While a serious online archive is coming that "will provide scholars, students, and the public access to the graffiti and a reasonably large collection of ancillary archival material associated with the graffiti," Dr. Stephen Robertson has a basic website up that does a great job discussing types of Civil War-era graffiti, mapping the examples, giving interpretations, and even featuring some of the soldiers who marked up walls. Below is Dr. Robertson's text from his About page. Make sure to navigate the drop-down links under the "Types of Graffiti" to see photos. - Stencil Archive

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Soldiers in the American Civil War left graffiti in many of the places they spent time, including homes, churches, hospitals and caves. Using charcoal, pencils and knives, they commonly wrote their names, usually adding their regiments and the date they wrote. Soldiers also drew pictures of battlefield scenes, political images and sexual material. Very few of these soldiers wrote anything else that has survived, so they represent Americans whose wartime experiences and lives have attracted little attention from historians. But they have left other traces in the historical record from which their lives can be reconstructed.

Atlanta BeltLine Embraces Graffiti Artists Amid Changing Urban Landscape

As graffiti morphs from real estate blight to urban amenity, Atlanta’s style writers are driving forces in a conversation about public art.

By Brentin Mock
bloomberg.com (Link to original)
Jun 01, 2024 01:15

The graffiti-slathered Krog Street Tunnel exists at a collision between old and new Atlanta. On one end, its entrance sits blocks away from the Sweet Auburn district, birthplace of civil rights legend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the site of his tomb. On the other end are Cabbagetown, once home to mill workers, and Reynoldstown, founded by formerly enslaved African Americans, both of which have undergone dramatic neighborhood change.

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Markings from the various stages of the area’s transformation are etched, scribbled, Sharpied, bubbled, tagged and spray-painted all through the underpass and both tunnel entrances, in layers upon layers of unadulterated graffiti, with timestamps reaching back decades. The overarching narrative is survival.

Krog Street is one of several safe spaces in Atlanta where graffiti artists — and really anyone with a spray can — can get busy on the walls, unencumbered. Residents have not only conceded the tunnel but have since supplied additional walls for public graffiti creation and consumption.

It’s indicative of the city-at-large’s unofficial tolerance of the practice. There are few stretches of Atlanta where you won’t find elaborate graffiti pieces and burners draped across walls. Such activity was once a priority law enforcement target, under the controversial auspices of “broken windows” policing. But today, while graffiti remains illegal in most of Atlanta, priorities have shifted. As in many cities around the world, graffiti has become part of the urban fabric – once seen as a real estate blight, but now commonly viewed as an asset.

In Atlanta, graffiti artists have worked for years behind the scenes to ensure their culture’s preservation and decriminalization.

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Scott Williams, ‘greatest of all stencil artists,’ dies at 67 (Original Post)
by OSCAR PALMA 
JUNE 12, 2024, 5:00 AM 
for Mission Local (Donate to support) 

It was the early ‘90s and the Mission was boiling, fermenting with artists from all over the world. At least that’s how Clarion Alley’s Project co-founder, Aaron Noble, recalls it: An artistic melting pot. And one of the premier artists at the time, a painter fueled by coffee, tobacco and burritos, was spray-painting institution Scott Williams. 

Williams, who lived at his apartment at 20th and Shotwell for 35 years, died Sunday, May 26, at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. He was 67 and succumbed to an infection, according to his family. 

Williams was one of the first artists to paint a mural in Clarion Alley after Noble and other artists started the project in 1991, Noble said. The two cultivated a friendship that lasted through the ‘90s before Noble moved to Los Angeles in 2000. 

“His work was everywhere, literally out on the street and indoors and outdoors, on cars driving by. You couldn’t avoid it,” said Noble. “He was a stencil artist. He was the stencil artist. He was the greatest of all stencil artists.” 

Some of Williams’ stencil pieces decorated local favorites, such as Burger Joint, Leather Tongue Video, Pedal Revolution, Chameleon Bar, Armadillo on Fillmore Street, DNA Lounge, Amoeba Records and The Lab. His painting at The Lab is the only one remaining, Mission Local has found. 

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Scott Williams' Stencil Archive continues to get updated, specifically with a new sub-Archive of his Public Works. These images are all from the late 1990s to early 2000s, taken from my box of developed photographs. They have been rescanned and even stitched together where possible.

According to file dates of backups, these images were last scanned in 2002! I know that a few were scanned for the "Stencil Nation" project, and the Lower Haight mural was stitched together for the first time around 2008, but here at last are many of Scott's public murals that were still running when I arrived in the late 1990s. 

There were a few newbie errors while using a film camera. While working on this last week, I asked myself why I didn't snap photos of Scott's Burger Joint walls, and the answer was that I didn't want to bother the folks eating in the booths in front of them. And I still remember taking a bus by Scott's Amoeba Records construction-wall stencils in the Upper Haight, and going back a few weeks later with my camera to capture them to only discover that the store was open and the amazing, large, stencils of musicians were gone! I recall Scott did not keep the cut outs of those images because they were too big.

I will continue to revise filenames, and there are only a few sub-Archives of photos left for that.

Inside Out: Steven Wolf Fine Arts Recreates Scott Williams' Apartment Studio 

Often considered a predecessor of "Mission School" street artists, Williams is most widely known for densely layered spray paint stencil murals. 

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By Christian L. Frock for KQED
Sep 24, 2012 

Steven Wolf Fines Arts has transformed one of their gallery spaces into a recreation of the live/work studio of longtime San Francisco artist Scott Williams. Often considered a predecessor of “Mission School” street artists such as Barry McGee — presumably because he worked in the street, though this seems oversimplified — Williams is most widely known for densely layered spray paint stencil murals. The artist began to cut and paint with stencils in the early ’80s, after a period of experimenting with color Xeroxes. In the late ’90s he transitioned to creating small-scale works with water-based airbrush for health reasons. In addition to large public murals, Williams’ body of work includes domestically scaled paintings and handheld books, each page a singular artwork, among copious pages. The artist’s life and process are the subjects on display in this exhibition. Rather than take Williams’ work out of its element, as is often the case with recent “street art” exhibitions, the gallery offers an interior view of Williams’ life and practice. 

Picture rails ring the gallery, as do wainscoting and chair rails, in keeping with the traditional Victorian interior of Williams’ Mission District apartment a few blocks away. Mismatched candelabra and the kind of light fixtures typical at home hang overhead. The walls are hung salon style with numerous works, some framed and some not. A bookcase jammed with paperbacks presides over one corner of the room, while a make-believe window is staged to recreate a window in Williams’ apartment, complete with a swath of fabric pinned across the middle. In the center of the gallery, positioned over a worn rug, stands a table heaped with stencils. Whereas stencils are often considered the residue of stenciled paintings — mere tools in the process — Williams’ stencils hold their own against the paintings themselves. Intricately hand cut, many bare evidence of repetitious use with layered sprays of color. The heaving pile of stencils in the gallery testifies to so much unappreciated labor, the crispness of each line lost in the aerated marks of the paintings.