Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón on Women Graffiti Artists

Feb 13, 2019

Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón wearing a blue blazer and teal glasses against a colorfully painted wall

How are women shaking up the global hip hop graffiti scene? What does social justice curation look like? How does feminist graffiti offer vibrant insights into more creative and just worlds?

In episode 82 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, host Cathy Hannabach interviews performance studies scholar and arts activist Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón about how women graffiti writers perform feminism on the global stage; who is excluded from the “respectable” street art model espoused by large creative cities; what a feminist approach to arts curating looks like on the ground; and why building feminist, queer, and decolonial bonds across the Puerto Rican diaspora is key to how Jessica imagines otherwise.

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Guest: Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón

Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at SUNY New Paltz. She is an interdisciplinary Latina feminist performance studies scholar working at the intersections of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; cultural studies; Black and Latinx studies; and performance studies.

She is the author of Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018), a transnational urban and digital ethnography that centers the experiences of over 100 women graffiti writers in 23 countries to demonstrate how feminism emerges through individual and collective performances of belonging within a heteropatriarchal subculture.

Jessica’s research fuels her arts-based community activism: she has curated gallery shows and coordinated public mural productions with graffiti grrlz; published opinion pieces in graffiti magazines such as The Infamous Magazine and on feminist websites such as Muslima; lectured at community events like Wall Therapy in Rochester, NY; moderated discussions including “Art in Public” at O+ Festival in Kingston, NY; and appeared on Radio Kingston to discuss feminist activism at the Women’s Marches and women and deviance broadly.

We chatted about

Jessica’s book Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (02:13)
The future of feminist graffiti art (05:10)
The intersection of art, academia, and activism in Jessica’s work (10:14)
Curation as a social justice project (12:22)
Resisting academia’s hyper-productivity culture (16:01)
Imagining Otherwise (18:56)

Takeaways

Jessica’s book Graffiti Grrlz

Graffiti Grrlz is a transnational ethnography that uses a queer feminist perspective to centers the lives of over 100 women….Ultimately, what I argue in the book is that feminism emerges through their performance, through how they perform their belonging, how they perform their presence, and how they navigate their place within the subculture.

Street art and graffiti in creative cities

The primary thing that I’m seeing right now is how street artists and writers are going to navigate the bifurcation between street art and what I focus on, which is hip-hop graffiti. Right now in what we would consider “creative cities”—cities that are hubs, major metropolitan areas that use creative arts to bring in tourists—one of the things that we’re seeing is that writers of color and people who do hip-hop-graffiti (as opposed to street art) are actually being once again passed over.

I consider myself a network builder, a community builder. That’s very important to me. I think the best work is done collectively and through collaboration, so that’s where the excitement comes in terms of curation. Because what is curating? Curating is bringing together in some kind of space or in some kind of conversation people, objects, and ideas that strengthen and challenge the collective enterprise.

Against hyper-productivity

Now I am doing something that maybe isn’t the best thing for academics in the publish-or-perish hyper-productivity culture that is academia: I’m taking a breath. I am allowing Graffiti Grrlz to sit in the sun. I’m doing podcasts, going on a book tour, and talking to as many people as possible about the project. I mean, it took 15 years to produce. So I figure I should give it some time to land and make an impact. But I also want to give myself time to land.

Imagining otherwise

[I want] a world where people have equitable access to not just the material substances that we need—food, shelter, water, clothing—but also things like joy and the freedom to express yourself sexually and gender-wise, to have sovereignty, to not have land taken. I would really like to see a world where an independent Puerto Rican nation, free of colonial debt, was a reality….There’s a writer named Claw Money who said something to me at a book signing. She said, “Thank god for graffiti because it reminds us that we’re free and that we don’t have to obey their rules.” The world that I want to live in can be the world I’m already living in. There are already other worlds happening. We just have to support them.

