Graffiti, art, and identity: Exploring Gajin Fujita's Hood Rats

While contemporary historians have explored the advent of graffiti as well as its link to the social and financial world, little attention has been given to overarching lenses that attempt to encompass the new global contemporary form of graffiti. In a recent catalogue of street art, Carlo McCormick argues that many of the fundamental motives and aesthetics of graffiti have transformed, requiring new lenses of analysis when comprehending the work. One of the main outcomes in the art-world system of the global contemporary is the dissolving of geographical distances that once divided art worlds from each other. As a result of evolving cultural paradigms, new parameters are required when analyzing contemporary art. It is here, in the global contemporary climate, that Gajin Fujita's Hood Rats shows how representations of American identity have transformed. With a composition of various cultures, Fujita's work offers a unique synergy of contemporary American identity. My study proposes a theoretical framework in which cultural exchange, and the identities expressed within that exchange, can be examined.