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Henry Chalfant
Tues., Feb. 19, 8pm. Free. Drexel University, 3175 JFK Blvd. 215.895.2629. www.drexel.edu
Graffiti: My parents weren’t having it when I told them how much I loved the jumbo words tied into knots spray-painted across their old neighborhood. Is graffiti the ultimate urban art brut, or gussied-up vandalism scratched by punkass wannabes? It totally depends, right? There’s your run-of-the-mill crude territorial pissing-match tags and crackhead romantic gestures, sure, but then there are also those insane, complex sociopolitical murals like in Henry Chalfant’s photos. Chalfant—author, photographer, documentarian and leading authority on hip-hop culture—will screen his legendary photographs this week at Drexel. Chalfant’s pics feature in the definitive catalogs of subway art and are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. His photo work focuses on graffiti art of N.Y.C. subway stations in the ’70s and ’80s, when the canvases for the city’s edgiest artists were literally slicing through the underground. (Tara Murtha)
