Artist Statement

Growing up in LA, I loved reading the writing on the walls and made a game out of trying to figure out what a name or word said. When I decoded a word, I felt like I won.  I was also fascinated by the signs in different languages that I saw rolling through the city, from Inglewood to East Hollywood to MacArthur Park, and wished I could read them all. 

My love for language developed early on. The product of a multilingual, multicultural family and community, I was fortunate to hear many languages spoken in my apartment complex on a daily basis. As a child I learned to write in English and Armenian.  Good penmanship was a must in my family. They had no idea at the time what that would lead to.

MyRenegade KillerBeezrepresent the influences of my culture and city: graffiti, hip hop, Armenian Persian and Arabic calligraphy and iconography, Japanese calligraphy and anime, and Saturday morning cartoons. I always felt a spiritual connection with bees. They fly up to the wall while I am painting, talking about “What you write? Where the flowers at?” and “Hit me up!”. I see them as a powerful symbol of the feminine, representing dedication, unity, strength, evolution, and abundance. Bees are also misunderstood. They are viewed as dangerous because they can sting, yet they spend most of their time pollinating and feeding the people. 

When I started writing, my goal was to be the best. Not the dopest girl, the dopest period.  I only wanted people to care about how my tag looked, not my gender. Like other girls who wrote, however, I had to work and fight harder than guys for respect and acceptance. I would downplay my femininity in futile attempts to prevent or avoid sexual harassment. Determined to overcome any obstacle I was like, “I got this marker and mad styles, so I am writing on everything, and what?!” 

Later, when I began to pursue art as a profession, the stakes and gender barriers got higher. I noticed there were few to no women included in most graffiti art shows, especially no LA women. It motivated me to fly higher, to showcase, represent and document the work of female graffiti artists, and to gain more access to art spaces and resources.

The works selected for GRAFFITI are part of an evolution of an idea that began inside my mind as a young misfit girl in the streets of Los Angeles searching to understand her identity and bring the strange images inside her head to life. Since then, my bees have taken me around the world. My journey as a graffiti artist inspired me to become a beekeeper and led me to a career as a muralist and teaching artist. In 2019, combining my love for art, urban gardening, and beekeeping, I founded the art and gardening organization, Pollinator Art. We create murals, food gardens, and pollinator sanctuaries with community members in Watts, South Central LA, expanding throughout California and beyond. We are currently designing, and are on our way to building, sustainable community art spaces and ecovillages.

Artist Bio

Petal1 is a Los Angeles graffiti artist best known for her iconic “Renegade Killer Beez,” swarming across the city and planet since the nineties. Bees, calligraphy, geometry, and abstract letter formations, are the focus of her work. A lifelong love for symbolism and bees inspired her signature swarm and hive designs. She is also a beekeeper.

Petal started writing on walls at age 13. Self-taught, her arts education took place in city streets, graffiti yards, and the LA River. Her bold and distinct Calligraffiti styles are a fusion of traditional LA graffiti and gang writing combined with Armenian and Arabic calligraphy.  She works primarily on a large scale, in aerosol paint and ink. As an arts-educator and activist, Petal utilizes murals as a vehicle of expression and community empowerment. 

Notably one of three women out of 150 artists published in the Getty Museum’s first graffiti art project, the LA Getty Black Book “LA Liber Amicorum” Petal is dedicated to breaking barriers and creating opportunities for women youth and underrepresented artists. In 2013 she produced the exhibition, ICON: Exploring Iconic Symbolism in Los Angeles Graffiti Art. In 2014, Petal and her sister Blosm, were featured artists in the LA Art Show, and produced the first symposium on LA graffiti women, Las Amazonas: The Herstory of Female Graffiti Artists in Los Angeles, for the Getty “Scratch” Exhibit at the El Segundo Museum of Art.