When an aspiring street artist by the name of Grafity watches the tenements outside his home being razed, he finds an unlikely canvas at the one wall still left standing in the debris. Over the next weeks, he begins creating a mural on the wall, one that chronicles the lives of his friends: a local low-level fixer named Jay who harbours dreams of being a rapper. A brilliant and awkward boy named Chasma who writes love letters between shifts waiting tables at a local Chinese restaurant. And Saira, an aspiring actress with ambitions so fierce that they threaten to consume her and all those around her. As the mural progresses, the story gives us glimpses into these incandescent lives, their hopes and dreams both inspired and impeded by the impossible city that they live in.
When an aspiring street artist "Grafity" sees the illegal tenements outside his home destroyed, he finds in the debris, a lone, standing wall--one that'll go on to become a summer-long canvas for the lives of four friends getting by and growing up in the constantly changing and challenging environment that is the city of Mumbai. As Grafity's mural on the wall grows, it chronicles the lives of his friends--Jay, a young man with dreams of being a rapper lured into the dangerous path of a gangster. Chasma, a bright but awkward boy who chronicles his struggles as an outsider trying to belong in this city, by writing letters to strangers, to the city itself. And Saira, who comes to Mumbai with Bollywood dreams but must first survive the reality in this place of gangsters, con-men, friends and lovers. As the long Mumbai summer comes to a close, hearts are broken and leaps of faith, taken. This coming-of-age tale set in Mumbai's loving, unforgiving and chaotic embrace, is a unique exploration of that entirely universal experience--the falling, soaring, the grave permanence and fleeting transience of our adolescent years. From rising comic book stars Anand R. K. and Ram V (Paradiso, These Savage Shores, Batman Secret Files). Listed as the #3 best graphic novel of 2018 by Paste Magazine, enjoy this expanded edition featuring extra content!
“Verde’s unique style and simple yet increasingly important messages of peace, mindfulness, and community make her stories a must-share...A must-purchase.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “Walls do not just create barriers and divide spaces. They can be canvases for artmaking; opportunities to shape a community.” —The Horn Book “This story of urban renewal sends a welcome double message by Verde: neighbors and neighborhoods are more than the way they look, and ordinary people can band together to transform big things.” —Publishers Weekly A boy takes on a community art project in order to make his neighborhood more beautiful in this empowering and inspiring picture book by Susan Verde, stunningly illustrated by award-winning artist John Parra. One creative boy. One bare, abandoned wall. One BIG idea. There is a wall in Ángel’s neighborhood. Around it, the community bustles with life: music, dancing, laughing. Not the wall. It is bleak. One boy decides to change that. But he can’t do it alone. Told in elegant verse by Susan Verde and vibrantly illustrated by John Parra, this inspiring picture book celebrates the power of art to tell a story and bring a community together.
“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.
Wouldn't it be awesome if you could see how the sketches of your graffiti pieces would look on a brick wall? Well, now you can! Because you can practice your hand style and design your own graffiti masterpieces on the 50 brick wall graffiti sheets in this street art sketchbook! But, if you'd rather practice some of your tags, throw-ups and wildstyle creations on blank white sheets of paper - no problem! Because each page is single sided, giving you over 50 blank pages to sketch on too. So what's the main features of this graffiti blackbook? Well, you get an incredible: 50 brickwork pages (10 different grayscale designs, 5 of each design) Single sided pages to prevent bleed through 80 colors can be tested on the 2 color test pages "Pieces By" page so you can lay claim to your graffiti blackbook And don't forget you can use the "Look inside" feature to see some of these pages for yourself! So give your graffiti designs a more realistic feel and grab your very own brick wall blackbook today. GO ON - SCROLL UP AND GRAB YOUR UNIQUE STREET ART SKETCHBOOK!
A blank city wall with a fresh coat of paint—is there anything more appealing to doodlers, dreams, and graffiti artists? Walls Notebook invites you to indulge your inner vandal without the risk of jail time. Here are 160 pages of wall photographs for notes, sketches, drawings, and defacement, all packaged in a delightful lay-flat flexi-bind paperback.
