By: Joan Jacobson

It's no easy trip to Adam Stab's graffiti hideaway at the city’s eastern edge. Adam slips on two sets of gloves: one latex to protect his skin and a heavy pair, with the fingers cut out, to keep his hands warm.

Follow him through the woods along a stream to a railroad track, then look for oncoming trains. Tread quickly along the railroad ties to the underside of the immense spans of Interstate 95. In the morning shadows of the interstate, the sight is startling: tremendous paintings in brilliant colors cover every concrete surface where graffiti writers from Baltimore and beyond have commandeered the abutments. This museum of outlaw art runs the length of a city block — on both sides of the track.

Adam leads the way through mud, a junked carburetor and a rusted jeep skeleton. This place, he says, is known as “jeep country” for the all-terrain vehicles that etch the nearby hills.

This glorious wasteland is Adam’s home away from home.

Gingerly stepping over frozen mud and broken bottles, he fondly identifies every tag writer’s work, like a proud docent at the Walters.

One writer, he says, traveled from Los Angeles. Another, a local daredevil known as APES, used a 30-foot roller to paint his red tag larger than anyone else’s.

Adam stops at one of his unfinished paintings. Pulling the top from a can of green paint, he shakes it and gets to work.

He is as meticulous with his paint can as a calligrapher with a tiny brush. Throwing his body into each spray, he’s in absolute control of every clean line and angle, outlining his tag in 3D.

In the shadows under the rumbling interstate, he paints anonymously to his heart’s content.


At 34, Adam “Stab” is  a master of an art form for the young and defiant. This veteran Baltimore graffiti “writer” knows what it takes to be baptized in his intrepid art world: True graffiti writers must work in the anonymous night. They must be stoic when their paintings are expunged in broad daylight. They must risk arrest. But only the most faithful graffiti artists will rise up with their paint cans to write again and again and again.

Adam “Stab,” outlaw artist, has done it all.

His tag, “Stab” (not his real last name), has spray-painted all over Baltimore for the past 20 years. The letters of his tag name give Stab his artistic freedom.

Sometimes the letters are three-dimensional, as if he carved them from red and silver blocks and set them down, slouching against each other like bored teen-agers. Other times, they look like angular letters of a Hebrew alphabet, resting like brave illegal aliens on a wall of an abandoned Baltimore warehouse. And sometimes the letters undulate from rapturous arches and lunges that almost dance off the freight car he has just spray-painted.

Stab is as fascinated by his chosen art as he is by its history.

“Tagging,” he says, started in Philadelphia and the New York City subway to empower city kids too young to drink, drive or vote. Graffiti writing was handed down to Baltimore writers through a New York City subway painting crew called “Rolling Thunder Writers” when one of its leaders, a man named Revolt, came to the Maryland Institute College of Art in the 1980s.

For Stab, his graffiti name is historic. He inherited it from a graffiti pioneer when he was a teenager. And for the past two  decades, he has plastered this “tag” on public benches, giant walls under expressways, old industrial warehouses and freight cars.

Train cars are the latest illegal canvases of graffiti writers and are a virtual traveling art exhibit. Writers in other cities can see Adam Stab’s tags in their local freight yards when the cars roll in from Baltimore.

Lately, Stab has moved to smaller — and more legal — canvases. He paints on old rowhouse windows — after they have
been removed from rowhouses — and circular saw blades. He also has painted a few cars for Toyota and Nissan. (Yes, he says, corporate America has embraced graffiti in the new century.) But when Adam Stab gets the itch, he goes home to graffiti writing.

“Urbanite” recently interviewed him:


LIGHTING THE FIRE

Adam Stab: It wasn’t until I started doing graffiti that I realized what art was and what art meant to me. Graffiti was the first … creative gesture that on some level I felt deeper. I felt hotter. In terms of all it takes to initiate a kind of powerful catalyst, graffiti has been the strongest … in my life.

