“Just because we are doing graffiti letters doesn’t mean we’re not artists, and it doesn’t mean that we haven’t earned the right to be involved in this scene,” Jher says. “We helped invent this scene, and then we’re just getting piggybacked on, you know?”
He said as much while he was on a panel for Crush Walls — the now-defunct RiNo mural festival — in 2019 with four other graffiti artists. "I brought up how I had been doing this in the city for so many years," he recalls, "and there are people who just start out doing cute little bunnies or whatever and are getting paid thousands of dollars by RiNo, when meanwhile, they’re putting graffiti artists in these alleys and we’re getting peanuts. We’re not getting paid much, if anything."
That struck a chord with Alexandrea Pangburn, an artist working with Crush at the time who is now the RiNo Art District's director of curation. When she was charged with coming up with alternative ways to celebrate murals — which have become a major draw for businesses and tourists alike in the area — she decided to transform the 38th Street underpass between Brighton Boulevard and Walnut Street into a rotating showcase for work by established graffiti crews and artists.
Pangburn selected the RTD crew to create the first installation at the underpass last summer. “We decided to highlight RTD because it was their thirtieth-year anniversary last September and they had members from all over the United States in town to be a part of the wall,” she says.
Jher was excited that graffiti was finally being recognized as legitimate street art with a real commission, and that he and Tuke, a longtime friend and member of the DF graffiti crew, were going to be the first artists to curate the wall. “We had our crew reunion, so a lot of guys came in from out of state,” Jher says. “It took us one, maybe two weeks to paint.”
Technically, he notes, the piece they created was not graffiti, since one of the hallmarks of that form is that it is done without permission. Rather, it was a mural in graffiti style, using the signature splashy — and often illegible — typography and bright colors.
But Denver didn't see the difference. Within weeks, the mural was covered over with gray paint. And how that happened isn't exactly black and white.
“Our plan was to originally have that 38th underpass wall be a permission wall, which allowed for monthly installation rotations and giving space to the local graffiti crews on a monthly basis,” Pangburn says. “We weren't aware that under the city and graffiti mitigation, [the Denver Police Department] categorizes that specific work to be ‘gang-related.’"
"DPD is not the agency that will determine what is art and what is not," says a DPD spokesman. The city’s Graffiti Prevention and Removal team, a division of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, was likely responsible for covering up the work, according to the DPD. The Graffiti Prevention and Removal team did not respond to a request for comment, but according to DOTI, RiNo did not go through the city's official approval process for the mural.
The RiNo Art District works with Denver Arts & Venues to establish official wall spaces. According to Brian Kitts, marketing and communications director for Arts & Venues, "DAV didn't ever receive a permit request for the mural and didn't approve the artwork, so it did indeed go up without the agency's knowledge. ... Had things been approved in advance, it wouldn't have been seen as graffiti,"
Location and timing both played a role in the mural's coverup, says DAV's public-art program manager, Michael Chavez.
"When COVID happened, a lot of areas around the city were hit hard with vandalism, that wall included," he says. "The vandalism that was happening in the underpass was happening frequently, and it comes to a saturation point where it's too much to fix. Alex reached out to us in early 2021 about doing this permission wall — this was their way of fixing it. At the time, we were in the midst of agency-wide furloughs, and we were short-handed and just couldn't get to it."
Ultimately, DAV wasn't able to meet with Pangburn until a month ago — long after the original effort was taken down. The graffiti mural wall was a complicated concept, Chavez notes, because the city has to approve the contents of a mural before it goes up, making an official wall that showcases multiple artists over the course of a year a challenging process.
Instead, the wall went the unofficial route. "The only assumption I can make is they kind of went rogue and just did it," he says. "The city looks like the bad guys, but it wasn't us. DOTI is just doing their job. They've got multiple trucks around the city every day taking down stuff; it's gotten difficult to keep up with the vandalism. ... It's unfortunate, because the artists spent a lot of time and money. I understand the frustration, but there are certain channels you have to go through."
To Jher, that just shows how Denver doesn't understand graffiti artists. Frustrated by the city's lack of response to his concerns, on February 8 Jher posted his grievances on his Instagram account. “I hadn’t said anything until now because we were going to wait to see if we could make any progress, if we’re going to get it settled to where the wall will be left alone,” he explains. “But they are not cooperating in the slightest bit.”
