SF/Arts Curator Insight

In the early 1980s, while helping a janitor retrieve items tossed onto the roof of a New York school building, teenage Greg Lamarche encountered the message "we don't need ladders." The multiple meanings behind that phrase became a dare, inspiring him to add his own contributions to the conversation circulating across the city's surfaces. In the early 1990s Lamarche began preserving this ephemeral art in Skills, the seminal graffiti magazine that anchors this exhibition. Classic zines, stickers, doodles, tags, and videos capture the style and energy of the era. My faves are the intricately illustrated snail-mail envelopes that delivered documentation of graffiti art from all over the world. During its heyday, the daily trip to Skills' mailbox must have felt like x-mas.