Preserving the Underground: How Letterform Archive Legitimatized Graffiti as High Typographic Art

SAN FRANCISCO — For the past five years, a quiet revolution has been unfolding inside the climate-controlled rooms of the Letterform Archive. Long relegated to the margins of fine art or swept aside entirely as illicit vandalism, graffiti is finally receiving its due as one of the most vibrant, complex, and innovative iterations of letterform design in modern history.

At the center of this institutional reckoning is a sweeping, multi-year initiative that culminated in a permanent graffiti collection, a landmark exhibition, and an exhaustive 320-page hardcover publication titled Subscription to Mischief: Graffiti Zines of the 1990s.

To understand the scope of this project, Stephen Coles, Associate Curator at the Letterform Archive, sat down with type designer, educator, and Bay Area graffiti writer Kel Troughton. Having served as a curatorial consultant from 2021 to 2024, Troughton offered a rare insider’s perspective on bridging the gap between an insular, criminalized subculture and a prestigious design repository.

Main Facts: Elevating the "Purest Form" of Letterform Innovation

In many ways, graffiti represents letterform innovation in its purest, most visceral state. Its practitioners—universally known as "writers"—are constantly inventing new ways to depict the alphabet and its myriad combinations. They develop intensely personal styles while simultaneously pushing, bending, and fracturing the boundaries of legibility.

Similar praise is frequently heaped upon calligraphy, traditional lettering, and commercial type design—disciplines that fill the shelves of design museums and archives worldwide. Yet, historically, graffiti has been cordoned off from these traditional crafts. Mainstream institutions have routinely ignored it, save for the occasional broad categorization of "street art" that strips the medium of its deeply nuanced typography.

The Letterform Archive recognized this glaring discrepancy in 2020. Spearheaded by Collections Director Kate Long Stellar, the institution sought active ways to increase the representation of graffiti within its holdings. They found an ideal partner in Kel Troughton. A friend of the Archive since its inception—serving first as a volunteer and later as a Type West instructor—Troughton brought two decades of active participation in the Bay Area graffiti community. His involvement provided the crucial trust needed to welcome a notoriously secretive subculture into an established institutional space.

This foundational partnership generated three major initiatives:

1. The Permanent Collection (2021–2024): Building a comprehensive, museum-grade collection of rare graffiti reference books, zines, and ephemera.
2. The Exhibition (2023): Co-curating Subscription to Mischief alongside Greg Lamarche, David “Chino” Villorente, and Kate Long Stellar.
3. The Publication: Releasing the comprehensive exhibition catalog, Subscription to Mischief: Graffiti Zines of the 1990s (320 pages, 7½ × 9 inches).

Chronology: From Tower Records to Institutional Archives

The journey to institutionalize graffiti typography was built on decades of personal passion, subterranean networking, and deliberate curatorial strategy.

The Formative Years (Late 1990s)

Long before stepping foot inside a museum, Troughton was studying letterforms through the lens of print media. Growing up in an era when brick-and-mortar music stores like Tower Records served as cultural hubs, Troughton relied on magazine racks to discover regional graffiti styles.

"I’ve studied these graffiti books and magazines since the late ’90s, back when we still had Tower Records," Troughton recalls. "So I have been studying these letterforms for a good chunk of my life, and I haven’t stopped."

The Institutional Pivot (2020–2021)

When Troughton first teamed up with Kate Long Stellar to build the Archive’s collection, initial discussions centered on acquiring photographic prints from Bay Area photographers and writers. However, Stellar redirected the focus toward the Archive’s core strength: printed matter.

The strategy shifted toward gathering small-run, out-of-print art books and localized zines produced twenty to thirty years prior. Troughton’s specific focus became acquiring graffiti magazines—the primary historical documents of the culture.

