Rebel art steps out of the shadows this summer in the Paris suburb of Bagnolet with an annual graffiti fest. This year’s edition spotlights women “writers” who are making their mark in a generally male dominated medium, whose main figures include Chilean artist ACV and Tabu from Japan, as well as Cope 2, Zori 4 and Lady Pink from New York.

Sandra Fabara, or Lady Pink, the sole woman graffiti artist of the ’80s hip-hop generation to emerge from the New York scene, is now a living legend and one of this festival’s stars. “The night belongs to men,” Pink recently observed “when I began in the early ’80s, there were 10 000 male graf artists and myself, one lone woman...”

The idea for the fest started several years ago when the Association Kosmopolite was created by uniting two groups of taggers, MAC and DOUZE 12. It now receives municipal funding from the town of Bagnolet for the festival, which creates a mural by invited artists as part of an ongoing collective performance. This time ’round, participants are to create large-scale works on public “painting cubes” in a street-party-like atmosphere, pumped up by concerts and film screenings, while Martha Cooper and Kriss Monfort, who have both spent over three decades documenting the evolution of graffiti, have curated a photo exhibition to be seen at the Kitchen gallery/bookstore. 

“It’s a difficult field for a woman,”says Pink. “There’s a lot of manual labor, physical risks and the attitude that women are too weak and therefore a liability, or the attitude that they just can’t do it. I was 15 or 16 at the time and I didn’t want to hear that. It’s hard for a girl to be a graffiti artist. You might as well throw your reputation in the dirt. Everyone thinks you’re a slut. I needed to hold my head up and prove that I could do it for other women...”

Kosmopolite’s first event was limited to a wall along the rue Saadi Carnot in a former commercial complex, but public interest quickly encouraged the this fest’s organizers to give it more international scope. Indeed, it now boasts over 40 guest artists and a diversity of styles from Europe, the States, South America and Asia.

The XXL 3D approach now identified with Hamburg actually grew-out of New York’s early ’80s  graf scene, while fluid “stylings” reminiscent of Asian calligraphy have brought fresh abstract æsthetics to tags. Vibrant muralist works from Brazil have been likened to the huge frescos of the Mexican revolutionary era. Many French graffiti artists have art school backgrounds, which injects a wide range of figurative sources of expression into certain collective murals, produced on a monumental scale.

But, not everybody sees grafitti as art. The city of Paris and the RATP have been waging war on it, devoting a yearly budget in excess of 12 million euros to erasing over 2 500 kilometers of tags. To those who call writers vandals, one of the festival’s organizers responds “It’s actually a quality of life issue, which raises questions about who public spaces actually belong to... I’m more offended by a lot of the advertising that I see in the metro...”

In the meantime, in Toulouse, a new generation of feisty French women are spray-painting their way to planetary fame. For instance, graffiti artists from the Hankey Panky Girls collective, aka HPG. Women artists like Fafi, Kat, Plume and Miss Van fill the rooftops, house-boats and trains of their city with colorful “throwups” and market products on Internet websites. Fafi’s rather provocative female characters appear on Adidas running shoes for a “mere” 30 000 yen in Tokyo, or as “Fafinette” dummy toys in chic New York galleries.

Reflecting on her pioneering role, Pink comments “I try to show younger artists that with enough passion you can achieve great things.” These days, Pink continues to set an exemple for younger women graf artists, by organizing what she terms “collective jam sessions on legal walls” to create monumental murals meant to enhance the neighborhood, and avoid the problems associated with painting on public property.