Graffiti icon DJ Agana has spent decades transforming walls into windows—sharing stories of sisterhood, resistance, and radical empathy.
Vanessa Solari Espinoza, also known as DJ Agana, always loved to draw. She painted graffiti for the first time when she was 10 years old, tagging in the street, but her artistry shifted when she participated in a community service program called Visual Elements at age 20. Through the program, Espinoza learned how to paint graffiti murals and collaborate with community artists, “but more importantly to put a deeper message in your artwork,” she says. “I quickly found out that it wasn’t about painting something pretty. It was about: what do you have to say with your artwork that can influence the way people think, feel, or move about the world?” Since then, Espinoza, a Bay Area native of Venezuelan descent, has worked as a youth visual art coordinator, curated public art projects, and has continued her career as a multidimensional contemporary artist.
Working in an androcentric industry wasn’t always easy for Espinoza, but “it’s been a beautiful struggle,” she says. Fourteen years ago Espinoza formed Few and Far Women, the West Coast’s first all-female graffiti artist nonprofit. “It’s definitely been one of the most incredible experiences to grow a sisterhood with so many beautiful women. We challenge each other, we make each other better, we support each other, we give each other advice, and we laugh so much together when we’re painting.… It’s nice to be able to express our femininity…within a male-dominated art form,” she says. At Paint Lewis last year, an annual graffiti and hip-hop festival in St. Louis, around 45 women associated with the crew painted a 550-foot graffiti wall with a bright yellow background—“a world record for the largest female production ever,” says Espinoza.
The Paint Lewis wall is just one of Espinoza’s prolific works. She also created a mural for the SF Giants, two Bruce Lee murals for the Chinese Historical Society Museum, and a mural of La Doña in the Mission in San Francisco. Most recently, Espinoza worked with the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, founded by Steph and Ayesha Curry, and Kaboom! to create new playgrounds for Oakland public schools. The first school Espinoza worked on, Franklin North Elementary School, was a particularly special project to Espinoza, a mother to a now six-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter. “Having the personal experience of my daughter being at one of the schools was really cool because I told her when mommy’s not there with you at school, it’s like you’re wrapped in my love.” Since then Espinoza’s artwork has graced the walls of over a dozen other schools and some preschools as well. “Hopefully they’ll have a beautiful place for generations to come.”
These days you can find Espinoza painting on the front facade of the Brava! for Women in the Arts building in San Francisco, as well as live-painting artists as they enter the building. “Walls and borders are built to separate us.… So when I’m putting stories and colors and imagery and messages on them, I want them to make people feel connected,” she says. “I want people to feel like a reflection of themselves in the work. I want them to feel love for themselves and the community.”
Main Image: Agana in between painting and breast feeding with her children with a Mike “Dream” Franscisco TDK cutout behind her she made to honor the legacy of the leader of the TDK crew, Dream who was murdered during a robbery in West Oakland on Feb. 17th 2000 and was one of the first graffiti writers to put political messages in his pieces.
Bruce Lee Image Courtesy Of Emma Walker Photography; All Other Images Courtesy Vanessa Solari Espinoza
