Sunday, February 15, 2009

Graffiti-related odds and ends

Several interesting graffiti-related items recently came to my attention:

Check out the photo blog ATX Graffiti for some visually stunning graffiti along with more mundane street graff.

The city of Fort Worth says it's reached the end of its rope with an enforcement-only approach to graffiti, and will try "art therapy to students who are in the juvenile probation program" and more public murals to combat graff.

An award winning youth facility in Brownsville includes "graffiti art workshops" among it offerings.

A Galveston resident is angry at a specfic tagger and suggests in a letter to the editor, "Maybe the people of Galveston need to put up some 'kill graffiti artist' signs, like the 'kill looters' signs we put up after Ike."

The graff artist who created the Obama "Hope" poster was jailed in Boston.

An anthropologist told the Indianapolis Star, "Graffiti is one of the oldest forms of class-based social protest .... The disenfranchised have been making marks on public buildings for centuries."

Yarnbombing: Can knitting be graffiti?

7 comments:

PirateFriedman said...

If you tag a government sign, I don't care so much, as the government stole the money to build that sign anyway. But if you violate someone's property for your gang or your artistic expression, I hope you get shot.

Gritsforbreakfast said...

"government stole the money to build that sign" ... "I hope you get shot"

Whew, it's a good thing you're not taking any extreme positions on this topic, P&L!

Anonymous said...

The picture on the blog is not the type of graff that communities are in an uproar about.

Gritsforbreakfast said...

"not the type of graff that communities are in an uproar about"

Perhaps not, but the penalties are the same.

Anonymous said...

P and L

If taxes are stolen money, I take it you would prefer a turnpike system of roads where every landowner could charge you a fee for crossing his property?

Charles Kiker

Anonymous said...

After living in Galveston for a number of years, I've gradually realized (with horror) that there are a lot of white supremacists and KKK types either on the island, or working on the island in law enforcement while living in nearby mainland towns. Hence the desire to shoot for graffitti. You see skinheads with neonazi tattoos on a regular basis, the police beat up little black grils and then try to terrorize them with the legal system thanks to a compliant and complicit DA, Kurt Sistrunk. The KKK organizer who terrorized Vietnamese shrimp fishermen in the early 1980s was from Lake Jackson, and worked out of Santa Fe. If you go to this website and scroll down a bit you can see a photo of a Galveston County Sheriff officer in a KKK hood. Horrific countywide police brutality shows the acorn hasn't fallen far from the tree. Although Houston had a soul-searching and rooting out of KKK (kinda?) in the police, I don't believe anything similar ever happened in Galveston County.

http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=4819db071deb7

http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/thorne-dreyer-kkk-in-news-again-and.html

Anonymous said...

So they're spreading KKK grafitti?