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Mural in progress - via aloveletterforyou.com

Steve Powers is giving graffiti a good name. Which maybe it doesn’t even want, but the veteran writer spent enough years sneaking around back alleys and climbing onto rooftops that perhaps he’s earned a degree of creative wiggle-room in the sometimes militant subculture. Before transitioning into more of a studio artist than a graffiti writer, Powers made a name for himself under the alias ESPO (an acronym for Exterior Surface Painting Outreach) throughout the 80s and 90s, and is known for straddling the line between legal and illegal street art. Nonetheless, his latest (and greatest) project lives up to the “Exterior Surface Painting Outreach” name, perhaps moreso than any of his earlier work.

The Love Letter project, as a whole, is me trying to replenish the vast resource that I gained so much from. — Steve Powers

A Love Letter For You was a massive undertaking — a collaboration between Powers, The Mural Arts Program, and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, resulting in an illustrated love letter painted on 50 walls between 63^rd and 45^th street on Market Street in West Philadelphia. Powers told the New York Times that he was “taking the form of the murals, which are insanely powerful for all the wrong reasons, and trying to retain some of the power and use it in a really good way.”

The project is beautiful beyond simple aesthetics, and will hopefully broaden the public’s view of graffiti. Work like this is important since it shows outsiders that graffiti transcends petty vandalism or gang origins, and is an art form all its own — both the graffiti community and the general population as a whole can be proud of and inspired by this ambitious and positive contribution to the urban landscape.