JOSEPH SANTOS graffiti

After observing the graffiti art only one thing came to mind: a very good friend of mine who is a graffiti artist, legal and illegal. He shall remain anonymous. What I learned was incredible. Tagging is not art, but actual murals are some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. While I was walking through skid row, and I passed by wonderfully done murals, displaying the art of the community. Alot of these murals can be seen all around LA and people are getting prosecuted. My friend then told me of one spot in which graffiti was allowed, one wall. That is not enough I believe that LA should create more walls for graffiti all across the city. The colors in the can make the grey walls of the city beautiful. Street art should be just as respected as art you would find in a gallery. That is why I enjoyed Bojorquez’s reading about graffiti. he noted the history about graffiti and shined some well deserved arm light on it.

JOSEPH SANTOS a native son

James Balwins essay, notes of a native son discusses the issues of civil rights. He is a first hand witness to the horrors or racsism. Written in the 1950’s, James Baldwin spent about then years writing. I was searching for this book online and I finally found it “http://books.google.com/books?id=HDnxq1cyEq4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=notes+of+a+native+son&source=bl&ots=zJokBpzFPJ&sig=XKaN0ttz52zmN_qB_6EavsO6LZc&hl=en&ei=Ys6vTJeCEoOesQPdk9z8Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=falsef”
After reading, I couldnt belive how far we’ve come with discrimination and segegation. Yes, it still is not perfect but nothing in this world ever is. Let’s just be glad that the riots and seperate bathrooms are behind us. Baldwin writes “disease—cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis—which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured.’’ This is refering to the effect the whites thought of the blacks at that time. That quote hit home for me than any other.

Graffiti is Art

Graffiti is Art
From Matthew Roy

Graffiti is Art; short and simple. Tagging is different than graffiti though. Tagging marks territory and has no expression and is the antonym of a mural. A mural is a beautiful painting that is created on a wall of some sort outside to express. After reading Charles Bojorquez’s Graffiti is Art, he helped me understand the background of Los Angeles graffiti and why it exists today. How he perceives graffiti, as art really helps relay a message and not just words or a picture on the wall. Why when people look at graffiti read this as a sign on danger or threatening? In the new age, tagging is overpowering graffiti caused by the growing number of gangs and new-aged people thinking tagging is cool. I am very happy though to have seen the LA Wall and view how an activist really helped changed the way people perceive graffiti and shows murals to express and inspire a true art form. When discussing the time and effort to put into the LA Wall, having known that it helped change lives for teenagers with criminal problems and brought about art instead of destruction. So alongside Chaz Bojorquez, his nature as an activist helped influence artists and activists to promote the nature and being of graffiti installments as a prominent world expression.

James Baldwin/

James Baldwin
From Matthew Roy

In James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son gives insight into the lives between lower class citizens to the upper class citizens. The issue of race between the blacks and whites of society were thoroughly discussed in his book in the time of 1955. During the Civil Rights Movement Baldwin discusses the lives of the African American population living in a civilization that focused on racial discrimination. Through his book, he described the impact and possible future changes in years to come and the chaos still erupted in times ahead. One of James’ most known quotes exclaims, “All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive.” Baldwin’s tough lifestyle as an African American writer helped him use personal experience to express his activism and attitude on society through writings. One of his personal experienced was set in a restaurant where he was given poor customer service because he was an African American. Acts like this help him to express prejudice through analysis and understand how it forms. As an activist, James Baldwin helped to spread his wisdom and expressions to bring up the chaos and calamity of racial prejudice.

LAPD

LAPD / from Matthew Roy

Going to Skid Row really got me up and out of my box. Going from Valencia to Skid Row really changed my view on our social structure and shows how the lives of the less fortunate can be. Los Angeles Poverty Department really showed me how much change can happen and how the activists helped people changed and better their lives. Being the leading and most rehabilitative group in the United States, this shows how the group can change a person from Skid Row and get them up and back on their feet. It’s amazing how much effect ordinary people are willing to do to act upon this poverty circle in downtown Los Angeles to help troubled citizens from the area of Los Angeles to help install change. This homeless neighborhood has a department that offers the choice of change while also using art and theater to express the past, present, and future of these citizen’s lives. After viewing their many theatrical performances of their life’s experiences, these acts gave my knowledge to the lives they left and the present they have come into with LAPD. Thanks to LAPD, the poverty department has changed and saved lives by giving people encouragement to have dreams, goals, and aspirations.

