Graffiti: Art Outside the Box of a Gallery or Museum

Before watching "Next: A Primer on Urban Painting" by Pablo Araveno and "Graffiti Verite", I was not aware of the gorgeous paintings that graffiti artists painted on walls. There were a lot of extremely good typography that was also painted on buildings. I believe that most of what I considered graffiti would be closer to just tagging or writing whatever, similar to what can be seen on Graffiti Bridge near the Pensacola Bay Bridge. Some consider graffiti to be a form of litter, not only because of the painted walls, but from all of the paint cans and other waste left behind when the painting is finished and the artists have long gone. They also tell about the cost of graffiti on the taxpayers, not to mention the environment. It is hard for me to see graffiti as a bad thing. This could be because those are not my walls and not my property littered with trash or my tax dollars being used to deal with the clean up.

Graffiti is a way of life based on the hip-hop movement. Timothy Werwath said that "graffiti is an indirect result and a modern response to the class struggle in America that has been going on for generations." While researching and looking for information on graffiti, I found an artist who was once a graffiti artist and while in college at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, he was hired by Coca Cola to create murals for them. Richard Coleman took the opportunity while in college to learn as many different kinds of mediums as he could. He now uses experiences from his past that have ended up taking on a life of their own. After viewing several examples of graffiti from the two videos and ones on the Internet, I believe that most of those artists should be able to have a great career in art. It is a shame that more of them do not get the opportunity that Richard Coleman received. At the same time that I can kind of sympathize with those that consider graffiti a crime committed on property, the environment not to mention the cost passed on to the tax payer, I would hate to see graffiti whitewashed from society.