I'm inside of the 23rd Street C/E subway station with 32-year-old street artist Jilly Ballistic, and we're about to break the law. It's rush hour, right around 5 p.m., and commuters are flooding the scene. Unfazed, Ballistic readies her spray glue and tells me to calm down. I'm visibly nervous and holding the rest of her gear—cardboard cut outs of feminist icons such as Rosa Parks, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Big Mama Thornton—that she plans to paste on top of the actors' faces on an ad for the HBO show Silicon Valley. (It's a quick job because she measured the heads in advance to ensure a perfect fit.) Now Parks, Curie, and company hover above the series' slogan: "Where Everyone Wants to Be an Icon." Satisfied, Ballistic snaps a few photos for her records (and her 3,000 plus Instagram followers), and walks out. No one's the wiser.

Courtesy of Lady Pink

"You have to be careful about who is on the platform and the timing of trains," she says. "Once you start, you can't stop. You are waiting for that right, exact moment."

Liana Satenstein

This is what Jilly Ballistic does: She disrupts existing ads, usually in the subway, and integrates photos (children in gas masks, female soldiers) to make a statement—often a feminist one. One of her favorite pieces is the "Poon Hawk," a five-foot flying vagina that she used to replace the raven in a Game of Thrones poster that reads "All Men Must Die."

Liana Satenstein

Courtesy of ELLE

Ballistic is part of a small, close-knit group of women street and graffiti artists who have managed to penetrate the competitive, rowdy, and male-dominated scene. Still, there are more women wielding spray cans these days than there were when the movement took off in the '80s. "Guys were extremely macho and chauvinistic and they fought tooth and nail not to have a girl infiltrate the boys club," says Lady Pink, who is best known for her surreal, pop-infused cityscapes. Pink won't give her exact age, but she says she began tagging subways when she was 15, after her first boyfriend was sent back to Puerto Rico for graffiti-vandalism. ("They send you back to the old country when you're bad," the Ecuadorian says.) In addition to technicolor Gothams, her work often focuses on the female form—neon-splashed figures with voluptuous breasts or legs that open to form a subway tunnel entrance.

Of course, being a female graffiti artist involves a healthy amount of risk. And New York has an entire task force dedicated to stopping vandals. "[Graffiti] is not for the genteel people," Pink says. "You have to be able to fight and carry on." To that end, police have searched her house and confiscated spraypaint cans on several occasions. ELLE, 28, another New York City-based graffiti artist, says that the inevitable clash with law enforcement keeps many women out of the game. "I have a lot of girlfriends who painted and got arrested and then stopped," she says.

Lady Pink recalls a time in graffiti's early days when being a woman graffer actually lent an edge. "Back in the day, women could be feminine and we could talk our way out of trouble. If you cried a little bit, the cops would let you go and harass the guys. You could talk your way out of certain situations by being a delicate, little girl. When I was 16, I talked my way out of a police precinct, no charges," she says with pride. "Now, that isn't going to sell anybody. Most girls today are going to jail alongside the guys—no amount of crying or begging will make them let you go."

To avoid being identified, ELLE only permits me to photograph her wearing a mask. "[Street art] is kind of dirty," she says. "It's late at night, it goes against stereotypes, and you don't want to be a jailbird and be a beautiful woman at the same time." Still, it's hard to believe that ELLE, who looks more like a friendly off-duty model in paint-splattered jeans than a graffer, has actually spent nights in the clink. And yet: "One of my arresting officers asked me on a date and gave me his phone number," she brags. "I was in handcuffs and he was holding my hand to take fingerprints and said, 'I'm so happy I get to hold your hand right now.'"

She brushes off the sexism. She has bigger mountains to climb, she says. Her Everest? A six-story billboard off the BQE. "I thought, There needs to be a woman up there [on that billboard]," she says. "If I had fainted, which I was pretty close to doing because I was so terrified, I would have fallen to my death. But I was like, 'I'm going to match this—the guys are doing it so I'm going to do it, too.' Part of it for me was about a woman putting 'ELLE' up there, like, 'Women, we're here!'"

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Images: Liana Satenstein

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