Street Art- 7th grade

Lets face it, kids are more exposed to street art than museum art on any given day. Artist have used this reality to bring their art to the people: to the streets. This unit was all about street art. We learned the difference between "street art" and "graffiti" and the history of both dating back to cave paintings and ancient Rome. 

Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of the Hands) in the Santa Cruz province in Argentina

Graffiti From Pompei

I was inspired to do this project after watching Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary by Bansky about the art world and street art. Exit Through the Gift Shop is not, I repeat, NOT suitable for students!!! I found this to show them instead:

The kids LOVE Banksy. They love the fact that he is an exclusive, elusive, top secret artist. We had several awesome discussions about vandalism, the value of art, and how art can be political. 

I made it VERY clear that I was not encouraging them to go out and make street art illegally. We even drew up a contract that they signed promising they would not use their graffiti skills for evil. So far, I have not had a problem with it.

Ideally, of course, I would have wanted to take the students out to make some real street art. I had several limitations ie large classes, lack of supplies, and lack of space to create a public work (and the fact that our school is pretty new so there was no chance in a million years they would let us paint the walls.) 

So.... I decided I would teach them to draw graffiti letters. I looked on youtube for tutorials which I modified for them. I made them use what I taught them and create their own alphabet. That process took a lot of time I will admit, but I think the practice really helped their final project. 

They had to include a gradient (to show blending), their name, and a positive character trait (I throw in Character Ed whenever possible). Oh, and all letters had to be 3-D. Here are some examples: