Fort Greene, Brooklyn was busy last night: 3000 people packed Brooklyn Tech High School to voice their displeasure about the closing of 19 high schools around NYC while a  couple hundred feet away, in the Greenlight Bookstore on the corner of  Fulton Street and South Portland, a smaller crowd of adults and teenagers gathered to hear tales from the graffiti adventures of SHR, CHINO BYI, KEO TC5 and RAB CAC., the fellas you're looking at. KEO is wearing Fila sneakers, CHINO is in the Yankee fitted,  SHR is holding the mic and RAB is smirking.

SHR and CHINO invited KEO and RAB to help promote "PieceBook Reloaded: Rare Graffiti Drawings 1985-2005" their second installment from their   graffiti blackbook series "PieceBook" available at Greenlight and Amazon.com.

Better known in the publishing world as Sacha Jenkins and David Villorente, SHR & CHINO weren't strolling down Nostalgia Ave. kicking rocks and yammering about the good ole days like old high school quaterbacks stuck in bad marriages.  They were there to show some slides and to walk us through their lives as young NYC residents making art and defying authority.

It was standing room only at Greenlight and unlike the gathering at neighboring Bklyn Tech, the panelist actually listened to questions and comments from the audience.

Piecebook Reloaded and its precedent represents a triumph in publishing. Technically it re-creates, down to the ink bleeds, graffiti artists black books, bringing to light the secret drawings of graffiti writers in NYC. It also picks up where the original  left off, showing drawings from the mid 80's to 2005. Further, its an important contribution to the canon of art history as graffiti is the last, true, uninstitutionalized, semi-democratic and community based American art  form.

In their talk Jenkins likened the blackbooks of graffiti writers as the first internet soap boxes,  because the books were passed around between artists in  high schools (think Bklyn Tech, Art & Design, Bronx Science, Hillcrest, Andrew Jackson etc.)  for months, years, even;  and was/is a social force within specific communities. There was compeition, admiration, disdain, disses, desires, dreams, social commentary, trading of skills, lessons; a portable chatroom on paper.

Listening in the audience  were LEE, COPE 2, and a host of writers, supporters and enthusiasts.  By the end of the night at Brooklyn Tech, 19 high schools in NYC were closed, just like the minds of some of the folks who refuse to recognize graffiti as an art. After the jump, more photos!

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