Projects and people discussed

Transcript

Cathy Hannabach [00:03]: [upbeat music in background] Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about the people and projects bridging art, activism, and academia to build better worlds. Episodes offer in-depth interviews with creators who use culture for social justice and explore the nitty-gritty work of imagining otherwise. I’m your host, Cathy Hannabach. [music fadeout]

[00:22] This episode is sponsored by the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The Critical Studies Program produces creative, critical thinkers with the research, writing, and communication skills necessary to address pressing issues at the intersection of cultural production and critical theory. MA program applications are open now. For more information on the program and the enrollment process, you can visit pnca.edu/criticalstudies.

This is episode 82 and my guest today is Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón.

Jessica is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at SUNY New Paltz and the author of the book Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (published by NYU Press in 2018). She is an interdisciplinary Latina feminist performance studies scholar working at the intersections of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; cultural studies; Black and Latinx studies; and performance studies.

Jessica’s research fuels her arts-based community activism: she has curated gallery shows and coordinated public mural productions with graffiti grrlz; published opinion pieces in graffiti magazines such as The Infamous Magazine ; lectured at community events like Wall Therapy in Rochester, New York; moderated discussions including “Art in Public” at the O+ Festival in Kingston, New York; and appeared on Radio Kingston to discuss feminist activism at the Women’s Marches as well as women and deviance broadly.

[1:42] In our conversation, Jessica and I chat about how women graffiti writers perform feminism on the global stage; who is excluded from the “respectable” street art model espoused by large creative cities; what a feminist approach to arts curating looks like on the ground; and why building feminist, queer, and decolonial bonds across the Puerto Rican diaspora is key to how Jessica imagines otherwise.

[02:08]: [To Jessica] Thank you so much for being with us today, Jessica.

Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón: Thank you so much, Cathy is my pleasure to be here.

Cathy: I’d love to start talking about your fabulous book Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora, which is such a fun and smart book. Can you give our listeners a little bit of a sense of what that book covers?

Jessica: Thank you! Fun and smart—that’s a great combination of things. So, Graffiti Grrlz is a transnational ethnography that uses a queer feminist perspective to center the lives of over 100 women. When I interviewed them, they were age 17 to 50-something (my eldest graffiti girl wouldn’t tell me how old she was). So these are women who write hip-hop graffiti in 23 different countries around the world.

I examine how they navigate their belonging and their presence in a heterosexist subculture. Ultimately, what I argue in the book is that feminism emerges through their performance, through how they perform their belonging, how they perform their presence, and how they navigate their place within the subculture. Through the strategies that they use, we can see feminism or feminist performance in terms of collectivity, empowerment, joy, pleasure, bodily autonomy, different way of thinking through how social justice might look, how equity might be attained within communities—those kinds of things.

Cathy [03:38]: What got you interested in graffiti art?

Jessica: This is interesting. I write about it in the introduction [to the book] because it is very much part of the methodology of it. I grew up in Dorchester, which is a city of Boston. All of my friends were graffiti writers—I should say all of my guy friends were graffiti writers. And I actually was kind of annoyed by it. I didn’t really enjoy graffiti at all because I felt like it was the only thing we did.

It wasn’t until graduate school when I was taking a class on lesbian art in America that I started thinking through all the absences of women in the world of high art and how that might relate to women’s absences in subcultures or “low art,” depending on how you’re framing it.

[04:33] I was thinking through how women in galleries, museums, art history, etc. are marginalized, tokenized, sexualized—those kinds of things. I realized one day in class that I don’t know any women who wrote graffiti, which seemed absurd to me because I was embedded right in the culture in Boston because of my friends. I said to myself, “Well, you know, there are women in art history and fine art. So surely there are women who write graffiti.”

So it was less that the graffiti interested me and more that the notable absence of women in the subculture that sparked my interest in and really launched this project.

Cathy [05:10]: One of the things that you talk about in the book is the increasing public visibility, as well as kind of ongoing visibility within subcultures in particular, of women graffiti artists. Where do you see women’s or feminist graffiti art going in the next couple of years?

