Builders by trade.
Writers for four days.

LiUNA!'s 27th International Convention, Las Vegas. We ran the entertainment room with one job — get the members creating. Three Las Vegas writers worked the room with us, and the members did the rest.

The Laborers' International Union of North America has represented construction workers since 1903 — around half a million members across the United States and Canada. These are the people who pour the concrete, run the jackhammers and build the places everyone else just shows up to. From September 21 to 24, 2026, LiUNA!'s 27th International Convention ran in Las Vegas, and Graffiti+ was invited to run the entertainment room. The brief was simple: get the members creating.

We brought in three Las Vegas graffiti artists to represent the city's talent. They worked the room alongside us, and their presence did exactly what we hoped it would. Members who hesitated at first picked up the spray can — and then most of them stayed to paint.

The centrepiece we built for the room put their trade on the wall: LiUNA! spelled out in a hard hat, a jackhammer, crane hooks, a Jersey barrier and a work barricade, waiting to be painted into. Over the four days the members filled the rest — local numbers, trades, names, whole burners. One member put his local across the wall and stood in front of it for a photo. Everyone who painted was honouring their own work, and the work of the people around them, through art.

The room put LiUNA! members and Las Vegas's graffiti scene in front of each other — and that's a bridge worth building.

Shout out to the three Las Vegas writers who worked the room — @enok_one, @Spen.1 and @metagear2600 — and to the members who stepped up and held their own: @ramosrenditions, who put up the superhero character, and @Rbee79, whose LOCAL piece ran the full height of the wall.