Many teens who have no other creative outlets enjoy graffitti. Graffitti is really intriguing.

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!”