Philadelphia: A city of art

Today brought an interesting experience in Philadelphia. A city that, as an international student, is not known for its art anywhere else in the world was surprisingly buzzing with beautiful art pieces. The Philadelphia Mural arts program was one of the most successful and powerful art programs I have seen.

A self guided tour led us to first receive a small speech on the history and the development of the mural arts program, leading to a tour around several mural art pieces surrounding Philadelphia. A key message that I retrieved from the first speech was that all the mural art pieces are picked specifically to fit individual neighborhoods and that the program works closely with neighborhoods to ensure they are comfortable with the murals in there neighborhood.

The most interesting story heard today for me was the mural of Dr. J. and even though we didn't see this particular mural, the story of the artist intrigued me. The fact that the artist wanted Dr. J. to be portrayed in a suit shows a key message that artists want to portray to the children within the city of Philadelphia, that individuals are more than what they appear to be.

Bibliography Sources

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/city-guides/philadelphia-photos-2/#/philadephia-doctorj_2400_600x450.jpg

English Roots

The only ever graffiti artist I had heard of growing up was Banksy and purely because he was the most well - known writer in England when I was growing up. During 2010 he was named one of the most influential people in the world, this shows how much of an impact his art and he as a person has had on the world over the past decade.

An article named The Story Behind Banksy explains the true story of how the famous and the mystery of Banksy started and where it is today. The most interesting component of this story for me is how influential an English born graffiti artist from Bristol has become in this world. This story truly shows how meaningful graffiti and street art can be and the subliminal message that this art can show. The image below shows my favorite Banksy piece, this is because I grew up at a time in England where football (soccer) violence was everywhere and this image portrays to me how violence isn't needed around this sport and that we should be celebrating the success of the sport not ruining the reputation of it and our country.

Bibliography Sources 

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Story-Behind-Banksy-187953941.html

Introduction to Graffiti Terms

As an accounting and finance major, my awareness and education of art in general is extremely limited but my interest in graffiti and street art is not limited. My first experience in art and graffiti art was the introduction to the key terms in street art. These terms were far different to what I used to refer to particular street art or graffiti, for example, I used to refer to all graffiti art as 'pieces' but after some individual investigation as well as an interesting powerpoint explaining the different graffiti and street art terms I realized that 'pieces' are a particular graffiti and street art that requires an extreme amount of planning as well as key execution.

So, key graffiti terms are important when referring to street art as the differences between them may only be small but the terminology for the art may change. Compare the 'piece' above to something called a 'throwie', which in the graffiti and street art world has much less respect, purely due to the fact that is seen to be less complex and have much less of a meaning and message than a 'piece'. If you refer to both images you can identify which of the two is more complex and therefore most probably a 'piece'.

Bibliography Sources

http://www.crayone.com/graffitiburners.html