Photo: Antar Fierce with freshman Teddy LePage.
A hands-on opportunity followed the next day for thirty Catawba students, accompanied by First-Year Seminar professors Dr. Kerstin Rudolph and Dr. Anne Marie Martin, to practice the art of graffiti and style writing in a workshop conducted by Antar at Salisbury’s public graffiti park.
Carson Wells, a freshman, explains the differences in some of the types of style writing he learned about in Antar’s lecture, “Street writing is visual art created without permission. Public writing is visual art created with permission, while style is the most common one which is stylistically writing a name or word frequently in public.”
Freshman Teddy Lepage reflects on his change in outlook toward style writing after understanding more of its history and the intention behind it. “Before attending Antar Fierce's lecture and participating in the workshop, my perspective on graffiti was quite limited. I had always viewed it as chaotic, messy, and simply vandalism that detracted from public spaces. However, my experiences during the lecture and workshop fundamentally changed my understanding of graffiti, revealing it as a vibrant form of artistic expression with deep meaning and context.”
The graffiti workshop made an impression on Skylar Mullins, a freshman. “After our experience with the spray paint cans, I understand why people do it. They can express emotion, desire, love in their artwork. This speaks volumes to the people seeing it as it goes by on a train, or as they watch from the inside of the car.” Carson adds, “It gives people hope and a desire to be a part of a community.”
Working with the Catawba students at the graffiti park, Antar expresses appreciation of the thing he noticed about how the students engaged in the process of painting. “Some of them really took it serious and created some great work.”
Antar shares how his interest in style writing came about. “Ever since I was a young child, I loved trains. When I took an interest in Style Writing at age 12 (1983), a big part of the attraction was because it was mostly on trains back then. My preferred surface is trains, or walls that are near railroad tracks. To this day I am more excited about photographing graffiti on trains – from hobo graffiti to large scale style writing masterpieces. But I also like trains without graffiti as well. I am a full-on rail buff as well as a writer.” Growing up in Brooklyn, NY in the 1970s, seeing first-hand the rise of graffiti and hip-hop in the city, Antar began photographing and documenting style writing, a practice that he continued when he moved to Atlanta to attend university, earning a degree in history. After twenty years in the corporate sector, in 2015, Antar co-founded the Right Track Program, a youth development organization that extracts the educational value from traditional Hip-Hop disciplines and delivers them to learners of all ages.
Antar explains what he enjoys most about presenting programs about style writing. “I think the most satisfying part of engaging with learners is getting them to learn that graffiti is more than just vandalism. Humanizing graffiti and getting people to see the artistic value of the graffiti art phenomenon is very special to me.”
It's a lesson that Antar conveys well to participants in his programs, evidenced by Skylar’s takeaway from the experience. She says with enthusiasm, “I would love to spray paint again; I so wish I could. Give me a blank canvas and a can and let me go to work.”
