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\"A guide to the art, artists, and culture of graffiti from the 1970s to today, as told by the taggers themselves. This major co-publication with the Museum of Graffiti chronicles the worldwide graffiti movement from its birth in the 1970s, through the street and train painting of the 1980s, to its emergence as an artistic genre admired in museums and sold at auction. With hundreds of never-before-seen photographs of graffiti art from the 1970s to today, many of which have been provided exclusively for this volume by the artists themselves, the book gives an insider's view through multiple interviews with celebrated graffiti artists, including Roger Smith of Sane Smith, Hotboy Hert, DESA, Shirt King Phade, RIME, MadC, Saber, AURA, and others. Told through essays, hundreds of images, and interviews with the artists -- both the underground outlaws and the writers who went mainstream -- The Wide World of Graffiti will become the standard-bearer of the art form's history and life today, a unique contribution from the first and only museum dedicated to graffiti as an art form.\"-- Publisher's description.

More than ever education students are required to study the social context of youth culture in order to understand and design meaningful, motivational curiculum. There is a need to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to address the critical issues which confront the education of youth today. In studying hip-hop graffiti, the author explores a crucial but neglected area in the contemporary training of youth workers and educators. The author interviewed ten hip-hop graffiti writers of various race, class, and gender by audiotape and reviewed them until patterns emerged as themes, mainly issues concerning public space and community. She continued her relationship with the participants over a five-year period to observe the diversity and transformation of individuals within graffiti culture. The study begins with a literature review from Web resources, books, and subculture magazines on graffiti in order to define The Structure of Traditional Hip-Hop Graffiti Culture. This chapter lays the basic foundation familiar to all writers and points to the main issues in order to analyze how individual writers conform to or deviate from the standard subculture. The author addresses the complex issues which are layered behind a residue of illegally painted signatures, characters, and text. There is a need for the voices of young people to be heard, especially those who have found artistic integrity, and awareness of civic and political issues on their own terms. Youth are in an ongoing struggle to construct personal identities and communities that they want to live in. Hip-hop graffiti is only one example where they have created a space, within a peer-run environment, to respect and encourage their political powers, ideas, and skills. The book asks whether an understanding of how adolescents learn outside of school can generate alternative sites for curriculum theorizing.

In this study, we applied an ecosocial semiotic theoretical framework to the analysis of graffiti literacies in the Vila Madalena neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, to inquire about the nature and processes of conscientização (critical awareness) for adult street dwellers who had no or little ability to read and write (as traditionally defined). An ecosocial semiotic framework suggests that people shape their environment through the use of signs, and these signs in turn shape them as part of the complex, dynamic, and nonlinear process in which the environment and its meanings are actively coproduced. We interviewed five adults in the neighborhood community regarding their thoughts about and experience of graffiti. We also interviewed two of São Paulo's renowned urban interventionists (a graffiti gallery owner and a graffiti artist) concerning how they perceived the social and political role of graffiti in the community. Findings indicate that certain ecosocial semiotic features of graffiti art are particularly helpful in providing opportunities for conscientização to take place for the participants we interviewed. The interventionists expressed a deliberate desire to influence the social and political consciousness of community members, which they also hoped would lead to social action. All participants suggested that graffiti has become an important resource in the community, helping members engage in critical perspectives of both the immediate and distal worlds around them. Overall, examining the nature of graffiti literacy in São Paulo, how it is constituted, and how it affects community members is revealing as a process of conscientização that may have important implications for broadening understandings of praxis.

The political acts in modernity, exercised through the unions, political parties and based upon large ideological structures, begins to demonstrate more and more distance between its goals and the concerning from the people that this political system supposedly represents. Its methods and systems are no longer able to deal with two main issues in contemporary society: the dynamism and connectivity. The current political model which is articulated around parties and representative democracy has become an outdated model and has been decreasing its authority in different social contexts. Some kind of political participation of the ordinary citizen has moved away from the traditional model and is affirmed under new forms of intervention and presence in the city. This chapter aims at a political dimension of resistance and confrontation that graffiti has been exerting in the contemporary cities. By adopting new possibilities to belong to and participating in the constitution of public spaces, and by creating new devices of discursive affirmation in the city, graffiti engages in an action that has political effects. This study came from an ethnography research about graffiti's culture in a Brazilian state capital. A political dimension of art was analyzed by Jacques Ranciere's theory and the micropolitical context in contemporary cities was based on Michael Foucault's theory. The research methodology was based on the urban ethnography of Italian author Massimo Canevacci. This research was held between 2011 and 2013. The author has lived as a graffiti writer, interviewing, filming and photographing the daily life of some artists, analyzing their group relations and the process of painting graffiti in the streets. This chapter is also based upon the report and the experience of five graffiti writers. Some themes exposed by the narrative from this five graffiti writers tell us a posture of transgression and resistance against the rules established by the control mechanisms. Their speeches reveal some strategies of subversion of punitive sentences, thus exposing the inefficacy of means of control. The graffiti writers report the lack of sense and proportionality in the execution of laws, since greater crimes committed by state or by large corporations do not receive equivalent legal punishment. Artists describe strategies to be accepted and do their paintings even without authorization. In the exercise of graffiti, artists also have to deal with a hostility present in society, which often strikes against graffiti and seeks to curb it with the use of force and violence. It is necessary to face police repression and violence of the population to practice this political act that seeks to exercise a freedom of speech and participation in the constitution of the contemporary city. Finally, graffiti presents itself as a way of living the contemporaneity, establishing bonds of friendship and collective relationship, creating an aesthetic experience with the city without disregarding its ethical and political dimension.

Here he interviews 24 figures, including MCs (Big Daddy Kane, Black Sheep Dres, Chip Fu, Chuck D, Kool Keith of Ultramagnetic MCs, Kool Rock Ski of the Fat Boys, Sadat X, Young MC, Shock G, Eric B, Sticky Fingaz of Onyx), producers (9th Wonder, Daddy-O), DJs (Spinderella), graffiti artists (DJ JS-1), poets (Michael Cirelli) and journalists (dream hampton). Recurring themes in the interviews include hip-hop as a lifestyle, as creativity, politics, the hard work involved in 'making it' in the industry, music influences, homophobia in rap, the current state of hip-hop, compositional process, rap feuds and sampling. Others, such as Akrobatic, point to the lack of maturity in older hip-hop artists as a problem, and R.A. The Rugged Man points to those in power in the industry (including Jay-Z when he was president of Def Jam) as being to blame for not helping support hip-hop as an art form.

Jon Reiss and his crew travel to Asia, Australia, the Middle East and beyond, exploring the local graffiti scenes and artists. Follow-up to the groundbreaking street art documentary \"Bomb It\".

Tells the story of contemporary graffiti, tracing its roots in ancient rock paintings through Picasso to its place in hip-hop culture in 1970's New York City.