Pioneer graffiti artist and painter Daina Higgins explores the shifting visual identity of urban spaces across the American Northeast. Our conversation, centered on Daina, also reads as a message to the emerging women graffiti artists she encounters on the streets. A how-to guide including the rules- yes, graffiti has rules- a way to value yourself as an artist, and a sisterhood joining the past and present.
Her paintings, photorealism with the energetic pulse of graffiti, trace a line between memory and architecture, surface and emotion. When looking at the span of her work, there is a direct through-line from her early graffiti work to her current paintings, where Higgins brings the street’s immediacy into the studio using spray paint, oil, and water-based media to examine how place, identity, and technology intersect. In her recent series Letters to Home, she reflects on displacement and belonging through the format of a trompe-l’œil ruled legal pad. We spoke about the series alongside graffiti’s unspoken codes, its unexpected parallels with social media and AI, and why the human touch remains central to her practice.