I do think it’s great that writing is finally being accepted by the mainstream art world. It’s only about 20 years behind Europe. What people need to realize is that writing has had the largest impact on every visual art form, on community planners, on the social consciousness. It has compensated for the absence of arts education in public schools. It has saved lives that could have gone down dark paths. It has taken art out of institutions and into the streets, freely accessible for everyone. Young visual artists hoping to build a name for themselves cut stencils and stickers and hit the streets, because they see it as a faster way of penetrating the gallery world and living off their art.

Your site says teach graffiti classes— how do you approach that?

Nowdays I mentor individual artists ages 25-35, but they must have spent time either rocking the streets or painting community murals because I don’t want to give away the culture to those outside. I’ll coach them on business practices—how to conduct themselves and manage their work as well as helping with painting skills.

Which pieces are personal favorites? The next one.

I was the first to teach after-school graffiti classes in San Francisco back in 1993. Now many schools offer graffiti classes, murals, public art, lettering, as part of the curriculum. It may not be long before we see graffiti as an accredited degree. There’s been a big shift in the social consciousness around graffiti. People are now accustomed to it and are aware of the difference between the creation side and the destruction side. Younger people are inspired and older people realize it isn’t going away.

Graffiti has impacted every visual art form, from architecture to filmmaking. This is possibly the most influential visual art movement in the world, and the only one to go global within a 20-year span. No other movement happened that quickly. The Renaissance took, what, 150 years to spread across Europe? Graffiti has built relationships and unified artists worldwide under a single art movement.

43 www.artizenmagazine.com