munich Graffiti Library doing amazing work. Their collection is similar to ours, in that they’re trying to get everything that’s already been documented — books and magazines, but also photos and sketches.
I think if you want to see a collection like this, you need to befriend someone who has been involved with graffiti for a really long time, cares deeply about this kind of letter work, and has spent a lot of their life collecting it — writers carry on the history themselves.
SC: Are there any other experiences that you had hosting these research visits that stand out to you?
KT: Yeah, I will say as our collection got big, maybe in 2023, I really focused more of my time on inviting people to come see what we had. And, generally speaking, people were so excited that there was an institution that was interested in collecting the stuff that they care about.
While we were working on the exhibition’s accompanying book Subscription to Mischief, we were scrambling to ID these magazines that were made in the ’90s that came out of San Jose, but we had no idea who created them. Then these writers came in who had painted there during that time, and they were like, “Oh, that’s by so-and-so. I’m going to set you up right now, and they will come in next week.” Every time someone came in, we were able to ask these kinds of questions, and the historical context continued to get filled in by the writer community. That was a super cool experience.
SC: We get that experience with any kind of tour or visit at the Archive — we learn from our guests, many of whom end up being specialists in a certain area. They may know a lot that we don’t know, or recommend stuff we don’t have. But I imagine that’s especially true for the graffiti community because of how uncommon and localized some of these things are.
KT: Yeah, it was really special when graffiti writers from older generations wanted to share their collections. It was awesome to have them bring them in.
We received a couple of drawings from a friend of the writer Kzam GTB, a really great graffiti writer in San Francisco and the South Bay who had died some years before. In the piles of magazines that someone brought us, there were a few sketches by Kzam on lined paper. And the person who shared them was like, “Why don’t you take one of those and put it in the Archive?” This kind of thing feels super important, and we were honored to be the place that could house things like that. Moments like that were happening all the time.
SC: How many objects are originals like that sketch?
KT: The Archive probably only has 15 or 20 original drawings that were purchased or donated. The vast majority of the collection is made up of printed works, like rare zines and books. There are also graffiti writers who are selling works on paper, and we did support some of them by getting their work for the collection.
SC: I draw so many parallels to the typography and design community. There are definitely things in the collection that people know about through the history of type — like a Gutenberg Bible leaf or a medieval manuscript — but they haven’t seen outside of a textbook. So it’s a similar vibe, just within a different discipline.
KT: I totally agree.
I’ve studied these graffiti books and magazines since the late ’90s, back when we still had Tower Records. Tower was an incredible resource for someone like me, as it gave access to an amazing magazine catalog. So I have been studying these letterforms for a good chunk of my life, and I haven’t stopped.
When I learned about the Archive, I was like, “Oh, wow, people are doing that same kind of studying, but with type stuff.” They’re not just reading about type in textbooks: they’re studying the actual letterforms on original type specimens. That was super exciting. I was like, “Whoa, this is the studying I like and that I’m already trained for. I’m going to obsess over these letterforms, too.”
I tell this to people a lot, but I wanted to go into type design because it’s where the people most interested in detail were — the people who cared about these forms, stared at them all day, and needed to collect more, find more, and learn more about them. A lot of us in graffiti writing were already doing that, so the Archive was a safe space for the same kind of activity.
SC: And I think a lot of people who are outside of the graffiti community would not recognize that — that there’s that same level of passion in both spaces. Why do you think that these worlds of graffiti, calligraphy, lettering, typography, and graphic design haven’t overlapped more? Or, do they already overlap, and each community just doesn’t realize it?
KT: I think they do overlap in a lot of ways — the studying, the ways of learning, the obsession, and the traditions. One difference between the two is the legal consequences of graffiti, but writers believe in the work and are part of a movement. They are part of a tradition, from the kids painting on the subways in New York to to the worldwide movement it has become.
