United Graffiti Artists


United Graffiti Artists was an early American graffiti artists collective, founded in 1972 by Hugo Martinez in New York City. Martinez, then a student activist at City College of New York, organized a group of teenagers who had been tagging the subways into a loose collective, formalizing their work and paving the way for commercialization. In September 1973, UGA organized the first ever gallery show of graffiti at the Razor Gallery in SoHo.
According to some sources, the artists of UGA elevated the profile of graffiti, bringing it from the subways and the streets to art galleries and studios. A 1992 technical report by the United States Forest Service credits UGA for being one of the first attempts "to organize and legitimize writers as artists." MIKE 171, an early UGA member, said in 2019: “We were the first ones to take it from the streets to the galleries and then from the galleries up to Broadway shows. We were the first ones to make it go commercialized in a sense, because we got paid to do shows, then we started selling our canvases."
Early members of UGA included PHASE 2, SJK 171, TAKI 183, HENRY 161, and MIKE 171.