Some Books about American graffiti - Happy American graffiti Reading!

Long before graffiti was adopted as the visual expression of hip-hop culture in the 1980s, Chicano gang members in East Los Angeles had been developing stylized calligraphy and writing on walls. Cholo (gangster) scripts became the first distinctive letter forms to evolve in the modern vernacular tradition of graffiti writing. Today Los Angeles writers of diverse backgrounds draw from a unique confluence of cultures that has led to regionally distinctive styles.

Graffiti L.A. provides a comprehensive and visual history of graffiti in Los Angeles, as well as an in-depth examination of the myriad styles and techniques used by writers today. Complementing the main text, interviews with L.A.’s most prolific and infamous writers provide insight into the lives of these fugitive artists. Essential to the understanding of the development of the graffiti movement, this book will be an invaluable source to graffiti fans around the world..
Price: $19.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Graffiti art. It's bold. It's thrilling And it can get a girl into serious trouble....

Raised by her single mom (who's always dating the wrong kind of man) in a struggling California neighborhood, Angel Rodriguez is a headstrong, independent young woman who channels her hopes and dreams for the future into her painting. But when her entry for a community mural doesn't rate, she's heartbroken. Even with winning artist Nathan Ramos -- a senior track star and Angel's secret crush -- taking a sudden interest in Angel and her art, she's angry and hurt. She's determined to find her own place in the art world, her own way.

That's when Miguel Badalin -- from the notorious graffiti crew Reyes Del Norte -- opens her eyes to an underground world of graf tags and turf wars. She's blown away by this bad boy's fantastic work and finds herself drawn to his dangerous charm. Soon she's running with Miguel's crew, pushing her skills to the limit and beginning to emerge as the artist she always dreamed she could be. But Nathan and Miguel are bitter enemies with a shared past, and choosing between them and their wildly different approaches to life and art means that Angel must decide what matters most before the artist inside of her can truly break free..
Price: $3.83 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A unique book that reveals the hip talk and occasionally lewd eloquence of the Spnaish commonly spoken in Mexcio and Latin America Whether you want to use the words, avoid them, or simply want to understand them when you hear them, this book clears up the confusion. Also includes examples of slang commonly found in graffiti on buildings, bridges, and fences..
Price: $5.49 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $9.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Over the past twenty-five years, Chicano artists have made a unique contribution to public art in California, transforming thousands of walls into colorful artworks that express the dreams, achievements, aspirations, and cultural identity of the Mexican-American community. Signs From the Heart tells the inside story of this new and important American art form in four interpretive essays by noted Chicano scholars about its historical, artistic, and educational significance..
Price: $29.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"In the beginning, there was the Word. On the streets and in the yards, the word was the Name. And the name was everything It was persona and place, form and content, truth and fiction The name was an act of self-invention, a pure visual manifestation, through alter ego, alias, and nom de plume, of personal expressions in the public realm. The name was a line and the line begat the Mark. Then, in the great style wars toward the end of the second millennium, medium, meaning, and message were joined in a golden era where the name became the source and signifier of Style. And when the name became wild style, the word was Dondi."

-- from the Foreword

The dominance of the graffiti aesthetic in contemporary culture is undeniable. But how did an art form spawned in the train yards of 1970s New York achieve the ubiquity it now enjoys at every level of the mass-media landscape? There are many answers to the question, but one major factor is indisputable: Dondi White.

Coming of age in hardscrabble East New York in the early 1970s, Dondi White unknowingly began the process of introducing a whole new artistic dialect into the cacophony of the American art scene. His train pieces painted from roughly 1977 to 1982 stand as some of the most influential works ever committed to Transit Authority steel. Writing with legendary partners such as DURO, NOC 167, KID 56, KEL 139, and FUZZ ONE, Dondi created some of graffiti art's most enduring iconography. His pieces just don't stop -- and neither do the aliases. From the badass Mr. Whites to the cocky, self-satisfied Busses, from the nasty Pres to the perfect, vicious Rolls, Dondi straight killed it, again and again. Works like Children of the Grave Part 2 and Mr White + Bev remain benchmark pieces for graffiti aficionados the world over.

