The other artists and works involved take Tats Cru, Daze and other old school artists as their jumping off points.

Glendalys Medina, 32, who goes by the hip-hop name The Shank, recalls learning graffiti by imitation. As The Shank, Ms. Medina is learning all the elements of hip-hop, including MC-ing, breakdancing, and graffiti writing. The influence of graffiti writers is apparent in her tag, Black Gold, which is an abstraction of a boombox. Unlike most graffiti tags, however, Black Gold features no words, but is purely graphic. “I don’t think of myself as a writer,” Ms. Medina explains. But she understands art as a transformative project, and as a way for her to express her identity, which is how graffiti and hip-hop functioned from the very beginning. “It’s an exercise to assert myself,” she says of The Shank’s tag. “So that somebody knows I’ve been here.” 

At the center of graffiti is the intersection of the graphic with the written word, which works by Keith Haring and Tim Rollins help explore. Haring’s collection of etchings called “The Valley,” is paired with the writing of William S. Burroughs. Mr. Rollins, a high school teacher in New York, used graffiti to inspire his students to read literary classics, like The Scarlet Letter. The protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, Hester Prynne, has much in common with the graffiti writers who came after her. She used her skills as an embroiderer to transform the signifier of her sin — the letter “A” which she has to wear for the rest of her life — into something beautiful. “The Scarlet Letter: The Procession,” which Mr. Rollins made with his students, superposes different manifestation of the letter A on a chapter from the book.

In the lobby, the museum has left out what are called “piecebooks” — blank notepads in which visitors can leave their own tags. Using the computer stations, visitors can leave their comments about the art, their thoughts on what style is and interact and participate with each other. Mr. Bessa describes the lobby as an active think tank.