WRITERS EDUCATION when street art enters the Academy

Abstract

Whether they are illegal or commissioned, writing and street art (and with them urban art in the broad sense) are now integral parts of our daily lives: so much so that they are no longer dismissed as vandalism pertaining to the urban suburbs subject to phenomena of degradation, but are promoted as expressive acts typical of ur-ban areas subject to phenomena of regeneration. However, despite being admitted to the most pres-tigious museum circuits (just think of the space reserved in the Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art in Berlin), writing and street art have always encountered difficulties in entering the Academy, also as the related items have never been included in the lists of disciplinary fields of the Visual Arts area recognised by AFAM (Higher Education in Art, Music and Dance established by Ministry for University and Research). This was the case up to the recent educational in-itiatives promoted by the “Pietro Vannucci” Acad emy of Fine Arts of Perugia, which on several oc-casions, between the academic years 2012-2013 and 2017-2018, saw the introduction of modules reserved for writing and street art. With an ex-perimental propensity which is far from surpris-ing, given that the Academy of Perugia has always been at the forefront, also and above all from the point of view of didactic experimentation, as it was the first Academy to introduce the teachings of descriptive geometry during the direction of Baldassare Orsini (1791-1810), of futurist aer-opainting during the direction of Gerardo Dottori (1940-1945), and of alchemical art during the di-rection of Edgardo Abbozzo (1984-2002).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.24.2020.2