Graffiti Bandits!

What is Graffiti?

Most museums of art just have ancient sculptures, art, old equipment, etc others don’t. One art form comes in a way many wouldn’t think of. When the word graffiti comes to mind art may not be the first thing people refer it to. They may think about vandalism, disobedience, etc. Artist can express themselves through many different forms of art, graffiti being one of them. Graffiti is the form of writing or drawings made on a wall or other surface. it’s usually without permission and within public view .

Out with the old in with the new…

The Bronx Museum of art isn’t any ordinary museum. It doesn’t have any of the “boring” stuff regular museums usually have. This museum is an American ethnic establishment filled with graffiti and photographs from earlier NYC times. It was founded in 1971 later turned into an art museum by the early 80’s. Graffiti reached NYC by the late 60’s and took over the 70’s. This Site is located at 1040 Grand Concourse, The Bronx, NY 10456. The Bronx Museum of Arts is a more modern art museum. It provides a diverse scenery through its permanent collection, special exhibitions, and education programs that aspire to reflect the borough’s dynamic communities. This site shows the differences in people and how no two people are the same and it’s okay. We can all have similarities but we’re still different, we’re still our own person.

Trashy NYC.

During the time the museum came about, NYC did not look how it looked today. It was so stuffy and most areas were pretty dirty and covered in graffiti. Back then it was way easier to get away with things so the city wasn’t looking so nice.

Was it memorable?

When visiting the site, seeing all the many different graffiti art is a beautiful view. There’s different styles of graffiti and it can literally just be a huge form of doodles. One thing that I learned from the museum that stuck with me was how people would guard train tacks/lanes for their art. Whoever did graffiti would take it really seriously and one of the main places graffiti would appear at were anywhere around or on a train. Artist would designate a train lane and stick to it, they and other people would guard it like their little gang territory. Another thing is that many of the graffiti artist were actually teens. The reason to this is because once you turned 18 and were caught doing it you would go to jail for about a year maybe more depending on the situation. During the day kids would skip school to go to stores and get spray paints. By night they would hit the streets to spray paint.

Is it fun?

The Bronx Museum of Arts is overall an amazing experience. My favorite parts were looking at the the peoples graffiti art on all the trains, the different designs and all the photo graphs from earlier NYC.

Seeing this was one of my favorites because I got to walk through what NYC trains looked like from before the 2000’s. This room allows you to even hear train sounds to give you more of the feeling.

This is another room I really enjoyed. It shows all the different trains and so m,any different designs. To many, graffiti may look all the same but when you pay attention to the detail it’s all different and unique. This room also shows the photographs from NYC in like the 70’s through 90’s maybe earlier. Looking at NY back then and compared to now is so drastically different which is why I liked it. It shows how much we have evolved.