Downtown Eastside artist featured at Emily Carr University exhibit

A one-of-a-kind art exhibition opened in Vancouver on Saturday. The art exhibition is the culmination of a course on the impact of graffiti culture launched by a B.C. university professor. One of the guest lecturers is well-known street artist Smokey D (James Hardy), who honed his skills in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “(Graffiti) is idolized in certain ways but then it’s villainized in other ways too,” Garnet Hertz said, an Emily Carr professor. After getting back into skateboarding, Hertz said he was impressed by the quality of graffiti at Vancouver skate parks. “There’s a level of dedication that was pretty hard to match in a lot of other artistic fields,” he told Global News. Breaking news from Canada and around the world sent to your email, as it happens. That commitment inspired his course, which attempts to look at how graffiti functions in society. Story continues below advertisement “Graffiti is probably impossible to get completely rid of but instead of banning it, I think an approach of encouraging is better … more interesting graffiti and more educated graffiti,” Hertz said. With the guidance of Smokey D as a guest lecturer, the class designed and published a zine exploring graffiti culture. Each...