Disem: Who Authorized This?

Featuring: Disem

A New Exhibition Launching during LatinX Heritage Month that Examines Authority, Identity, Assumptions, and the Systems That Shape How We See the World

After more than twenty-five years as a graffiti writer, Miami-based artist DISEM presents Who Authorized This?, a new exhibition that explores the boundaries, systems, traditions, and assumptions that quietly influence how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

The exhibition takes its title from a question the artist has encountered repeatedly throughout his career: Who authorized this? Asked while painting walls—both legally and illegally—the question has come from passersbys, curious observers, and those questioning whether the artist had the right to occupy a particular space. Over time, however, the question evolved beyond graffiti and became a broader inquiry into who establishes the rules we live by, where those rules come from, and why we accept them.

For the artist, that questioning is deeply connected to his experience of immigrating to Miami as a child and spending much of his life painting throughout the city. Rather than functioning as autobiography, Who Authorized This? draws from those experiences to examine how a person’s environment, history, Latin American culture, and lived experiences influence the way they see and interpret the world.

The exhibition brings together contrasting visual languages—including graffiti and realism, street culture and fine art, refinement and rawness, permanence and ephemerality. Rather than presenting these elements as contradictions that need to be reconciled, the artist embraces their coexistence. Together, they reflect the complexity of Miami itself: a city where cultures, identities, traditions, histories, and contradictions constantly intersect.

“Who Authorized This?” is ultimately less about authority than it is about awareness. The work asks viewers to consider the ideas, systems, permissions, traditions, and assumptions they have inherited—and how those influences may have shaped their perceptions and decisions without their conscious recognition.

Dialogue is central to the exhibition. The artist does not present the work as a definitive statement or an attempt to establish a single truth. Instead, each piece is intended to open a conversation and invite viewers to bring their own experiences and perspectives to the work.

“I don’t expect everyone to arrive at the same conclusions I have, nor do I expect my own conclusions to remain unchanged,” the artist explains. “Like life itself, meaning continues to develop through reflection, experience, and dialogue.”

Through Who Authorized This?, the artist invites audiences to pause and question what can so easily go unquestioned: Who established the boundaries we live within? Who gave permission? What beliefs have we inherited? And how might our understanding change if we simply stopped to ask why?

The exhibition was made possible by an artist grant from Zig-Zag, awarded to the artist as part of the Museum of Graffiti’s 2025 Miami Art Week Programming hosted by Shark Tank’s Daymond John. Disem did a live pitch for this concept in front of a panel of judges and ultimately took home the grand prize from Zig-Zag in addition to a billboard to promote the exhibit courtesy of Outfront Media. Additionally, the first 150 guests to the exhibition opening will receive a complimentary Levi’s® Trucker Jacket hand screenprinted with the artist’s work.