Piece by Piece Short Essay

Ilene Lee
English 1B
Professor Sabir
TTH 9-10:50

Today, we watched Piece by Piece, a documentary about the lifestyles and ideals of graffiti culture. The film provided a glimpse into the secretive lives of graffiti artists and focused on the motivation of the street artists. Graffiti culture can be described as a “creative destruction”; a way for artists to express their unique sense of style through various forms of writing on public surfaces. It embodies the essence of hip hop culture through its rebellious and bold ideals. The hip hop culture started a revolution and transcended into a phenomena for minorities. Hip hop culture began as a movement for minorities to establish their names and to express their abilities with a new approach such as dance, rap and graffiti. Graffiti became the prized hobby for many to showcase their artistic knowledge and creative juices. Communities and people joined together to present their graffiti as a means to identify themselves in their city- it was their method of contributing to the community.

The graffiti movements in San Francisco and New York shared the same passion and enthusiasm from the artists. These artists devoted their time and efforts into creating a masterpiece on walls and public buildings. The two also shared similar techniques like tagging and graffiti with images to display the art. These two cities revolutionized the graffiti world by sparking talent and skills in the art of graffiti. Artists continued to set trends and styles as they displayed their works throughout town. San Francisco and New York had the best graffiti works from the very beginning and continued to expand as more artists became influenced by past works.

The graffiti movements of San Francisco and New York shared many qualities, but differences also arose from the two areas. The main separation was the laws and regulations passed to prohibit graffiti from each city. In New York, the mayor and officials felt it necessary for the city to create anti-graffiti programs to stop the continuation of vandalism in public property. People changed the rules and increased the punishment of graffiti artists who were caught. The bills and efforts that went into stopping the graffiti movement cost millions of dollars and only further proved the failed system in the city. Despite the funds that went into stopping graffiti, people continued to express themselves. In San Francisco, regulations and restrictions were not as tough. In the beginning, people had set locations where they could draw and graffiti as they pleased. It was a community for people to share their techniques and go over the works of others. Eventually this area was closed and left many artists without a place to work. This ended up increasing the areas of graffiti in public locations and sparked rage within the community. The key difference lies in the way each city took care of the situation politically.