Keeping Track:

The political railway graffiti of IMPEACH

by Paul Schmelzer

“I want the graff points of getting up and making my name stick in people’s minds,” a Minneapolis-based graffiti artist recently told me. “I neurotically look myself up on the Internet, just like every other writer. Fame is the name of the game.”

But where this artist departs from most of his peers is that fame isn’t just about self-aggrandizement or the ego kick of “getting up.” To borrow the text of one of his massive boxcar pieces, he’s engaged in an “ideology war”— and as he becomes increasingly well known for his train graffiti, he’s using his renown to spread poetic and often political messages about poverty, income inequality, and corruption across the country.