The expansive survey exhibition “Graffiti,” curated by Leonie Radine and artist Ned Vena, begins in 1951—the year spray paint was patented in the United States. This seemingly banal technical footnote functions as a clear material marker: the pressurized paint can prefigured a wider transformation in postwar conceptual art practices and beyond. Central to this curatorial narrative is the short period when spray paint was embraced by studio-based artists in the 1950s and ’60s, seemingly drawn to its vaporous, cool finish. This was upended when spray paint started to appear on streets, subways, and bus shelters across New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia through the 1960s: a period that continues to shape conceptions of “graffiti,” largely imagined by marginalized African American and Latinx youth—the exhibition overall tilts towards this US perspective. If the modern city provides scant refuge for the politically conscious, immigrants, and the socially precarious (including communities engaged in sex work, cruising, or drug taking), then graffiti here retains its image as its persistent mise-en-scène. The poet Anne Carson described graffiti as “often ugly and usually, on some level, activist,” yet this exhibition largely eschews any overt political messaging, instead repositioning graffiti as an unconscious manifestation of a …