Jessica [05:28]: The primary thing that I’m seeing right now that I’m wondering about is how street artists and writers are going to navigate the bifurcation between street art and what I focus on, which is hip-hop graffiti. Right now in what we would consider “creative cities”—cities that are hubs, major metropolitan areas that use creative arts to bring in tourists—one of the things that we’re seeing is that writers of color and people who do hip-hop-graffiti (as opposed to street art) are actually being once again passed over. In this process of institutionalization, a community board might say, “Oh, let’s have a street art day and hire people to paint on walls and give them permission, but it has to be family friendly. It has to be respectable, etc.”

Jessica [06:26]: Street art and hip-hop graffiti are different in terms of them being illegal or illicit. There are ways that they become commodified, commercialized, and institutionalized that further exacerbate the problem or the reason why writers are writing on walls in the first place. So that’s one thing that I think about a lot.

[I’m also thinking about] the world of social media, which has drastically changed the illegality, the risks, the publicity, and even the anonymity [of hip-hop graffiti]. Especially when we’re talking about hip-hop-graffiti, it’s all about doing an alternative name and getting it up as much as possible. You’re supposed to be public, but you’re supposed to be anonymous at the same time. But now you can log into Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and see graffiti attached to a name that is traceable.

[07:31] There are a lot of those kinds of shifts happening where the dynamic between public and private for graffiti writers and street artists is really sort of up in the air. I don’t really know how the subculture is going to plot that out, how they’re gonna navigate that.

The more public you are, the more likely you are to like get hired or have your work be in a museum or something like that. But, at the same time, it can also put you at risk for getting arrested. Who’s going to get arrested and who’s gonna get hired? That’s really the dynamic that I’m thinking about. And that’s not specific to feminist graffiti art or feminist street art. That’s specific to street art in general.

In terms of feminist graffiti art or women, I’m seeing a move toward feminism, which is really interesting because one of the things that I write about in my book is actually that they reject feminism. When I was doing my research, a majority of the women that I spoke to related feminism to this kind of Global North, neoliberal capitalist, empty “girl power” kind of ethic that they wanted nothing to do with.

[08:28] But I think because of the public discourse around Me Too, the Women’s Marches, the legalization of abortion in Ireland—those kinds of very public, widely circulated on social media things—I’m seeing more graffiti writers claim it and articulate feminism in a different way than they did before. So that’s exciting to me.

One of the graffiti girls, she’s um, gosh, I want to say in her forties? She’s in New Zealand. She recently messaged me on Instagram and was like, “I want to post something about feminism. I’m really coming around to it. I think I understand it better now. Can you look at this and tell me what you think? I know that, you know, you’re really into feminism, that’s your thing.”

[09:23] When I interviewed these girls, I asked them what their positionality on feminism was. But it’s not like if they said no, I’m not a feminist, they weren’t going in the book. The book would be empty in that case.

So I responded to her and did the affirmation work of, “From my perspective, you’ve always been doing feminist work and articulating how what you do is feminist.” In her case, she’s the founder of the crew Stick Up Girlz. I said, “In doing that work, you have been doing feminism, you’ve just been articulating it in a different way—aesthetically rather than linguistically.”

So I would love to see more queer feminist street art being celebrated. Anything that like takes us away from the same story about Banksy would make me happy.

Cathy: Seems much overdue!

Jessica: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Cathy [10:14]: I’m curious how you see your work including this area of your research, but your other projects as well, which I hope we can get to more in a minute. How do you see your work combining academia, your interested in art or creativity, and your commitment to social justice?

Jessica [10:28]: Art, activism, and academia have never been separated for me. Just a little bit of background: I was raised by a single mom in a working class, Puerto Rican household in Boston. Academia was never really on my radar. I kind of accidentally landed in my undergraduate program (that’s a whole other story). We didn’t go to museums. We didn’t go to plays. We had Puerto Rican cultural art stuff, exposure to that kind of thing—artesana, those kind of like craft things. And my parents were not activists. Nobody in my family was an activist.

