This is the start for my piece. Let me know what you think...and let me know if this isn't' where I'm supposed to post it!!


“Cornbread[+ketchup]” A woman stuck in the floor boards. She was yelling indiscernible things. A knot hole in the wood floor revealed her. The recording of her voice looped the angry cries for help. A series of suicide attempts all photographed. The collection documented both gruesome and ironic methods of killing oneself. Twenty foot high, four inch thick steel bending around itself in an elliptical fashion. Mangled car parts spray painted vibrant colors and welded together. An eight hundred square foot apartment buried entirely under three feet of soil. Rusted neon signs from rural America The date, ever so carefully painted in white on a solid black canvas. A map of the United States formed out of car license plates. A film of a woman spinning a hool-a-hoop of thorns around her waist, naked on a beach. Art. advertising Mo’s BBQ and Heineken Beer. Alias names flooding subways and city walls. New script and calligraphic styles displayed on the streets. Crowns used to proclaim writers as king. A smoking joint as the cross bar for the letter “H”. The development of scale and visual weight paired with the addition of color. Thicker letters filled in with designs ranging from stars to checkerboards. Masterpieces start to span the entire height of subway cars. Block letters, leaning letters, and Softie letters. Is it art? Graffiti movements began as early as the 1930’s in the U.S. with the Cholos of Los Angeles, but didn’t gained recognition and identity until the late 1960’s. Old school writers CORNBREAD, JULIO 204, and Taki 183 were amongst the first of these artists to give birth to the underground art movement in the boroughs of New York. Early writers targeted the subway system, using it as a line of communication between the different movements surfacing in the five different boroughs. Their tags became a symbol of presence and identity; the more “bombs” a writer completed the more recognition and status he would gain. Writers joined together and the styles began to form as one crew of writers pushed to out perform the other crews. By the mid 1980’s graffiti culture turned to embrace the physical strength, territory, and unity of gangs. The climate on the streets between crews intensified and “cross out wars” became significantly integral amongst writers. Since increased efforts from Transit Authorities, writers have turned to the streets targeting highways, walls, rooftops, and trains. For some writers, graffiti is an outlet of expression, an opportunity for the individual to make known his or her fears, hopes, and dreams. For others, it’s a territorial game; a challenge to see how many times one can tag and escape authorities. Still others see it as a means of seeking revenge from oppressors and the society that turned its back on them. Coda, a 21 year old writer from Philly said: “Basically, when I look around, I see us living in a modern day Babylon, full of temptation, sin, distraction, corruption, injustice, and misguided fools being mentally enslaved. It seems to me the only way to wake people up from this kind of numbness is to destroy what they know: their business, their places of commerce and their biggest place of gathering, the cities! Put it on their trains, on the lines they take to work, on their rooftops, on their highways, on anything just to make some people realize that culture isn’t lost and that, at the very least, a small group of kids is fighting to keep it alive.” Maybe this form of art is a documentation of the present cultural thinking. The images engage in a dialogue with the textures of the city streets. Is it something that should be painted over and fought against? The U.S. government is still facing legal battles with numbers of Native American tribes. While the issues of debate vary from region to region and tribe to tribe, the undercurrent of most of these disputes is a struggle to preserve a disappearing culture. The oral language is dying as the number of native speakers dies alongside, and developers are bulldozing burial sites and religious grounds to make way for new ski resorts. The history of these cultures heavily depends of the sacredness of the land; the earth is the written book of these cultures and we are too quick to turn our heads. Perhaps these graffiti writers, from the city streets, are spraying a timeline of our current culture. Are they defacing property? Should we wipe clean a mural that took 8 hours and 30 cans of paint; a composition that expresses an individual’s thoughts and criticisms?