The world’s largest collection of graffiti on canvas can be found in Everett

“The Dogtown Collection” took decades to put together. #k5evening EVERETT, Wash. — Behind the walls of an old Masonic Temple in Everett hangs a small sample of a collection that’s the largest of its kind in the world. “Graffiti is the only art that modern North America, the United States, has put forth through the art genre to the world. Everything else came from somewhere else,” said John Carswell. Carswell began reaching out to graffiti artists in the early 2000’s after learning that decades-old works were being whitewashed away. “We would send back canvases and tell them what we were looking for. And what we were looking for is not what you’re doing now, we’re looking for what did you do? What was your most famous piece when you were getting up at 14 years old? So they would do that on canvas for us and roll it back and send it.” Now known as the “Dogtown Collection,” this assembly of graffiti on canvas prints numbers into the thousands – by works of some of the most influential artists of the last five decades. “Most people see the genre a little more like the tagging, single color, bubble letter, vandalism,...