Below is an excerpt from Graffiti or Street Art? published in Boston Art Review: Issue 04, The Public Art Issue. The piece was written by Arielle Gray, with financial support from Now + There.
Driving up a rugged side street in South Boston, I see a young man standing on a stool in a vacant parking lot. He waves his hands above his head and a streak of orange appears, tinting a window-sized canvas in front of him. Entranced, I pull over and get out, watching as he uses spray paint to emblazon a vivid skyline. Artist, educator, and Artists for Humanity co-founder Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs, stands to the side, intently watching his student work.
Some would say that attitudes towards “graffiti” are changing as the city barges towards a “street art”-driven plan to restore and liven up spaces across the city. Realistically, it’s hard not to like street art—it’s bright and otherworldly, and if it’s good, it’ll make you pause and think. When street art is well-commissioned, the work is a reflection of the surrounding community while introducing something novel and new. There’s no shortage of beautiful street art. ProBlak would know—he’s created some of the most beautiful pieces around town.
However, that doesn’t mean he’s totally convinced about the aim of street art. “It’s a colorful sticker,” he says. “The art itself is beautiful. But sometimes ‘street art’ is used in the displacement process in our neighborhoods.”
Graffiti’s refusal to abide by social propriety and it’s unbridled, uncontrollable nature is why law enforcement is so keen to eradicate it. From the Berlin Wall to the subways of New York, to the once elevated Orange Line in Boston, graffiti became a way to visually reclaim space. It was, quite literally, writing oneself into existence and that, in itself, was subversive. “It was the one thing that was undeniably ours and we had it since the subway was elevated all the way to Downtown,” ProBlak says. “That was the spine to our city from our neighborhoods. So whatever representation we had culture-wise, it was there.”
Walls acted as the galleries for burgeoning artists who never felt welcome or invited into traditional art spaces like galleries and museums. Graffiti was a way to practice, to establish a presence, and to write the community’s culture and history on the walls. In neighborhoods like Dorchester and Roxbury, murals also served this purpose. “The greats like Dana Chandler, Paul Goodnight…they called themselves urban landscapers,” ProBlak points out. Pieces like Gary Rickson’s Africa Is the Beginning, emblazoned on the side of a Roxbury YMCA, memorialized collective histories of the surrounding communities of color in ways that society at large neglected to…
