BLAZE: The Birth of Oakland Graffiti

Before Oakland graffiti had a history, a kid named BLAZE was already writing it.

In 1983, after seeing Style Wars on PBS, Steven Johnson began writing BLAZE across Oakland and the East Bay. What followed was a teenage education in letter structure, spray-can control, black books, BART lines, crews, yards, and the writers who were building a local scene in real time.

BLAZE: The Birth of Oakland Graffiti is a first-person memoir and visual history of Oakland graffiti from the 1980s through 1990. Built from surviving photographs, original black-book material, and decades of memory, the book documents the walls, writers, techniques, rivalries, friendships, and places that shaped an early East Bay graffiti culture.

From the 23rd Yards and Berkeley walls to the evolution of BLAZE’s lettering and layered painting techniques, this is the story of graffiti from someone who was there—not as an outside observer, but as one of the writers making it.

For readers interested in Oakland history, Bay Area graffiti, old-school hip-hop culture, street art, graffiti lettering, and the history of 1980s West Coast graffiti, BLAZE preserves a piece of a scene that was often painted over almost as quickly as it was created.