Fostering the Creative: A Search for Identity, Expression, & Artistic Space

Abstract

The tradition of writing on wall surfaces has been around for millennia. Public and private surfaces have served as persistent canvases from the carved images in Paleolithic cave walls to the inscribed writings on manufactured hardscapes in present-day cities around the world. Throughout time, these motifs emerged from the arts, rituals, mythologies, and imagination, that tell us a story about who they were, what they were doing, and what they wanted to become. We come to know these motifs by their contemporary name of “graffiti.” The close examination of graffiti shifts one to think about the modern-day markings as illegal and unwanted defacement in comparison to the earlier notion of them being a part of the expressive form of imagination and story telling. Graffiti became an empowering tool for artists of the twentieth century. It developed as a vessel for personal and social expression and at the same time, upset traditional respects for public art forms. Individuals and social groups differentiate between their backgrounds that drive them to create marks of cultural expression and art on one hand, but the defacing of property and civic order on the other. Rather than focusing on the illegality and acts of vandalisms that is associated with graffitist’s violations against public and private property, this dissertation intends to explore the advantages modern forms of art can impose upon the troubled youth of today. This study will utilize interdisciplinary methods to focuses on reimagining the effects graffiti has on the next generation of artists. Graffiti is memory marking that infringes conventional thinking that allows others to see into one’s psyche as a portal to the physical form of expression.