![]() This is why Afrika Bambaataa, the New York City Breakers, The Treacherous Three, or female pioneer MC Sha Rock were not seen in the film. The Furious Five could not appear alongside Flash and had to be cut from the film because of prior obligations to another more mainstream motion picture depicting the development of Hip Hop that came out later called Beat Street. The Cold Crush Brothers, Rock Steady Crew, and Grandmaster Flash were just a few of Hip-Hop’s trailblazers that debuted on Wild Style’s silver screen. With Ahearn as producer and director, the three began embarking on a journey to gather the individuals who would be the faces of this landmark film.ĭeveloping its name from an abstract letter design made famous in the graffiti world by graff king Tracy 168, Wild Style featured some of the most prolific pioneers from all aspects of Hip-Hop. Ahearn found out that Lee was the same graf king whose work he admired while filming in LES. Fab 5 Freddy brought legendary graff artist Lee Quinones to meet Ahearn to discuss further the approach of filming graffiti and introducing it as a legitimate art form. He was soon approached by Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Braithwaite about making a movie encompassing all elements of Hip-Hop (emceeing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti). ![]() In 1983, film director and cultural artist Charlie Ahearn premiered the flick in Times Square, breaking records by selling out at all screenings for the three weeks it played.Ī member of the collective artist group Collaborative Projects, Ahearn was initially exposed to Hip Hop in the late 70s through graffiti when he went to film the youth in the projects in Manhattan’s Lower East Side that studied martial arts. When Hip-Hop was being passed off as a fad that wouldn’t last beyond “Rapper’s Delight,” a vivid reenactment of the introduction of this artistic culture to the world was made. Wild Style is arguably the very first movie and one of the very few that shows the true essence of what Hip Hop is about. We totally love arrows.Visit for more information We think arrows are a fascinating and diverse element of graffiti letterforms, providing artists and students with continuous possibilities for innovation and style. One New York artist and graffiti writer, Mare 139, actually creates beautiful, 3-dimensional sheet-metal sculptures that contain only arrows, with light and space as parts of his designs. From that simple beginning, the arrow has evolved into a multi-faceted, complex and autonomous art object of its own. So, early graff writers incorporated simple arrows and other basic design elements into their tags to make them stand out and grab attention. Or it can blast off of the side from which it protrudes, like a missile, as in the artwork of "The Rammelzee", known as Gothic Futurism. An arrow can organically follow the flow and direction of a letter, like a vine. An arrow can be drawn in all shapes and sizes thick and chunky or long and spindly, pointy or squared, single or with multiple ends. Graffiti artist Ezo says that every graffiti writer has his or her own arrow and it's true: the variations and design possibilities of an arrow are endless. An arrow can project out from any side of a letter, weaving in and out, backwards and forwards, and around in circles, across a two-dimensional surface, creating depth and rhythm. An arrow guides the eyes of the viewer in a specific direction. In graffiti art, however, an arrow is a powerful, visual tool that is often put together with letters to give them motion and dynamism. From studying the images of these early tags, we were able to determine that the complex variations of arrows we see in today's advanced Wildstyle graffiti letterforms originated from simple graffiti tags.Īn arrow is an internationally understood symbol that is used on signs to simply indicate direction, as in "Entrance" or "Exit". ![]() Many of these tags contained arrows, as well as stars, hearts, numbers, and crowns. ![]() In her groundbreaking book "Tag Town", Martha Cooper photographed vintage graffiti tags in her Washington Heights neighborhood, still visible from the early 1970's to 1980's (tags are those hard to read scribbles you see on mailboxes and other surfaces around most cities). One of the most important design elements in graffiti art is the arrow.
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