Graffiti on the Garfield Monument in Golden Gate Park

On January 18, ARG/CS Principal David Wessel and Conservation Director Katharine Untch will speak at Zero Graffiti International, a three-day conference to address the causes, effects, and prevention of vandalism in communities. This year’s conference takes place in our very own San Francisco, where city agencies spend somewhere around twenty million dollars a year combating graffiti on buildings, buses, and public monuments.

Graffiti has implications for a range of policy areas–from education to public safety to social justice–and the conference will feature speakers from across the spectrum of organizations who have a stake in understanding what graffiti is, why it happens, and what to do about it.

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By Katharine Untch, Director of Conservation

In 1849, Dr. Robert N. Slack, a young Kentucky doctor disappointed in love, joined thousands of others heading west in the Gold Rush. He ended up in Shasta County, California. In 1852, in a letter to his brother, Slack conveyed the flavor of the time and place, describing a dispute with one of his creditors, who “used insulting language and likewise made hostile demonstrations.” The next day the two exchanged gunfire, and a chase ensued, with the creditor shooting at Slack while simultaneously running backwards. Slack was arrested for wounding his foe; the subsequent trials cost him “much money and trouble” before he was “honorably acquitted.”

After making a living as a doctor, farmer, and co-owner of a ferry across the Sacramento River, he died five years later at the age of 37 from “Congestion of the Brain,” according to his obituary He was interred at the Shasta Catholic Cemetery, final resting place of many of the county’s early pioneers.

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