Helen K. Garber, a noirist, feels a camaraderie with graffiti writers as she and they roam the city after dark while sometimes forsaking their physical safety, to use the urban landscape to create their art. They all share a love for the city of Los Angeles. Despite their differences in age, gender and background, they were able to communicate as equals because of their mutual respect for each other as serious artists. Duce One designed the collaboration and invited Mear, Saber, Gin, Retna, Gzer, Vyal, Revok, Zes, and Cab to join him. This is the first time so many of these significant artists collaborated on the same production. Vyal gave Helen a lesson in good spray can technique and she added her own tag to complete the collaboration. In 2010, for the FADA Los Angeles Art Show, Duce again invited more writers to add their tags and Duce, Cre8, Mear and Vyal finished the piece during the art show, 3 years after it was begun. This project opened up a dialogue between Helen and these fellow artists and has given the writers a forum to explain their process. Not only do large corporations support this group's work, the writers are presently in conversation with the Los Angeles Dept. of Cultural Affairs about creating murals for the city. Instead of considering them outlaws, the city hopes to support them for creating the same type of work. - Young artists rarely tag these artist's murals because their style is well known and respected. The young, ignorant artists generally tag murals that they can't relate to in the hopes that their tag will remain longer on a mural than on a plain wall that can be simply painted over. While most view territorial gang tagging as urban blight, Helen views it no worse than billboards, electric wires, thoughtless development over the years such as fortress-like indoor shopping malls and McMansions created with lots of money, but no aesthetic sense. Imagine how more beautiful our cities can be if art programs were re-introduced to the public school system with an added emphasis on the appreciation of the urban landscape. That way future taggers, developers and landlords would create with a better understanding of design and aesthetics. Venice/Venezia  Premiered at DNJ Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2010 Venice/Venezia is a series of b/w diptychs on stretched canvas that create a metaphor by illustrating the duality of life in two distant cities that share the same name.