What ancient graffiti reveals about the everyday lives of Jews in the Greek and Roman world Few direct clues exist to the everyday lives and beliefs of ordinary Jews in antiquity. Prevailing perspectives on ancient Jewish life have been shaped largely by the voices of intellectual and social elites, preserved in the writings of Philo and Josephus and the rabbinic texts of the Mishnah and Talmud. Commissioned art, architecture, and formal inscriptions displayed on tombs and synagogues equally reflect the sensibilities of their influential patrons. The perspectives and sentiments of nonelite Jews, by contrast, have mostly disappeared from the historical record. Focusing on these forgotten Jews of antiquity, Writing on the Wall takes an unprecedented look at the vernacular inscriptions and drawings they left behind and sheds new light on the richness of their quotidian lives. Just like their neighbors throughout the eastern and southern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Egypt, ancient Jews scribbled and drew graffiti everyplace--in and around markets, hippodromes, theaters, pagan temples, open cliffs, sanctuaries, and even inside burial caves and synagogues. Karen Stern reveals what these markings tell us about the men and women who made them, people whose lives, beliefs, and behaviors eluded commemoration in grand literary and architectural works. Making compelling analogies with modern graffiti practices, she documents the overlooked connections between Jews and their neighbors, showing how popular Jewish practices of prayer, mortuary commemoration, commerce, and civic engagement regularly crossed ethnic and religious boundaries. Illustrated throughout with examples of ancient graffiti, Writing on the Wall provides a tantalizingly intimate glimpse into the cultural worlds of forgotten populations living at the crossroads of Judaism, Christianity, paganism, and earliest Islam.
This collection of unique works by 150 Los Angeles graffiti and tattoo artists represents an unprecedented collaboration across the city’s diverse artistic landscape. Many graffiti artists carry sketchbooks, called black books, and they ask crew members and others whose work they admire to inscribe their books with lettering or drawings. A few years ago, the Getty Research Institute invited artists, including Angst, Axis, Big Sleeps, Chaz, Cre8, Defer, EyeOne, Fishe, Heaven, Hyde, Look, ManOne, and Prime, to consider the idea of a citywide graffiti black book. During visits to the Getty Center, the artists viewed rare books related to calligraphy and letterforms, including works by Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. The artists instantly recognized the connections to their own practices and were particularly drawn to a liber amicorum (book of friends), a form of autograph book popular in the seventeenth century. Passed from hand to hand, it was filled with signatures, poetry, and coats of arms, like a black book from another era. Inspired by this meeting of minds across centuries, these artists became both creators and curators, crafting their own pages and inviting others to contribute. Eventually 150 Los Angeles artists decorated 143 individual pages. These were bound together into an exquisite artists’ book that became known as the Getty Graffiti Black Book. This publication reproduces each page from the original artists’ book and recounts the story of an unprecedented collaboration across the diverse artistic landscape of Los Angeles.
Radical and unique in its approach and presentation, Marketing Graffiti turns the traditional marketing introduction on its head by helping students to understand the part they already play as ‘consumers’ in the marketing process. Most marketing textbooks tackle the subject as a business function – i.e. how to "do" marketing in companies and other organizations. Marketing Graffiti shows how marketing is not just a business function but a part of our culture, and one in which we are all active as part-time marketers. By rejecting managerially-driven structures in this way, Saren's approach makes marketing immediate and instantly recognizable as a process and a phenomenon in which we are already complicit. It helps readers to become aware of what they already know. Critically examining a wide range of products, businesses, technologies, information, services, ads, packaging and branding, Saren utilizes everyday images and phenomena to draw out the conceptual foundations of marketing from a social science and cultural studies perspective as something that we all experience in everyday life. This new edition of the first critical marketing textbook discusses the role new technologies (such as social media) play in marketing culture and how this can potentially place more power in the clicks of the consumer. It includes new, updated or expanded sections on market exclusion, the role of the consumer in innovation, space and place, pricing, consumer communities, collaborative consumption and social media marketing. Leading experts in these fields of research and marketing practice also contribute additional sections on these topics. This essential marketing guide is supported by a range of teaching support materials including the latest journal and online references, guides to further reading, teaching slides and test bank questions
