Driving down the Jone's Falls Expressway to downtown Baltimore City the walls of graffiti always catch my eye. Growing up in Baltimore and making this trip very often I became accustomed to what tags were where and I would notice when a new one appeared or another vanished. I thought the bright colors and the block letters, so squished together that they were sometimes indecipherable, were intriguing. However, I never really thought of graffiti as a form of art because I still always percieved it as vandalism. Recently though in my painting class we were asked to paint graffiti for the set of the upcoming play entitled "Polaroid Stories." This was a new experience for me and I found it very liberating being able to paint directly on the wall of the theater, especially something of such large-scale. Professor Leon Wiebers also introduced us to a famous graffiti artist whose work demands the attention of passerby. Banksy is a British street artist whose work ranges from political statements to comedic images. Being exposed to a graffiti artist like Banksy allowed me to see graffiti more and more as an art form than as vandalism or something that should be viewed as criminal. No longer was graffiti a form of destruction of a surface, but rather something that brought your attention to that surface, even made you stop and think.
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