[11:25] So all three of those things I was exposed to in college. I did my undergraduate degree in sculpture and was kinda like, “I dunno what I’m doing here. What am I doing? It seems like a cool idea to do art, so let’s do art.” And my sculpture was terrible! It was awful until I discovered feminism. Until there was content behind the creation, for me, it didn’t really gel or makes sense. Then I got a work study gig at the Women’s Resource Center and that’s how it all sort of came together.

So my art, my activism, my art, and my academic self all emerged together. So I’ve never been able to see them as separate.

That said, I’ve learned over the years that academia can not be the only place for the expression of those things, that my scholarly work needs to be accessible to the public. And though I don’t make art anymore, I use my privilege as best I can to uplift the art-making of other people who I admire. I also try to be as available to my community as possible for activism work.

Cathy [12:22]: So you brought up uplifting the artwork of others and increasing a platform for artists and creators of various sorts to get their name and their work out there. I’d love to turn to the work you do with curation because it’s something that has showed up across a lot of the interviews that I’ve done on this podcast. Certainly the podcast itself I think of as a curation project. I’m curious what you find so appealing or energizing about a feminist or queer or racial justice approach to art curating.

Jessica [12:53]: This is something that I actually just realized kind of recently through being a professor on the tenure track, being one of very few women of color on a predominantly white campus.

I consider myself a network builder, community builder. That’s very important to me. I think the best work is done collectively and through collaboration, so that’s where the excitement comes in terms of curation. Because what is curating? Curating is bringing together in some kind of space or in some kind of conversation people, objects, and ideas that strengthen and challenge the collective enterprise.

In relation to my work with graffiti girls, the interest was not necessarily the medium. The interest was in how I could intervene in the absence of women in graffiti studies, in graffiti subcultures. It was an activist, social justice-oriented impetus.

The very first thing I did was bring girls down to Arizona from New York City to collectively paint on a wall to show people that not only were women painting graffiti but they were doing it together. Like, look at their different styles and the fact that they’re still able to work together to figure out how to plot out the space on the wall—all the logistical and aesthetic differences between how they work and what they produced. That to me is that’s the exciting part. What do we learn when we bring a bunch of different women together to do something that makes them visible?

[14:17] I wrote a piece called “Writin’, Breakin’, Beatboxin’” about performing women in hip-hop culture. It’s in [the academic journal] Signs. I was seeing all this backlash against curating all-women group shows and that was the work that I was doing primarily with graffiti girls. It was always and only about women—unapologetically so.

So I wrote this essay where I focused on beatboxing, graffiti writing, and breakdancing to argue that we’re not past the time where we need to do these kinds of curation projects. Some of the graffiti girls that did not want to be in my book said that my book would ghettoize them by putting them together only with other women.

[15:13] And this is a common response you get as a curator if you are trying to do a group show. Likely somebody will say, “But why is it all women?” I try to make the case that the curating work is making sure that they’re not separatist spaces. [They’re about] having an all-girl event in hip hop where they are the show, where they’re the primary people on stage with the mic, but allowing anybody to come in and learn from them and be exposed to various kinds of hip hop through women. I just think we’re nowhere near a place where that kind of work has to stop.

So yeah, I went off on a tangent here because the thing that’s exciting about curating is also the thing that’s the most difficult about it. It’s getting people to understand why you’re bringing them together and the the rationalization around it.

Cathy [16:01]: What kind of projects are you working on these days?

Jessica: So now I am doing something that maybe isn’t the best thing for academics in the publish-or-perish hyper-productivity culture that is academia: I’m taking a breath. I am allowing Graffiti Grrlz to sit in the sun. I’m doing podcasts, going on a book tour, and talking to as many people as possible about the project. I mean, it took 15 years to produce. So I figure I should give it some time to land and make an impact. But I also want to give myself time to land.

[16:57] I was at the NWSA conference in November, the National Women’s Studies Association, and someone came over to the booth during my book signing and was like, “Wow, you had a book and a baby at the same time.” And I was like, “Yeah, I did! Right.” I have been in this job for four years and my child is four years old—I came into it pregnant.