Graffiti is Art

The impression by communities today that graffiti is the defacement of property, and a bane upon the urban landscape is unfortunate. Of course it is understandable when the work emits racist comments, or other socially inappropriate messages, however in reference to Bojorquez’s style of ‘Cholo’ graffiti, how can a community, or government ban the work, or paint over it. Graffiti is more than a set of words on a wall or building it is a form of personal, communal, and historical expression, to cover it up is to deny that the person/people who put it there, and their histories can be covered up to. You would not put a sheet over “The Last Supper”, why paint over a piece of graffiti. Not only that, but the amount of money that is spent on covering up this art work could go to something of actual importance such as the homeless. Also when a city is created of boring grey buildings, would it not be beautiful to walk through colorful buildings? Colorful because of artwork, history, and personal expression, a city created by the individuals who inhabit it. I question this within CalArts, when there is a school filled with talented artists, should not the entire thing be covered with artwork? Instead when you enter the building it looks more like a clinical institution. We need more than the sublevel.

Graffiti is Art! - Bojorquez

It is interesting for me to talk about graffiti because I was one of those people that judged it and many times considered it vandalism. As years passed and I immerged myself in the arts I stopped judging it and started to question. When I experience it now, I feel like I’m having a conversation with the artist because I know that he is telling me something and the way I interpret each shape, each color, each detail is my response to it. Like I judge any other art to be, graffiti is a mean of communication because through it you’re able to transmit a message and at the same time imprint your personality, opinion, voice, background, and technique. It finds it’s way to our lives making use of the chaotic city we live in. It spread itself through buildings; it jumps in front of our eyes while we’re blindly driving. I quite can’t image a city without graffiti anymore, because if I do, I inevitably imagine a community that does not have a voice and hide itself behind those walls. How beautiful it is to hear the city speak. To see the wall smiling or the highway shouting at me. Graffiti now colors my world, points at my world and many times questions my world challenging us to do something for a change.

Paula Rebelo

LAPD

Although I was expecting to hear more from the work LAPD has been doing with the members of Skid Row’s community, I was still excited to experience what they shared with us. The enjoyment, pride and respect with which they would show us their work, was noticeable. A good example for that was the filmmaker who presented the documentary on Romania. He confidently shared his story and his achievements and even challenged us as to whether or not we were artists ourselves. LAPD provided the space for these people, who have been shut down and oppressed by society in so many different ways, to speak up and find their space in the community having voice through art. And that’s my personal goal as an artist too: to be heard, to be able to change myself and others, to have an effect in the community I find myself in, to keep moving forward, to move people (physically and emotionally) and in my opinion that’s exactly what they have been doing. It allowed them to change their lives, come together and express themselves and if ART had that dramatic effect in their lives and in their sense of community, I wonder what it can or should be doing with mine.

Paula Rebelo

Gaffiti Art

Bojorquez's piece made me think back to a conversation I had with a colleague of mine while touring through Latin America. Especially as we traveled through Mexico City we saw a vast array of Graffiti from people tagging to expresartemexico sponsored masterpieces. After talking to some of the locals about the artivism that is going on with expresartemexico it is hard not to support a cause that keeps kids away from drugs and violence by funneling what is inherently art into a more "mainstream" idea of art. While I agree to some degree with many people who have written about how tagging simply a gang sign or name isn't art I think there is something to be further explored in this. Something is motivating this person's choices to put anything up for people to see, the color, the scale, the location. While I hate the ammount of pointless defacing that arrises from this there is an amazing amount of freedom that can arise from literally anything being a potential surface. Ultimately art is about expression and there is no doubt that the people creating graffiti are expressing themselves through their medium to convey emotion.

Graffiti

Bojorquez's piece on graffiti brought up some interesting arguments (all be it, made countless times before) about graffiti and it's relationship to the art world. It would be hard to deny that graffiti is an art form, it has visual appeal and displays a form of human creativity (so according to Webster's dictionary, yes it is art). But as with all art forms, context is everything. The Greal Wall of LA is tastefully created (with, of course, the obligatory political motives, that can easily be forgiven). The piece is rich in history, and the process of the piece's initiation is just as beautiful as the final product. When is graffiti art and when is it a nuisance? There's the obvious answer of gang tags being nuisance and commissioned murals being art, its the pieces in between that aren't so defined.

LAPD

The LAPD is a unique and powerful group of homeless (and former homeless) individuals that use performance as a means to build community within Skid Row, a homeless district of downtown Los Angeles. These pieces are meant to allow the performers to display their hopes, dreams, pasts, and futures to an audience that may not be familiar with the lives of those who live in and around Skid Row. Most people have a preconceived notion of what Skid Row is, mostly drawn from how homeless districts are presented through media and entertainment ( see Little Shop of Horrors,

Downtown

Where the folks are broke.

Downtown

Where your life's a joke.

Downtown

When you buy your token,you go

Home to skid row.
Downtown
Where the cabs don't stop
Downtown
Where the food is slop
Downtown
Where the hop-heads flop
in the snow
Down on Skid Row)

However, groups such as LAPD are trying to change this notion of Skid Row. LAPD isn't creating a community in this neighborhood, its bringing to light the fact that these communities already exist, and that they should be supported.