But while Jher is disappointed, as someone who has been throwing up typographic murals and graffiti tags around Denver and other cities since the ’90s, he’s used to having his work covered up.
Jher first spoke with Westword about Denver’s graffiti scene back in 1998, when then-Mayor Wellington Webb beefed up the city’s graffiti ordinance to crack down on crews, going so far as to say that juveniles caught vandalizing should be jailed. A detective was even assigned to investigate graffiti vandals and file cases on them.
"If there were more [mural] pieces around, the kids out tagging would see that and try to elevate themselves to that level," Jher told Westword. "They'd be attracted to graffiti as an art form instead of just a rush. I mean, what's the point of doing a tag when you can do a piece? What Denver is doing now isn't working. They should at least try it.”
Since then, mural programs — both official and unofficial — have made the city far more colorful than the “drab” Denver that Jher described in 1998. And graffiti was one of the reasons the movement was successful, since it led to renegade murals that were more than graffiti-type lettering. The public and the government were able to digest landscapes better than alphabet soup.
But because the city started commissioning murals as a tool to discourage graffiti, that caused a “rift between street artists and graffiti artists,” Jher says today. The Urban Arts Fund, for example, was established in 2009 as an arm of Denver Public Art to create murals in “perpetually vandalized areas” in Denver. Its web page identifies the fund as “a graffiti prevention and youth development program” that has contributed about 330 murals to the city and “has helped protect more than 500,000 square feet of walls from vandalism.”
“The problem that we’re dealing with is that there is a lot of confusion and fear around graffiti because people don’t understand it,” Jher explains. “People in younger generations mostly like it, because they’d rather look at color than gray. But older generations still affiliate all graffiti with gangs, because they don’t understand it and that’s what they were told.”
Graffiti has changed a lot since the ’90s, though. “The culture itself used to be a lot more pure because there wasn’t the Internet,” Jher reflects. “You didn’t have access to it; it was very secret, and you had to be involved in it to learn about it. Now you can order all your materials online and look at graffiti from all over the world online and be inspired by different styles. Before that, it was graffiti mags, a few blurry videos.... It was a secretive, low-key culture, and there weren’t a lot of people doing it.”
He describes graffiti as abstract art, and says its evolution has been similar to that movement: Just as Cubist-style paintings were reviled by most and embraced by some before being widely considered one of the revolutionary genres of painting, graffiti artists have gone through a similar struggle for their craft to be identified as a legitimate art form.
Jher notes that there is a “clear delineation” between gang graffiti and graffiti art. “Graffiti is the application of paint to a wall without permission,” he explains. “Gang graffiti is the same thing, but it’s used by a gang to mark their territory. The difference between our graffiti and gang graffiti is that we are doing it more for the notoriety as a form of art — there's a style to it. Gang graffiti is similar, but you can tell the difference by looking at it. If it’s somebody’s name or just a word, it’s probably not gang graffiti, which would say something along the lines of 'North Side' or 'West Side,' or a street name or number.”
And not only was the piece not gang-related, but it showed how graffiti artists helped make RiNo the place it is today. “The thing with RiNo is that it’s where a lot of graffiti artists painted back in the day because it was all industrial," Jher says. "There was nothing but bums and people doing heroin in the alleys, so we would go there to paint because nobody was going to mess with you. In any city, graffiti generally tells you what part of town is the most interesting. Without directly making people money, it actually makes people a lot of money. As far as property values in RiNo and what makes that place a desirable location to be — it started with graffiti.”
Jher still hopes to be able to curate the graffiti-centric wall. In the meantime, he has other works up in the RiNo Art District: One is located on the side of First Draft, and another is in the alley between Larimer and Walnut streets on 26th Street, behind Green Spaces.
Pangburn isn't giving up on the project, either. “We are now working with the city to commission more of a permanent installation from these artists where we can allow for the art to be on the wall for a minimum of a year, as it's imperative that we create space for groups of artists like this,” she says. “This is the first time that we have had to deal with a situation like this.”
Chavez is certain the wall could be approved if the right information is provided.
"We need the details up front before we can approve something; we can't approve a hypothetical mural," he explains. "That's the hard part of this kind of work as an art form. ... So it's a catch-22, but it's doable. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But we're always willing to try."