So not only did I bring a life into this world—well, two lives really—but all of that sort of academic momming has taken a toll and I need a break. So I’m taking it.

That said, I am of course also working on stuff, but my primary goal is to make sure that I’m healthy and happy and being present.

I do have another book project on the horizon. It’s called Performing Beyond and it’s a critical autoethnography about being diasporican [diasporic Puerto Rican]. So it looks at what it means to be Puerto Rican living in the diaspora.

[17:52] That book is being joined with these little side project essays and articles that are coming out of activism. So when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, I launched a campaign called Feminists for Puerto Rico. It’s really a visibility and fundraising campaign. I designed a logo, I got people on board. We have a Facebook page, sometimes we do Twitter. We do information campaigns trying to get people to really understand that the crisis in Puerto Rico, the ongoing colonial condition of Puerto Rico, is a feminist issue. That has been the thing that’s predominantly taking my time right now, aside from the resting and the breathing and hanging out with graffiti girls.

It’s been great because through this second project I’m really building a new network. Through starting Feminists for Puerto Rico and another project that I’m working on collaboratively called DiaspoRican: Decolonizing Academia, I have been exposed to a world of Puerto Rico scholars that I didn’t know previously. So I’m building a new community, another network through which to do my activism and my scholarly work. It’s been really fulfilling.

Cathy [18:56]: So this brings me to my absolute favorite and final question that I get to ask folks, which really gets at the heart of why you do the work that you do in the world. That’s that better world that you’re working towards—that world that you’re imagining, that you’re collectively producing with other artists, with other academics, with activists. So I’ll ask you this giant question, which for some people is a scary question, but I think it’s a really important question. What’s the world that you want?

Jessica [19:47]: It is a giant question. I’m going to defer to my four-year-old son. Lately he has been trying to distinguish between things. I guess it must be at a developmental thing, right? He’s trying to distinguish between cartoons, movies, and like “real life” quote unquote. So he’ll say, “Mommy, is this in our world? Is this in this world? Can we have this in this world?” He asks questions about what he’s receiving in the frame of what world are we in? This is really interesting to me.

I think I can rephrase the question of maybe not what I want the world to look like, but what I want to be included in the world, in the world that I live in. It would be things like a world where people have equitable access to not just the material substances that we need—food, shelter, water, clothing—but also things like joy and the freedom to express yourself sexually and gender-wise, to have sovereignty, to not have land taken.

I would really like to see a world where an independent Puerto Rican nation, free of colonial debt, was a reality.

[20:54] I would like to live in a world where I don’t have to talk to my son every day about [gender oppression]. He’s gender fluid and it gets questioned and challenged a lot. You know, “Why are you wearing a skirt?” So I would love to live in a world where I don’t have to teach him how to navigate those kinds of questions and challenges, where he can just have his dinosaur and wear his tutu at the same time and not be challenged or tried to be fit back into a box by the people in his life.

I want to just bring this back to graffiti for a second because the things that I want in my world, they’re raw and they’re not necessarily respectable. They’re rebellious. They are nonnormative.

There’s a writer named Claw Money who said something to me at a book signing. She said, “Thank god for graffiti because it reminds us that we’re free and that we don’t have to obey their rules.” The world that I want to live in can be the world I’m already living in. There are already other worlds happening. We just have to support them. They’re already in existence.

Cathy: Well, thank you so much for being with us and sharing all of the creative ways that you imagine otherwise.

Jessica: Thank you so much. I hope that this was as fun for you as it was for me.

Cathy [22:04]: Thanks for listening to another episode of Imagine Otherwise. Imagine Otherwise is produced by Ideas on Fire and this episode was created by Christopher Persaud, Rebecca Reynolds, Michelle Velasquez-Potts, and myself, Cathy Hannabach.

You can check out the show notes for this episode on our website at ideasonfire.net where you can also read about our fabulous guest as well as find links to the people and projects we discuss on the show. [music fadeout]

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Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón on Women Graffiti Artists

Guest: Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón

We chatted about