A New York Graffiti Legend Is in Clarion Alley This Week
It’s Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco’s Clarion Alley, and eight girls are hovering over a folding table scattered with paint pens. Discussing a mural design for an adjacent wall, they hatch a plan to paint “San Francisco,” surrounded by symbols that represent the city.
Nearby stands Lady Pink, a legend in the New York graffiti and street art scene, who’s here to mentor the young girls on the mural. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lady Pink was the first woman in graffiti to make a national name for herself, and in the process carved out space for other women in the male-dominated field.
Today, she’s lending her skills and expertise to the students of Graffiti Camp for Girls as they take on their first mural-sized project.
“It’s important to hand down our craft to the youth,” Lady Pink tells KQED in the alley, during a break “They don’t teach mural painting in schools so much. They teach painting, but they don’t teach mural painting. So, we’ll get a big wall and we’ll let the kids express themselves in a giant size.”
Once the mural is completed, it will be unveiled at an event on Friday, June 19, from 4–5 p.m. in Clarion Alley. Lady Pink, who starred in the groundbreaking 1982 hip-hop film Wild Style, will be present for a meet and greet.
Now in its 10th year, Graffiti Camp for Girls is led and founded by Nina Wright, known as local artist Girl Mobb. Her goal is to equip young girls with street art skills and the basics of spray painting safely, with respirator masks, while giving them the space to create public art.
For 16-year-old participant Aaliyah Garcia, the camp offers her a crucial outlet as she continues to “expand her creativity.” Though she has been drawing and painting for as long as she can remember, she had no experience with spray painting prior to this week’s session.
“I’m excited to have my art up in the world for everyone to see,” Garcia says. (The mural is scheduled to stay up in Clarion Alley for at least five years.)
After a few days of participants getting the hang of graffiti basics and learning new skills with lettering, Lady Pink arrived Wednesday to offer insight on large-scale painting. Her role, she emphasizes, is to push young people in the right direction rather than influencing their art.
“Kids love to paint big, they love to paint in the street,” Lady Pink says. “They don’t like to run from the police nearly as much as we did.”
While Lady Pink came up in an outlaw era of unsanctioned graffiti, the opportunity for today’s youth to utilize “permission walls” and learn to express themselves is “absolutely priceless,” she says.
“I love to see the confidence and the growth in the kids when they do something,” she adds.
After just a few hours under Lady Pink’s guidance, 13-year-old Carey Deeter felt that confidence developing.
Deeter had joined the camp because of her admiration for street art across the city, and while at first she’d been slower and more controlled with the spray paint, she learned to follow Lady Pink’s advice to “just get it done, don’t overthink it.”
“Once you get the hang of it, you can basically do whatever you want,” Deeter says. “It’s very easy to control and stuff. It’s very freeing.”
A mural unveiling and meet-and-greet with Lady Pink takes place on Friday, June 19, from 4-5 p.m. in Clarion Alley in San Francisco. Details and more information here.
