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No Power-Washers in Sight as Teens Take on Graffiti
A Toronto high school student puts the finishing touches on her canvas.
With all the fuss about Mayor Rob Ford’s war on graffiti lately, teaching high-school kids about spray-painting techniques and graffiti culture seems downright brazen.
But that’s not at all how Dragan Grubesic, organizer of the eighth annual Groove and Graffiti workshop, sees things at all. Or so he insists. He and the other facilitators at the event (sponsored, oddly, by the Toronto Jazz Festival) say they’re just teaching promising art students one more way to express themselves. It’s been a pet project of theirs since well before their peers’ murals became a target for elimination.
“The stuff that’s going on with the [larger graffiti] community, we try to keep that out of this,” he told us on Thursday, in front of the picture-perfect backdrop of a sunny day, a high-school soccer field, and 20 trigger-happy teenagers working on a series of large canvasses.
“This is about kids finding a positive way of doing it—graffiti is something you can do on a canvas in your backyard if you want. The negativity towards it always comes from people who lack education on the subject.”
Since the mayor kicked off his graffiti war last month with an awkward photo-op featuring a power washer, the number of businesses receiving notices warning they’ll be fined if they don’t remove offending graffiti from their property has gone up considerably. On the other hand are many property owners who welcome graffiti, and the whole issue has become increasingly fraught in the last few months. Grubesic may have a point in keeping politics out of his program, which serves 40 Toronto District School Board kids over two days at Danforth Collegiate.
About 20 students participated in each of the two days the Groove & Graffiti workshop was offered at Danforth Collegiate.
The participants who spoke with Torontoist on Thursday had no inkling such a war was underway, and no previous experience creating graffiti.
“Most people don’t really know how to do [graffiti] because there’s not really a place to do it,” said Lawrence Park Grade 11 student Mohammad Bagherbeik, age 16. An avid artist with interests that span several mediums, he said few in his generation have an opportunity to try the medium without facing trouble with the law.
And therein lies the problem for artists who gravitate to graffiti’s sprawling style, notes Evond “Mediah” Blake, one of the workshop facilitators.
“In Europe and South America, they put up big graffiti walls called ‘halls of fame’ as a legitimized area for mural art,” he said, noting nothing of the sort exists in Toronto. “When that happens, the vandalism slows down… People doing vandalism are people who aspire to write murals… Why not give a place to do that in a legal setting?”
To many graffiti writers, a freshly cleared surface is a target waiting to be bombed. As such, the City’s strategy of covering over murals has the potential to not only destroy some amazing art, but to lure lower-quality work in its place.
“They didn’t consult with the community on this, I know that for a fact,” Blake said. “I can guarantee that this plan isn’t going to work out the way they want.”
Groove & Graffiti offers chosen high-school art students a chance to spend a day with renowned aerosol artists Mediah and Elicser. Four students selected from the two-day program will create a mural with the artists during the Canada Day Shad concert at the Toronto Jazz Festival.
Photos courtesy of the Toronto Jazz Festival.