I think that the bigger difference between graffiti and graphic design is more about class, in some ways. For me, the access I had was to graffiti writing. I think there are a lot of people who got into this art form who didn’t really have money to study design. And not everyone had a computer at home. So, type design wasn’t necessarily the most accessible field. If it had been, I probably would have been more into type earlier in my life, but graffiti was a more attainable access point to the practice of studying letters.
Our work at the Archive helps to bridge these two groups of people, and tries to teach them about each other in a way that is really rewarding. I always brought out lettering manuals, showcard books, and type specimens to show my graffiti writer guests, and Kate continues to share graffiti zines and books with the graphic design students and designers who come to the Archive. That work is never over, but I think as time goes on, more institutions will want to be able to learn from and talk about the graffiti writing movement.
SC: So how does the exhibition Subscription to Mischief relate to the graffiti collection project?
KT: Early on in my work at the Archive, I reached out to Greg Lamarche. He’s an incredible graffiti resource and one of my favorite artists in a lot of different letterform-related mediums. That’s why one of the first things I did was ask, “How do we get Greg involved?”
All images in the gallery below are hi-fi captures. Click an image to enter fullscreen view, then click or pinch to enlarge.
When we first started talking we were mainly talking about his graffiti zine Skills.
Graffiti magazines are really important to me, but they’re important to me because they’re important to every graffiti writer. As far as I’m concerned, most of the best pieces were painted in the ’90s, and the regional styles of that era are well documented in these magazines. So our collection is a good time capsule for those of us who care about the ideas of the time.
At the Archive, I was very focused on magazines because they are the way you tell the story of this art form, from the people within the community.
When I reached out to Greg and said I needed all of Skills, he was stoked. Then we started talking immediately about his idea for pitching Skills as some kind of museum show.
That was a big, exciting moment. That idea became the Archive’s exhibition Subscription to Mischief, which Greg co-curated with Kate, David “Chino” Villorente (another East Coast writer, author, and curator), and myself.
The curatorial team was amazing. Greg and Chino were the experts who have been participating in and documenting the culture for decades, Kate was the voice of the Archive and reason, and I got to be somewhere in the middle with a foot in both worlds (graffiti writing and typography). I feel incredibly lucky to go from being a teenager learning about an art form from magazines at Tower Records, to being able to work with some of my favorite writers to document how important graffiti magazines were in influencing the style of letterforms today.
SC: How do you hope people will use the collection? And who do you hope uses it?
KT: I have high hopes that you, Kate, and any of the docents are continuing to mix in some exciting books from the graffiti collection with the rest of the graphic design you show the public.
The exhibition was a really good start in helping the graffiti community find out about this amazing organization, and I hope to see that continue. I hope there’s a way to make the collection more visible, like more events or lectures about graffiti to help the community know that these things are here and that they can come to see them.
Anyone can schedule a free research visit, and you can even request specific things that you’re interested in. If you know you want to see graffiti writing from the ’90s, we have a pretty awesome collection, or the Archive librarians can just pull a lot of cool stuff from different regions.
We think that the work we did bringing in graffiti writing to the Archive is a substantive step toward respecting this amazing community. As an outsider to the art form, Kate did a lot of incredible work. Seeing her handle these items just like all the other things in the collection is really cool, and it’s been great to have an advocate for graffiti writing in the organization.
So please — go see Kate and check out the graffiti materials. Dig in, take photos of everything, snoop around, and ask what other stuff the Archive has. That’s what I have been doing since 2016, and I feel really honored to have helped add to the collection.
Kel Troughton is a type designer, a lettering artist, a graffiti writer, and an educator living in Oakland, California. As a curatorial consultant at Letterform Archive from 2021 to 2024, he advised on collection acquisitions, hosted public events, and led education initiatives on graffiti-writing history. Kel was a co-curator of the 2023 exhibition Subscription to Mischief and a consultant on the upcoming publication of the same name. He runs an experimental type foundry called Overlap Type and documents graffiti and other letter-based work.