Arcadia Italy
Street Art in Rome
Date
October 8, 2015
Graffiti on the Streets of Rome
The Street Art Workshop, one of our most creative co-curricular activities for students, took place last Saturday.
While taking a bicycle tour with contemporary art historians and writers through the Quadraro district, a very nice and old working-class quarter of Rome, students had the opportunity to view a great number of legal spaces covered in murals and impressive street art.
Giorgio Silvestrelli, the artists’ assistant of MURo Association (Museo Urbano di Roma) took us on a bike tour through the district of Quadraro, explaining not only every single work but also
providing valuable insight on the history of the neighborhood. Students were excited to know that they were a few blocks away from Cinecittà Studios where many international movie productions took place, like Gangs of New York, Cleopatra and Ben Hur.
It was interesting to discover how the works of Diavù, Ron English, Alice, Gary Baseman and Lucamaleonte were related to the history of the area.
Throughout the years and during the many graffiti projects Arcadia has produced in collaboration with Gazebike and MURo, we have had the chance to work with Italian artists who are becoming famous internationally. This time, Alessandro Sardella was the artist who followed the students and guided them through the brainstorming phase especially. As per this year’s Life of the Mind theme, they had to develop a work in line with PROTEST! through symbols.
Students had fun painting on a (legal) wall in the Quadraro district with brushes and colorful paint! Featured below is a snippet of the thoughts of Sarah Freitag, Villanova Student.
“In our painting we were asked to create something around the theme of protest. For me, what came to mind was gender equality and the fight for all people to be respected and appreciated as fellow humans before anything else. To depict this I painted 10 triangles in two colors interlocking to represent men and women and how they complement each other and are meant to work together for good. Then, on each side of the triangles are two yellow half stars which are supposed to represent the societal and political movements and forces that pit men and women against each other and force them apart instead of bringing them together. This is how I chose to portray one idea of protest in my street art”. – Sarah Freitag, Arcadia in Rome, Fall 2015