Imagine for a moment that you were a polyglot — that you could speak multiple important verbal and visual languages. Signs, symbols, colors, gestures, and images: imagine that you could read the surface of any culture perfectly.
It’s Indiana Jones’s superpower, and it’s one we have a great deal of respect for … provided it arises from deliberate study and not naturally from, say, migration or the diversity of your urban neighborhood. This is why connoisseurship of the traditional art of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy — reserved to the educated — is highly respected. This is why, despite years of mingling its aesthetics with those of “high art,” graffiti art, often the province of products of bilingual education, is still underobserved.
So suppose that you were an polyglot by nurture AND by study. What kind of art would you make?
Yeah, it’s a leading question. Obviously I’m trying to get you into the peculiar, headspace you need to be in to understand ProArts gallery’s glowing exhibition CalliGRAFFitti, a collaboration between Asian American calligraphy artist Minette Mangahas, and nine graffiti muralists. The connection between the aesthetic of ideogrammatic calligraphy and the tagging-based lettering of graffiti is such an obvious one, it’s astonishing that it’s been made so seldom before, much less to such lovely effect.
In a series of experiments, Mangahas and her collaborators (Apex, Coby Kennedy, Zen One, Toons One, Amend, Desi W.O.M.E, Denz One, and Lucha) match materials and canvases to see how harmony and counterpoint influence the effectiveness of each art form. Wooden panels are acrylic and spray-painted. Paper mounted on Chinese scrolls is ink-painted and magic-markered. An installation of cinder-blocks nearly takes flight with its even covering of white and purple lettering.