A City Arts exclusive: This is how Tacoma looked a quarter of a century ago, as recorded in evocative photographs published here for the first time. Our portfolio is accompanied by an essay on how the city came through urban renewal nearly unscathed.
Is graffiti vandalism or art? Tacoma officials, community leaders and property owners are agonizing over it. Curators and collectors are wrestling with it. And everyone is aware that it’s everywhere. An epidemic of tagging has made graffiti an impossible problem to ignore and a complicated one to solve. In the first part of our two-part Special Report, we meet a crew of local graffiti writers – aerosol outlaws – as they make their way up from the underground, on an unlikely course headed towards legitimacy.
Born and raised in Louisiana and for many years a wandering soul, C. Rosalind Bell finally feels at home artistically, here in Tacoma. The author of short stories, novels, stage plays and film scripts, she is completing work on a chronicle of Hurricane Katrina survivors.
