-City walls are constantly talking to us, and the artists who write on them are changing how we see the world.

-As one of hip-hop's central mediums of expression, graffiti has transformed the landscape of cities and communities across the world.

Its rebellious spirit and aesthetics spread beyond city walls and subways to album covers, fashion, and fine art.

-Today, we're talking with award-winning artist Patrick Martinez.

He went from tagging the streets of LA to showcasing artworks in the world's most established art institutions.

We want to know how Los Angeles inspires his work and how he uses his art to generate social awareness.

Patrick Martinez creates paintings and mixed-media installations that rethink the possibilities of city life and culture.

His work as an artist is shaped by his earlier years as a graffiti writer on Los Angeles' East Side.

-The spot we're going to right now, I have in mind, because there was a graffiti yard right off the 7th and 3rd way.

It was called the panic zone.

-Panic zone?

-Yes, because all the Hazard gang is there.

As teenagers, you would want to be seen in different parts of Los Angeles, so that was one spot you can get without getting harassed too much, either by cops or gangs or whatever.

-Were there certain things you would notice just in terms of differences, both neighborhoods looked, communities looked?

-Yes, definitely with the graffiti.

Once you're in the yard, you read between the lines and understand what the dynamic here is going.

In terms of different cities, yes, they would have their different aesthetic, color, facade, textures, things like that.

-All these places where art was not imagined as being part of their function, the young people repurposed it.

-I think so, yes.

-A chosen one.

-It was like connecting with people in different cities and painting with them.

That made you think, and it would make you pay attention.

-As a teenager in the '90s, Patrick lived through a rapidly transforming Los Angeles.

Massive demographic shifts, widening wealth disparities, and racial tensions changed LA's visual landscape.

For many communities hit by these changes, hip-hop and graffiti provided an effective means of resistance and response.

Aerosol cans became instruments to call out inequities and tattoo onto the city's skin the names of people and communities who were being forgotten and erased.

-These are just photos of back in the day.

That's at a graffiti yard.

The only reason I have that photo is because we had a substitute teacher in high school, and these are all my friends that I used to roll hard with.

He was just overhearing us, and we were drawing in black books, and he was like, "Man, you guys do graffiti?

Let me shoot you guys in your element."

We never saw him again after that.

He gave us the photos, and they were pretty dope.

-Was that the name of you all's crew?

HDF?

-Yes.

-That's dope.

-Early '90s, my brother was out there in the streets just writing on everything.

I got that LA, San Gabriel Valley, tagger culture.

It really resonated with me.

That's how it got started.

I was always drawing before that, and then I started painting around 1991 or '92.

Simultaneously, I was checking out these art books, these Spraycan Art, Subway Art from the library, where no one stole it.

You had it in hand, you're like, "Wow."

It was like reference guide, like who's doing what in New York.

-Modern graffiti was born in the late 1960s among Philadelphia and New York City youth who used subway trains and city walls as billboards.

By the early 1980s, graffiti became ingrained in global culture.

Much of this was the product of films like Style Wars and Wild Style.

West Coast writers like Chaz Bojórquez and Mister Cartoon, along with collectives like CBS and K2S Crew, helped build LA's graffiti subculture.

What are these?

-These are black books from the '90s.

When I was a teenager, I would work in them constantly.

Lots of names, people writing in my book, thoughts and ideas, sketches.

You do a drawing, and you think maybe it's half good or maybe it's something I want to paint on a wall.

-With graffiti and Spraycan Art, it seems like part of the work, even before creating the piece, is like being able to see the city or pick spots.

-It takes a lot of discipline to be able to be a teenager and figure out and organize your colors and your sketch, and then figure out, "Okay, so who am I speaking to here?"

Not that I was articulating it like that, but if I'm doing a piece in the graffiti yard, I'm speaking to those people in the yard.

It's like a gallery.

It's just the subculture, hip-hop, through graffiti and through Spraycan Art, Subway Art, and how DJing, MCing, and break dancing.

All those things were in conversation with each other.

In City College, I was already experimenting with trying to make money off of what I knew.

I thought that it'd be nice to do a lot of the album covers for a lot of underground rappers here in Los Angeles.

