I hold a Master of Arts degree in Graffiti and Street Art.
Yes, you read that right.
In early 2007, I was looking for a topic for my thesis, and came across an article about the Splasher, an individual or group who splattered paint on street art pieces by OBEY (Shepard Fairey), Swoon, Banksy, Faile, and others.
This intrigued me, and I began reading everything I could about graffiti and street art, and the Splasher, and in 2008 my Master’s thesis Street Art and the Splasher: Assimilation and Resistance in Advanced Capitalism was accepted by Stony Brook University.
I continued reading and thinking about graffiti, and in 2009, when I moved back to Dallas, I met and befriended the founding members of a Dallas graffiti crew, who introduced me to quite a few writers local and national writers, and gave me a sounding board for my ideas about graffiti and street art.
This section of my website contains my thesis, some blog posts I wrote long ago for a defunct wordpress.com blog that I never made public, a lecture I gave on graffiti and Performance (actually, it doesn’t yet… I should put that up: it’s good stuff), and very occasional current writings or thoughts on graffiti and items of interest that I come across.
I post much less here than I probably should, given my education and relative expertise. But the whole art world—of which Street Art is undoubtably a part, and of which Graffiti is most assuredly not, or maybe it is, but only by virtue of its apparent similarity to Street Art—holds somewhat less fascination for me than it once did, so I just shoot pictures and read Quran and spend time with my darling wife instead of pursuing Graffiti further than I already did.
Stuff still pops up here from time to time, though (though I did skip completely the reports that Banksy had been arrested and identified, except he (or they) hadn’t, really… that’s how much I worry about keeping up with my Graffiti credibility, not that I had much anyway: I only knew what I read from others, never painted anything without authorization, never racked a can of paint. So most of this is mere historical curiosity.)
