The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium

Written by the graffiti writer ESPO, Stephen Powers's The Art of Getting Over is a history of graffiti from inside the culture, published as the form reached the end of its first three decades.

Powers combines a general history with extended interviews with the writers who shaped it, from the New York subway generation to the crews active in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1990s, and illustrates the account in colour with pieces, throw-ups, sketches and blackbook pages. The title turns on the writers' own term for succeeding by any means, and the book's argument, that graffiti had become ubiquitous without being understood, is made through the voices of practitioners rather than critics. The black cover carries Powers's hand-lettered title in silver.

Powers (b. 1968) began writing in Philadelphia, published the graffiti magazine On the Go from 1988 to 1998, and moved to New York in 1994. His later work moved from walls to painted signs and public murals: A Love Letter for You (Philadelphia, 2009), commissions for the Brooklyn Museum and Coney Island, and the ESPO's Art World studio and sign shop in Brooklyn. This is his first book.