Shelves of spray cans line the van of Menace Two and Resa Piece. Stickers and doodles ensure no space is blank. Their two cats, Rusto and Montana – named after the spray paint brands – have watched the entire country roll by.
For New York graffiti artists MenaceResa, their van is a moving studio, a home, and an ongoing project to paint murals in all 50 states.
What began as a means of going all-country for graffiti clout became a portrait of a country pulling itself apart.
“We’re slowly but surely trying to get to the soul of this nation and the root of the problems,” Menace said, “Just by going to different cities and painting things for the community.”
The original intention of graffiti was always to go all-city, said Menace, which means your name is up everywhere, in every borough, neighborhood, and corner. Seeing other writers throw up tags across the U.S inspired MenaceResa to expand their mission, too.
What started in 2023 as individual interest quickly became more about community impact. Somewhere in between Little Rock and New Orleans, the vision shifted.
“Our goal originally for this was oh, let’s go all-country for graffiti clout. But then as we began traveling, things began falling apart fast in this country. It became less of a trip about graffiti and more of a trip to meet and understand the different kinds of people in America,” said Menace.
Their murals have taken them to the hidden cracks of the country. They’ve witnessed racism and poverty, hospitality and kindness, beauty and destruction – many times, all in the same town.
For the two Asian Americans, graffiti became a lens for society.
“We expected crazy redneck Trump supporters that were going to kill you because you’re Asian,” said Menace.
Instead, in Iowa, they expected hostility and found kindness. The whole town came out to help them paint. People brought them fresh eggs. Kids helped fill in the murals.
“Going to Iowa restored a lot of my faith in this country,” said Menace.
Graffiti also brought them to places like Mississippi.
“And there, I lost my faith in America.”
They described meeting a barefoot 10-year-old boy riding alone on his bike in the middle of the night, his parents “methed out” back at a home with no running water. But the details, they say, will be in their book. They plan to document the country through the eyes of two Asian American artists traveling “during quite possibly the most turbulent time in this country’s history.”
Before MenaceResa, there was Menace Two and Resa Piece.
Resa grew up taking art classes and later worked in the fine art world. Menace started doodling Pokémon and anime characters as a kid before falling in love with graffiti.
Their parents encouraged more stable careers. Menace tried programming. Resa worked in a gallery. But graffiti was their calling.
“I liked programming, but I would wake up in the morning for graffiti. I would go to work, take all that money and go buy spray paint,” said Menace.
Resa saw Menace’s tags walking around on her lunch breaks in SoHo. In search of the artist behind the alluring “calligraffiti,” she eventually found him online, pleasantly surprised that he was Chinese.
“I never thought there were other Asian graffiti writers so it was a nice surprise,” she said.
They reconnected a few years later to paint a train. The session turned into a literal acid trip, and “that acid trip turned into, shit, we’ve been together for almost 9 years now.”
During their drug-induced reconnection, they discovered their art style: Resa’s characters and portraits combined with Menace’s lettering became MenaceResa.
“I kept a book where I had very ornate handstyles and most people couldn’t read that stuff. She was able to read every single one,” said Menace.
They were the same person in two separate bodies, he said, and their styles represented the “yin and yang of the aerosol art community.” On one side, he explained, is traditional graffiti lettering, your bombers and vandals and the culture of tagging. On the other is “street art,” more fine art, non-letter-based or landscape-like work.
“Our job is to pull these two sides together and use the most positive elements of both in such a way that we can uplift communities, which is the primary objective of street art.”
Their first home on the road was an old “bingo house bus” they flipped. After four years, the shuttle was “so rusty that I was able to pull the mat up of my driver’s side seat and put my foot through the floor and touch my tire… on some fucking Flintstone shit,” Menace said.
Now they have a swankier Sprinter van, “floating around,” and painting murals across the country.
Most of their work is free community murals. At each stop, they research local history, talk to residents, and build the art around the place. Depending on “the vibes,” they’ll paint tributes to local heroes, like the Little Rock 9 or MLK in Little Rock, or in more “whimsical” places like New Orleans, they painted gators wearing voodoo hats.
“Once we leave the community, it’s the community’s art,” said Menace. “We want them to enjoy it and preserve it however they want.”
They even bought land in Missouri, drawn to the rural, seemingly forgotten places. The Confederate flags were jarring at first, they said, but the shock wore off into more complex feelings of hospitality and contradiction.
“The ‘random flyover’ states that no one really talks about hold some of the keys to the soul of this country,” said Menace.
Unsavory encounters with police in white dominant, rural areas, two arrests, and oh, “being chased around by a crew of graffiti writers with racist tendencies,” had them questioning the project.
But no amount of harassment, danger, or legal risk has deterred them.
“There’s no time like right now in America and we are here to document this shit.”
The same issues like racism happen within graffiti, said Resa. Yet it’s the vehicle that allows us to enjoy all these different cultures.
“Local regional graffiti cultures and art cultures are microcosms of like the macrocosm of that region’s culture,” said Menace. In the South, graffiti reflects its more racial history. Go West, and it reflects a gang-driven identity.
“Graffiti is filled with a lot of filth. It’s filled with a lot of grime and drugs and death and decay and sadness. I’m able to see both sides of America. Every beautiful part in this country has some underbelly that can be explored through graffiti,” said Menace.
But their work is more than a quest to understand the U.S. It’s also about “changing the vibes of whole communities.” It’s about adding color to a place that normally wouldn’t have any.
“Art should be doing something,” Resa said. “It’s not about the money. It’s about the message – the impact and the influence.”