I was doing stuff like this, a 12-inch vinyl single, but I drew all this out.

You know what I mean?

That's all hand-drawn, and then you just arrange it.

I did that one with B+.

He was working on a Quantic project with Stephen Serrato, and they had this idea for a neon being on the album cover.

I was like, "Oh, what's the album called?"

Magnetica.

I was like, "I think I could do something with that."

This is what I came up with.

It was a way for me to make money, to just do these illustrations for magazines.

I painted this cover for RIME Magazine.

It was big news.

They just needed it.

-You painted this cover for RIME Magazine.

-Yes.

A two-page spread I did for XXL back in 2004.

-Check that out.

-I never get to show people stuff like this.

I still have it.

It's weird.

I would have never guessed.

-I probably saw this image.

We were talking about this earlier, but one of the important entry points and ways of connecting, engaging, and being involved in hip-hop culture was print journalism.

For so many of us, it was not just about the music.

It was about album covers.

It was about the articles.

We got to hear from the artists, as well as the people who were critics and commentators on the culture, and as well as the imagery.

Patrick's experiences as a graffiti writer and graphic designer in the world of hip-hop inform his current-day creative practice in the world of fine art.

Just like the tags he painted on walls as a teen, the artworks that he creates today are informed by the changing landscape, architecture, and imagery of LA.

-As a teenager, I was already traversing the landscape in a different way via the bus.

I was going to friends' homes in different parts of the town, going to paint graffiti with them locally in their area or other places.

We would see different parts and understand how that area was developed.

What I see in those different pockets, I'm thinking about it as a landscape painter.

People aren't highlighting these areas.

I'm going to highlight them in a new way.

I'm thinking about the materials that they offer, the colors that they exude or that spill out of them, the textures, the graffiti.

That's how I approach my work now, just obtaining materials that you're not supposed to make artwork with.

That's what graffiti was.

It was like you weren't supposed to be doing any of it.

You weren't supposed to be using paint from the hardware store.

You're not supposed to be painting on walls.

You're not supposed to be painting on the sides of trucks or rooftops.

The work that we were painting, the letter forms, and the characters, what would they be used for?

There was no end result.

What is this going to turn into?

It's like, "No, I just want to make a painting on a wall for people to enjoy or whatever."

The stories that live in the layering of the walls, I think about collaging them together like a tapestry, almost thinking about it as an archive, and archiving those things away in the paint.

-Another important element of Patrick's artistic practice is creating works that draw awareness to societal injustice.

For Patrick, art isn't simply about creating something unique.

It's also about illuminating the struggles and radical possibilities of the past and today.

Art exists in the institutions that have been culturally constructed as where art lives and breathes.

It feels like your art, while it exists in museums and galleries, you've also found ways to produce work that lives and breathes in people's hands, extensions of the articulations of people who are calling out societal injustice.

[music] -The work pushes back, and that's what I wanted to do.

I live in the real world.

I don't live in the art world.

I also want the work to be activated by what it's informed by.

Making prints that bridge work that's being made to show in a gallery or a museum to people that aren't even going to those shows is something that I've always thought about.

Maybe it comes from graffiti.

Maybe it comes from street team stuff that I used to do back in the day or whatever.

I've always wanted to try to extend my hand out.

If I'm conscious about the past being erased, I'm thinking about the present being erased as well.

To be able to use the work that I'm making to respond to that is something I'm already set up for.

I've been doing that, and that's what graffiti's supposed to be, is that pushback, that renegade culture.

I'm extending my hand out to the public and trying to get them to be engaged with art and be engaged with, whether they like it or not, a message that they might think about and take home.

I think art can do that.

It can be a placeholder or useful language to push back because it's something that we need to continue to do, because as things get stripped from us, if we don't, then they will continue to take more from us.

-As Patrick explains, art has the power to stop us in our tracks and tell us to slow down and pay attention to the world around us.

-The next time you see graffiti painted on a freeway wall or a building, ask yourself, "What is it saying?

What is it trying to teach me?"

Thanks for watching Outside the Lyrics.

-Make sure to like and subscribe if you want more stories about how different communities shape music and how music shapes them.

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