In a recent email conversation with @Stef and @Erwin_Tommissen this recurring challenge came up again: how to properly handle crew names for street and graffiti artists.
Right now, Street Art Cities is built around individual artist profiles. But in graffiti culture especially, crews are just as important, sometimes more important, than the individual writers. Crews shape styles, travel together, collaborate on walls, and carry decades of history. If we want to represent the culture accurately, we need a clean, consistent way to include them.
The challenge
Some artists want their crew listed alongside their name.
Some murals are created by a crew rather than a single artist.
Some crews have multiple aliases or sub-crews.
And sometimes the crew is the only identifier available on a piece.
Right now, there’s no standardized way to capture this without bending the artist field or adding it in the description, which makes searching, filtering, and crediting messy.
Proposed solution: introduce a new ‘marker tag’ for crews
Marker tags already help categorize murals by theme, technique, or festival. Why not extend that logic to crews?
What this could look like:
Introduce a new marker tag category: “Crew”
Allow contributors to tag murals with one or more crew names
Crew tags would be clickable, leading to a page showing all murals tagged with that crew
This avoids mixing crews into the artist field while still giving them visibility and structure
It also respects the fact that crews aren’t “artists” in the same sense, they’re collectives, identities, and sometimes fluid groups
What do you think?
Should crews get their own marker tag category?
Should crews ever be treated as “artists” in the system?
How do you currently handle crew names when uploading?
Any pitfalls we should consider?
Would love to hear how others approach this and whether this solution feels right for the community.
This is a complex problem. There are many issues, many of which you have outlined, but here’s a few more.
Often artists are in more than one crew.
Often it is is only some of the crew members that work on an artwork, rather than all of them.
Often an artist will paint a piece on his own but will place “call-outs” to his crew, and crew members and others in the piece.
Often artists from multiple crews will collaborate on a piece.
I often find it difficult to work out exactly what is going on. I think we do have a few “crew names” listed as artist names at the moment, these would be for pieces where we have been unable to determine the exact artist.
All those things said, I think the “crew” tag is a good solution, especially if like some other tags it allows multiple values to be specified on an artwork.
It allows flexibility of use and is a good solution I feel.
We generally do not post a whole lot of grafitti, unless it is in well-known, well-trafficked areas. In the past we have asked a number of graffiti writers if we should post certain walls and after discussion the answer has been “No” every time, usually because they are often more secretive about their locations, and in the past there have been a number of disputes between crews leading to malicious wall damage, and having all the locations of a crews work easily accessible may not be a good thing. Whether a “crew” tag exacerbates this issue - I’m not sure.
Malicious use of the valuable location data found in SAC has always been something that worries me and nags at me a lot. Not sure if this is an issue elsewhere.
I do like the idea of using Crew as an identifier, but (at least to my relative novice understanding) a crew has two distinct meanings.
a group of artists who might not always be operating within the law
An organi ssation that has a core team of artists who work on solo and collaborative murals for them.
An example of the first could be SMT (Still Making Trouble). These guys do paint legally (see their mural in Leicester), but they do, um… paint on the other side of the fence, so to speak (see that same mural, it shows them doing what frequently gets them in front of the judge: painting underground trains). I would imagine that they would happy being credited as SMT on their legal murals, but remaining anonymous on “other” artworks. And not naming the individuals at all.
An example of the second would be Brink Contemporary Arts. They are a mural management company, run by Lord Numb, and painted by mainly Mig29 and Lord Numb, but sometimes other artists, too. (Lord Numb is an active Hunter/Curator, so his input would be great to have here). In Brink’s case, they actively state who the artists are, on the mural and on their social media posts.
So, i would suggest that if the crew name is said on the artwork, include it. if the artist’s names are on the work, include them. If official releases give the names and/or crew name, include them. If nothing stated, and it’s relying on the Hunter’s inside knowledge, don’t include it.
When we think about crews, one of the first things that come to mind are the graffiti crews that love to work off the books. But there’s also crews that worked together legally.
So opening the dialogue with those crews to know exactly what to document and link to crews and what not is crucial