Beneath the hum of passing traffic, the sharp scent of aerosol, and the rhythmic hiss of spray cans, Atlanta’s graffiti culture came alive this weekend for the ATL StyleWriters Jam, a three-day exhibition uniting generations of artists who shaped the city’s visual identity.
First launched in 2022, the Jam transformed sections of the Atlanta Beltline into open-air galleries painted by the hands of writers from across the county, the same hands that pioneered Atlanta’s “style writing” scene in the 1980s and ’90s. The event remains free to the public to preserve accessibility for all.
Giving credit to the architects
Naomi Perry, who organizes the Jam through the Atlanta StyleWriters Association, coordinates the writers with the city to honor the city’s original graffiti community and the artists who, while defining Atlanta’s visual rhythm, rarely receive their recognition.
“I realized the people who are best with spray paint weren’t the ones getting opportunities in the public-art space,” Perry said. “Part of graffiti’s anonymous culture made that difficult. So I wanted to help bridge that gap, to make sure the artists who built this have representation.”
Each year, the BeltLine partners with the StyleWriters Association to fund and equip local artists. Longtime writer Mr. Totem, who has painted Atlanta walls since the early 1990s, and who has participated in Jams of the past, helped coordinate & curate this year’s exhibition to ensure the murals represented the highest level of craft.
“This tunnel is known as the Burn Unit,” Totem said. “Every artist here can do what any muralist can do, but we come from hip-hop, where the letter is the heartbeat.”
Why names stay hidden
For many of the participating artists, anonymity remains sacred. Many artists keep their “government names” separate to preserve creative freedom and protect themselves from the criminalization that once shadowed their work.
Names like Save1, Poest, and WebONE serve as both alter egos and shields, remnants of graffiti’s complicated relationship with the law.
“Graffiti was always labeled with a bad name,” said Save1, an Atlanta native who grew up near Bankhead. Within the culture, “graffiti” refers to how the public sees it, but “writing” speaks to how artists see themselves, craftsmen shaping letters, not criminals defacing walls.
“We call ourselves writers because we’re writing our names, mastering calligraphy with aerosol. The media gave it the word ‘graffiti,’ but to us it’s letter design, it’s expression, it’s identity.”
Writers still feel the weight of taboo. For decades, public perception framed graffiti as vandalism rather than art, forcing early creators to work under the cover of night.
“There’s a purpose behind every piece. It’s not destruction, it’s communication,” Save1 said
From Bronx roots to Southern rhythm
Poest, who began writing in Brooklyn in 1987, said the art’s migration south gave Atlanta its own creative dialect. “Through migration, you had styles coming down here, and people gave them their own spin,” he said. “That difference, that remix, is what makes Atlanta’s scene so cool.”
For WebONE, a Bronx-born artist who relocated to Atlanta more than two decades ago, graffiti’s evolution mirrors that of hip-hop. “I started tagging trains in New York around 1980,” he said. “Now you see it on the Beltline, in London, everywhere. There’s money in it now because it connects with younger audiences; it became part of mainstream culture.”
Yet despite that mainstream acceptance, Poest said the roots of the art remain firmly planted in Black creativity and innovation. “We don’t do enough of this because it gets whitewashed,” he said. “People forget the architects. We have to keep showing what it really looks like when we lead, to represent tomorrow.”
A living canvas
This year’s ATL StyleWriters Jam stretched across multiple Beltline sites, from the Northeast segment of the trail down to the Eastside and Ralph McGill Boulevard. Each piece, Perry said, “proves that graffiti artists can do everything traditional muralists do, and often at a higher level.”
What began in the late 1960s as a form of street-level expression in New York, where writers tagged subway carts has since evolved into a global art movement. Graffiti and style writing helped shape the visual language of hip-hop. Once dismissed as vandalism, the form now appears in museums, galleries, and city-sponsored projects worldwide.
As Poest put it, “What they see when they see us all together, they see us representing what we would love things to look like. They see us representing tomorrow.”