In this exhibition, Higgins revisits her formative roots in graffiti while incorporating its hallmark medium, spray paint, into her compositions. In the title painting, Growing Up Graffiti, a glowing neon tag beckons to us from under a freeway overpass. Its intensity is challenged by the last rays of sunset and the eye of the moon peering out from behind wisps of suggested curtains, subtly veiling the scene. Her vivid and layered approach to painting echoes the overlapping nature of memory.

Daina Higgins began her vocation as an artist in the 1990s as a quintessential outsider: she was not only a graffiti artist in her native Columbus but also one of the few young women then so engaged there. Her noirish attraction to the oblique angles and ominous shadows of a presumptively benighted urban landscape in the Rust Belt has never flagged. At the same time, her paintings and drawings have acquired the existential gravitas that comes, if an artist has the requisite talent and mind, with the travails of life, the burden of lineage, and the compulsion to reflect on them. 

Her elegiacally retrospective 2024 painting Growing Up Graffiti embeds both her creative origins and their thematic throughline. She draws as well as she paints, which allows her to get very busy on the canvas without flummoxing her audience. A forbidding gray arch beneath a city bridge catches fearless light from the Day-Glo applications of two taggers at work as swirling charcoal auras waft upward from makeshift shelters and distressed flowers to the moon, struggling to break through crosshatched, tendrilled darkness. Alongside the beavering artists are railroad tracks that gain illumination as they proceed Oz-like into the distance towards a water tower – traditionally a symbol of progress, community, and providence – blessed by a setting sun, its light unimpeded.