[Alan] My name is Alan Ket, and I'm the co-founder of the Museum of Graffiti.
[Allison] Allison Freidin. I'm the co-founder of the Museum of Graffiti in Miami, Florida.
The Museum of Graffiti is the only museum of its kind in the world.
We give context to the walls that you might see when you walk around this neighborhood.
One of the most important exhibitions that we currently have on display is called
"Style Masters: The Birth of the Graffiti Art Movement." And that exhibition takes you from 1970
when this was an art form started by kids tagging their names on the streets of New York City, and
Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, and shows how it evolved from simple print writing on walls and on
trains to an art form that started to have style. And then we go into the emergence of these artists
into the art galleries. How did that happen? Why did that happen? You get to see original
works of art created in the 1980s. And we continue along this timeline to show the emergence of this
art form in Miami. And we go through the '90s, 2000s, now, as it moves out of New York City,
travels across the world. Here in America goes onto freight trains, and criss-crosses
all over the country, and introduces this youthful art form to audiences everywhere.
What separates graffiti from any other art form is the desire for the mastery of letters,
how to bend them and tweak them and enlarge them, and make them your own. And so when some
people talk about street art and they ask what's the difference between street art and graffiti?
Well, street art has to do more with imagery. Graffiti is about lettering.
So what we're looking at here is a site-specific mural by Defer from Los Angeles. What we teach
about every single day at the Museum of Graffiti is how looking at each one of these walls
can give you context clues to where these artists are from. For instance,
in this wall you can see how Defer incorporates inspiration of Los Angeles gang graffiti by
taking something that society typically looks at as bitter, or as violent, he makes it beautiful.
And we like to compare this, or contrast it to this wall by JonOne. JonOne was a trained
painter. He did huge pieces on the subways in New York City. And it's so important to see how
two graffiti writers who are doing the same genre of art can have such a different take.
This is the world's largest art form. It has practitioners all over the world. That
fact that it's sort of expanding, and going around the world, and very open to anybody picking it up,
and adding something to it has started to change the perception of this being purely a vandal's
movement to an art form that is celebrated, and accepted globally and desired globally.
Communities have woken up. And that's where we are today, which is that social norms, and cultural
norms have shifted. Just the way that they've done in other areas of low-level crimes, people are
opening up and seeing the benefit to including this type of art form within our country.
My personal history. I'm from New York City. I started painting in Brooklyn,
New York as a teenager in the 1980s. I painted exclusively illegally. I painted
the trains. I painted the walls and I've gotten arrested. And it didn't
dissuade me from being a participant in this art movement. As a matter of fact, it made me sort
of more entrenched. And the Museum of Graffiti today is sort of the project that I dreamed of.
And I was able to convince artists that normally would not give their artwork to anybody to
allow me to have it because they trusted me. They know me as a member of the community.
This art form has not been celebrated by museums in the past. We had to make our own museum.