The Community Activation (2023)

As the collection grew, Troughton began hosting informal research visits for foundational figures within the graffiti movement, such as East Coast writer and Skills magazine creator Greg Lamarche. These visits transformed the Archive from a static storage facility into a dynamic, living research hub. Older writers brought in forgotten books, corrected historical oversights, identified anonymous 1990s zines from San Jose, and donated rare ephemera, including original sketches and freight-train documentation posters.

Supporting Data: Inside the Collection and Rare Ephemera

The graffiti collection at the Letterform Archive is staggering in its depth, largely because it focuses on printed material and archival artifacts rather than merely canvas paintings.

• The Scope: The vast majority of the collection comprises rare zines, self-published magazines, regional books, posters, and prints. Original drawings are kept intentionally scarce; the Archive houses roughly 15 to 20 original sketches, including rare pieces by the late San Francisco writer Kzam GTB.
• The Ephemera: Notable contributions include a series of freight-train documentation posters donated by the late writer Hybrid TCI, capturing the work of elite North American freight crews. Hybrid also lent a vintage spray can to the 2023 exhibition.
• Key Publications Represented:
  • Skills (founded in 1992 by Greg Lamarche)
  • IGTimes (co-edited by David Schmidlapp and PHASE 2)
  • The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine (created by David Paul)
  • Graffito (produced by the TCI Crew in the 1990s)

While major institutions like Cornell University house massive hip-hop collections featuring contributions from figures like PHASE 2, and specialized independent projects like the Munich Graffiti Library are doing vital preservation work, few institutions have approached graffiti documentation with the rigorous, typographically focused lens of the Letterform Archive.

Official Responses and Perspectives

The Convergence of Typography and Graffiti

To Coles, the parallels between traditional type design and graffiti are striking, even if they occupy different cultural spheres. He compares examining a rare graffiti zine to viewing a Gutenberg Bible leaf or a medieval manuscript—artifacts that people know intimately through textbooks but rarely encounter in the flesh.

Troughton echoes this sentiment, noting that his transition into professional type design (via his experimental foundry, Overlap Type) was a natural extension of his obsession with graffiti letterforms:

"I wanted to go into type design because it’s where the people most interested in detail were—the people who cared about these forms, stared at them all day, and needed to collect more, find more, and learn more about them. A lot of us in graffiti writing were already doing that, so the Archive was a safe space for the same kind of activity."

Bridging the Class and Access Gap

Reflecting on why the worlds of graphic design and graffiti have historically remained somewhat siloed, Troughton points not to a lack of shared passion, but to socioeconomic factors.

"The access I had was to graffiti writing," Troughton explains. "I think there are a lot of people who got into this art form who didn’t really have money to study design. And not everyone had a computer at home. So, type design wasn’t necessarily the most accessible field. If it had been, I probably would have been more into type earlier in my life, but graffiti was a more attainable access point to the practice of studying letters."

Implications: A New Precedent for Institutional Collecting

The success of the Letterform Archive’s graffiti initiative proves that institutional spaces can successfully bridge the gap between street-level subcultures and academic repositories, provided they approach the subject with genuine respect, cultural fluency, and collaborative humility.

By inviting writers to co-curate exhibitions like Subscription to Mischief, the Archive ensured that the history of graffiti was told on its own terms, using its own specialized vocabulary and historical frameworks.

Moving forward, the implications for the design world are profound. As more institutions begin to recognize the intricate typographic mechanics of graffiti, the artificial boundary separating "high art" typography from street-level letterform innovation continues to dissolve.

For Troughton, the ultimate victory lies in accessibility and cross-pollination. Whether introducing graphic design students to rare 1990s zines or showing veteran graffiti writers centuries-old type specimens, the Letterform Archive has established a permanent sanctuary where letter lovers of all backgrounds can study, obsess, and preserve the history of the alphabet together.

The exhibition catalog Subscription to Mischief: Graffiti Zines of the 1990s is available now through the Letterform Archive shop. Researchers and members of the public can schedule free research visits to view the permanent graffiti collection by visiting the Letterform Archive website.