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Graffiti-inspired lessons can engage, motivate, and advance every student. Whether you teach in a rural community or bustling city scene, bringing graffiti into the classroom can transform students into artists.
Relevant and meaningful content increases student investment with the material. Graffiti-inspired studies can develop student knowledge of identity, interdisciplinary content, symbolism, metaphor, and artistic conventions. Students can design dynamic graffiti-inspired work using markers, colored pencils, pastels, or paints.
Here are 6 Reasons to learn about this subject.
1. Graffiti Is Personally Meaningful
Graffiti art is found everywhere. Students and teachers can use exemplars from student towns, cities, and neighborhoods to help captivate their peers. Popular visual culture is saturated with graffiti art. Commercials, movies, music videos, and documentaries have used this art form to attract young audiences. Students of all backgrounds have been exposed to graffiti art.
2. Graffiti Is Academic
Graffiti is a combination of imagery and text. Usually, the text is a “code name,” or a unique aspect of the individual’s identity. Students can create and design their own code name to represent an aspect of their own identity. The compositions students create incorporate imagery demonstrating their understanding of symbolism, metaphor, and artistic conventions.
3. Graffiti Helps Students Express Themselves
Graffiti-inspired art provides students a safe, academic way to help express and explore identity. Choosing a code name to display is personal, yet allows for a sense of secrecy. Seeing each individual’s work and questioning the meaning behind each piece makes for a great class discussion.
4. Graffiti Connects to Language Arts
Graffiti artists are often called “writers.” There is a interdisciplinary content overlap between studies in graffiti and language arts. Concepts such as symbolism, metaphor, and irony are applied to both disciplines. Students can show their knowledge of these concepts through their text and imagery choices.
5. Graffiti Incorporates Artistic Conventions
The three elements of graffiti are direct parallels to the first three elements of art. In graffiti, works evolve as tags, throws, and pieces. These connect to the Elements: line, shape, and form. The study of graffiti lettering can provide students access to artistic concepts. One-point perspective, overlap, and depth in space are natural conventions used in graffiti. The concepts were learned in 7th grade. Drawing techniques are used to design the imagery in each piece. Color theory is demonstrated through studying the color wheel and applying various color combinations.
6. Graffiti is Everywhere
Graffiti art provides endless ideas for students to study. Many examples are local, state, national, and global. Students who have more exposure to graffiti culture can also become resident artists and experts. That kind of acknowledgment can provide the most struggling students with a positive, academic connection to school.
Are you still on the fence about this subject?
A powerful art program challenges students to think about what they believe and what they have to say to the world. Many students can disengage with the curriculum when art education only provides “high art” exemplars that are often disconnected from their lives. The study of graffiti shoes the lives of young people who tend to favor this aesthetic and tradition. Our most struggling students, as well as our most advanced artists, can all benefit from engaging in graffiti-inspired lessons.
