First Post – Graffiti Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
This is my first post to ArtNewYorkCity.com and I’m kicking it off with a review of the Graffiti Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that opened just the other day.
I’m still mastering the art of adding pictures to this Blog Editor – so I’ll skip that for now.
I grew up in New York and with the Graffiti and I was surprised that it became an art movement, of sorts, but the paintings (such as they are) looked pretty good. It’s hard to tell where the technique ends and the “art” begins since all of the Graffiti art is produced with Krylon spray cans of paint.
I also watched the movie “Style Wars” that is a legendary hip-hop documentary about New York City graffiti writers. It’s interesting to note the artists were described as “writers” as their main motivation was writing their names on the outside and inside of the NYC Subway cars. The movie was good but I did fall asleep on part of it.
I also noticed the website of the Brooklyn Museum is a blog (which makes sense as it’s easy to update a blog) and there is an attempt to be viral by asking visitors to the Brooklyn Museum’s site to upload their on Graffiti Pictures to a Flickr account created by the Brooklyn Museum.
Graffiti is an important gateway for the young into the arts. I think it is excellent that the Brooklyn Museum of Art have undertaken this project.
A few years ago, I was working in a project for disaffected teenagers who had been excluded from school. None of our students considered art a “cool” thing to get into until we invited a young artist to work with them for a series of sessions. She brought along books about graffiti and the kids were interested immediately. Very quickly they were reproducing the illustrations they liked and progressed from there to original (and, for some, artistic and well executed) creations.
It was a small step to encourage this initial interest into other art forms and all of them completed the course with an appreciation of art and its demands on the artist. As the Australians would say, “Good on the Brooklyn Museum of Art!”
By Gone Away on July 2nd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Marshall, what a treat to see you in emerge another greta blog site! Congratulations — and I look forward to your posts here. I’ve bookmarked the site and will follow it with interest! It takes an expert like you to help us all to mesh together art , culture and life in ways that can find meanng even in Style Wars. I’ll be back and thanks.
By Ellen Weber on July 2nd, 2006 at 10:06 pm
Hi Marshall. Congratulations on your new blog on the arts. It’s a great fit and I know I’ll enjoy coming to visit often.
Many teens who have no other creative outlets enjoy graffitti. Graffitti is really intriguing.
By Robyn McMaster on July 2nd, 2006 at 11:07 pm