Dozens of the city’s most influential graffiti artists created new installations on the Atlanta BeltLine last weekend as part of ATL JAM. The event celebrated Atlanta’s history and legacy of style writing and how it developed as part of hip-hop culture.
Hosted by Art on the Atlanta BeltLine, the event took place at multiple locations along the trail simultaneously, with artists painting surfaces on the Southside and Westside trails. Artists whose work stretches back to the 1980s worked alongside younger artists. All revealed their unique take on the art of style writing, defined as the art of creating words using visual techniques that are generally unique to graffiti art.
The weekend’s featured style writers included The United Kings Crew, Five Kings, Save, Totem and Dr. Dax.
Dr. Dax first saw graffiti when he moved to Atlanta in 1985. “All graffiti existed off the MARTA line, and as quickly as they were showing up, they were disappearing,” he says. “I started paying attention, trying to figure out who was doing it. It has become a lifetime obsession.”
Back then, artists wrote their names in their unique style as a symbol of recognition among peers in the scene, never anticipating that the art form would explode into a global culture or be recognized years later with a public celebration.
On Sunday, graffiti historian Antar “Cole” Fierce led a tour, explaining the legacy of style writing in Atlanta. He says the city’s earliest installations appeared around 1984 by the United Kings, the first graffiti crew in the city. “[They] created huge pieces off the highway and MARTA line,” he says.
The United Kings are considered an integral part of Atlanta’s first generation of graffiti artists, along with the Five Kings, but the two groups never met or overlapped in those early days, when style writers had to operate in secret because law enforcement and city officials were staunchly anti-graffiti.
“Now it’s the opposite,” Fierce says….
Read the full article here
