Elements: Graffiti

This week in our online classes we exlpore the five “pillars” of hip hop. Today: Graffiti! Graffiti artists literally make their mark on the world by making designs or graphic signatures on the wall of a building or another public surface. Graffiti has existed in one form or another for thousands of years — ancient Romans got a kick out of carving signature images onto walls or on monuments — but it really became part of the American landscape in northeastern cities like New York and Philadelphia in the 1970s. There, young artists, primiarly from African-American and Latino communities, took aerosol spray paint cans to the streets — or, more literally, to the walls, and subway cars, and bridges — and announced their existence by “tagging” the heck out of their landscape. Though the powers that be often dismissed tagging as an annoyance, even prosecuted as vandalism, as early as the late ’70’s the “high art” world began to recognize the expressive merits of the form, making artsy celebrities out of graffiti pioneers like Lee Quinones and Fab 5 Freddy. The  1983 PBS documentary “Style Wars” and grafitti-swathed videos for early hip hop hits like “The Message” rocketed the art form into the musical and pop culture mainstream.