"Graffiti," exhibiting from March 29 to September 14 at the Museion in Bolzano, is Italy's first institutional exhibition exploring the evolution of spray paint use in art. For the first time in an Italian museum, graffiti is regarded as a component of art history and, more importantly, as a method of analyzing municipal realities. Graffiti culture emerged in the late 1960s. Many of the artists featured in this exhibition, such as Rammellzee, Futura 2000, Lee Quiñones, Blade, Daze, and Dondi White, were part of a movement that began in New York in the 1970s and developed in the early 1980s. Their works on exhibit were created during a period in which the art world was attempting to capitalize on the emerging practice of writing graffiti on the New York City subway by having them perform on canvas what they would do on trains. By the late 1980s, New York City had largely eradicated graffiti on active subway lines. Consequently, the work of these
authors is now exclusively preserved on these canvases as surviving evidence of their practice from that era.