In the 1980s, partially through his collaborations with noted photographers Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, Dondi White's work entered the rarefied world of fine art. In making the transition from subway car to canvas, Dondi retained his unfaltering sense of letter form and balance, and his paintings remain a testament to the clarity of his aesthetic. Dondi's canvases were subsequently shown in galleries from New York to Amsterdam to Tokyo and beyond, influencing a new generation of young artists and introducing an indigenous American art form to the rest of the world.

Dondi White: Style Master General presents the life and work of a seminal -- yet heretofore overlooked -- American artist whose work has resonated on every level of our popular culture. Filled with rare photographs, original sketches, unpublished interview materials, and testimony from some of Dondi's closest cohorts, here, finally, is the full story. At the time of his death in 1998, Dondi had seen the majority of his work destroyed -- scraped off, painted over, or chemically removed from the steel upon which it thrived. Within these pages, however, it still speaks volumes.

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Price: $21.02 [Notify me when price goes down.]

New York City is where the quintessential contemporary people’s art of graffiti was born. The top "writers" go "all city" when their tags can be seen throughout the five boroughs This exhilarating selection of their work, assembled by Hugo Martinez, a leading authority on the history of street art in NYC, takes the reader on an "all-city" tour of New York, displaying the extraordinary range of its taggers and bombers. More than two hundred photographs showcase the artwork of the most prominent names of the past five years, including CASE 2, KEZ, MÖSCO, SKUF, VFR, and MQ. As graffiti comes to be embraced as a medium in its own right, its most important practitioners in NYC confirm the power and creativity of this vital contemporary language..
Price: $6.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A controversial art form and provocative cultural phenomenon, graffiti has inestimably influenced our entire environment - from music and fashion to advertising, architecture, and graphic arts. Yet it is an illegal activity, which makes its practitioners wanted criminals. Motivated by a desire for self-expression and recognition, the act of marking one¹s territory is done at the risk of severe consequences including fines and jail time. Graffiti writers are outlaws, unknown artists whose faces are known only to their peers. Treated as criminals by the law and dismissed as artists by the establishment, writers are perceived as either alluring anti-heroes or loathsome vandals, and usually remain anonymous to their audience. But not to photographer Peter Sutherland. With an eye for style, Sutherland captures all of the gritty glory and glamour of the graffiti world and its warriors. Collected for the first time in Autograf: New York City¹s Graffiti Writers, Sutherland presents a never-before-seen chronicle of the people and places that populate New York¹s famed graff scene. Featuring old-school legends FUTURA, STAY HIGH 149, LADY PINK and DOZE, as well as COPE 2, KAWS, CYCLE, CLAW, VFR, KR, EARSNOT, SERF, RATE, SACER, UFO, and DSENSE, among many others, each one of the fifty-three portraits is authentically tagged by the individual writers using the same paint markers that brought them fame. Complemented by over fifty landscape photographs and featuring handwritten text by legendary recluse REVS, Autograf is the only book to showcase New York City¹s graffiti scene as it was created and defined by some of the most prolific artists of our time..
Price: $18.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Full of vibrant, energetic and explosive images, Broken Windows - Burning New York gives voice to an art movement that is largely undocumented and often misunderstood.

In New York in the 8âs graffiti moved from the subway trains to large walls which allowed it to become more refined and concept driven. Because walls provide a more stable and reliable surface they have encouraged the artists to create works of much greater depth and complexity and the form is now arguably at its peak. Although it is often indecipherable to the world at large, as Broken Windows - Burning New York shows, graffiti is a radical and daring means of visual communication.

Features extensive interviews, the largest collection of women's 'graffiti' to date, and more than 180 artists from The United States, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Italy, and Norway..
Price: $38.05 [Notify me when price goes down.]