Archival pigment print on Sunset Cotton Etching Paper
$500–$900Price range: $500 through $900
Blackbook II is made from a trompe l’oeil painting of Daina Higgins’s graffiti blackbook from the 1990s. A blackbook is a black-covered sketchbook that graffiti artists use to sketch and practice their tags and pieces — used in landscape format to mimic walls and other surfaces, its dark cover concealing what the artist is drawing.
Signed, numbered, and dated by the artist. All Haystack editions come with a Certificate of Authenticity.
“I carried my blackbook and a set of pencils with me everywhere as a socially awkward teenager in Ohio. At parties I sat on the couch and buried my face in the sketchbook.”
— Daina Higgins
About the Artwork
Blackbook II is made from a trompe l’oeil painting of Daina Higgins’s graffiti blackbook from the 1990s. A blackbook is a black-covered sketchbook that graffiti artists use to sketch and practice their tags and pieces — used in landscape format to mimic walls and other surfaces, its dark cover concealing what the artist is drawing.
Produced in collaboration with the artist and Forth Estate at Axelle Editions — a renowned printmaking studio active from 2005 to 2015 — Blackbook II is an archival pigment print, digitally printed using a lab-calibrated inkjet with pigment-based inks on 100% cotton paper. The smooth texture and purest natural white tone of the paper allow every visual subtlety and tonal transition in the original painting
Curator's Note
Blackbook II shows two pages open-faced. The top page reveals the bleed-through of a paint marker fill-in by Orse (RIP) — a legendary figure in Columbus’s graffiti underground, whose tags and pieces across the city’s walls, trains and rooftops throughout the 1980s and 1990s shaped an entire generation of writers. Here, Orse shouts out three names: fellow legends FLIP and CREAR, and their crew WHAT (We Hate All Toys) — a roll call that reads today as a document of a scene that was vibrant, tightly knit and largely invisible to the city around it.
The bottom page is a sketch of a piece Higgins painted in the Smith Brothers Hardware building in 1996 — as part of a storied graffiti battle with Metro, one of the defining creative rivalries of Columbus’s graffiti era. Executed in the trompe l’oeil style — French for “deceives the eye” — the print has the appearance of an opened sketchbook, with great care taken to depict the layers of marker within. Higgins flexes highly technical painting skills and mark-making, with near-photographic depictions of pocket-sized graffiti, thoughts and coded messages. Together, these two pages preserve a chapter of Columbus history that was never meant to be preserved — and is more vivid for it.
About the Artist
Daina Higgins (b.1979, Columbus, OH) is an urban landscape painter and graffiti artist working in oil and water-based media. Her subject is the vernacular American landscape; depicting the built environment illuminated by natural and artificial light.