I was 13. I was very new to an urban environment. I had never lived in a city before. I moved into East Baltimore when I got here in ’83. Baltimore was quite an adjustment, coming from north-central Florida. When I got here, I might as well have fallen off the moon.

I went to Herring Run Middle School, a pretty rough-and-tumble school. I saw my first gun there, in science class. I was living in Highlandtown. I was being put through the ringer by not being accepted in the neighborhood. My saving grace was that my mom got me accepted to TWIGS (at Baltimore School for the Arts).

Two days a week, I’d go to this art class, and from going downtown, I got exposed to graffiti. There were a handful of graffiti writers, five or six guys on St. Paul, Calvert, Charles and Mount Royal. They had a lot of tags up. There were marker tags on bus (stops), benches, walls, alleys. When I embraced graffiti, I thought this was something I could do.


A SENSE OF DARING

The illegality of it I think got mirrored for me in being so young. When you’ve got some adolescent boys and even girls – we had female writers willing to hang out all night until the sun came up – it was more of an encompassment of this youthful energy.

I think at the time it was important for me to join in and to actually conform to a group of artists who I saw as very creative and ahead of their time in their sense of daring.

You can’t really make a name for yourself in graffiti art and you’re not anybody who is remembered unless (painting big, illegal walls) is done and unless that’s done well.

When I had my heyday in graffi ti … when I got my graffi ti crown in this town, I was a kid. I was a freshman in high school and I was really out to take the highest of risks. And I wanted the most fame for it.


ARRESTING ART

The major time they caught me was right after I turned 18. This was in '88. We set out to do a rooftop at a six-story building at Chase and Cathedral. This was one week before Artscape. It faced the field of Artscape. We got up on top of the building via the fire escape between the two buildings. We started to do our thing. We probably had about 35 cans of paint in our backpacks.

It was a really nice summer night, one of those nights when you could stay out till dawn. We were a little ways into it when the first cop showed up. We were peering over the building edge and he was looking straight up at us. We went to the opposite side of the building. There were cops everywhere. Next thing we know, they’re coming up the fire escape. We’re looking up (over) the ledge and seeing their flashlights going and hearing their hard shoes.

We jumped over the fire escape and the little alley between the buildings, jumped down a story to the next building, ran over that roof and jumped down another story to the next building. We got to the opposite side of the block and there were no cops. But it was the biggest jump yet, a good 20 feet down.

I tried to make it to Bolton Hill, but there were swarms of police. I was lying in the grass (near Maryland Institute) … trying to catch my breath and they were spotlighting over the grass. By the time they got us back, there must have been an armada of police, five cop cars deep.

I was charged with trespassing, vandalism. I was 18 and they knew who they had. The (prosecutor) wanted me to go to jail for three years. I was 18 years old and had never committed a violent crime in my life and he wanted me to go to jail for three years. But … I was (placed) on probation.


GOING LEGIT

The graffiti experience … grows in all these young artists who may have gotten their feet wet as spray painters. Some of the galleries have embraced these guys. I know people I’ve had the chance to write with and paint with who are in the Hirschhorn. But they’re still out in the freight yards and that’s the beauty of the thing.

In the 1990s, artists turned to the freight yard. There are more kids in freight yards painting on cars than there are doing graffiti in an urban environment. We are newcomers to the art that has been happening for eons in the American freight system. There have always been artists out there who have been scribing with related, repetitive designs into freight cars since the Depression.


GOING HOME

I go out if I need to stretch. I spend so much time in the studio bent over a small project. It feels so good to use my arm free and to be outside and it’s under that creative craving that I mostly respond to. When my body needs a big, physical mural painting, it’s got to go on.

It’s a dance. I’ve actually hurt myself physically because I’ve gotten so lost in the painting. My podiatrist could only come to the conclusion that I’d been doing this one stroke and spending too long down on my ankle and just zoning out.

(The doctor) said, “When you spray paint, how many low strokes do you do? How long do you sit in a certain squat position?”

I said, “Forever.”

I’ll sit there till the cows come home.



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