Skills Files :
1992–1995

One of the early graffiti zines in publication, Skills magazine ran from 1992 to 1995 for a total of seven issues.

Creator Greg Lamarche made the magazine by hand—cutting photos and arranging them into collages, then photocopying or scanning the layouts into both black-and-white and full-color reproductions.

Lamarche endeavored to publish flicks (photographs) of any practitioner with real graffiti skills no matter if they were from a major city with a well-known scene or a small town. To do so, Skills relied on a constant flow of contributors sending in flicks, like many other graffiti magazines at this time. Most magazines would fill layouts with burners, but Skills featured graffiti letterforms from tags to productions, from walls to freights.

Readership spiked when music store giant Tower Records picked up the magazine for distribution in 1993, with print runs growing from 100 copies of issue 1 to 10,000 of issue 7. Although the final issue appeared in 1995, submissions continued to fill Lamarche’s P.O. box well into 1997. Some of them are on view for the first time in this show.

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