Student wins award for graffiti in Grand Rapids research

A Grand Valley State University geography major’s research about graffiti classifications in southeast Grand Rapids was recently awarded at the East Lakes/West Lakes Regional Conference of the Association of American Geographers (AAG).

Since her first semester at Grand Valley in the fall of 2013, Alyson Mabie has been researching how different graffiti classifications in southeast Grand Rapids reflect cultural shifts in varying neighborhoods over time. Through her research, Mabie has collected location data for more than 700 instances of three categories of graffiti, which she defines as:

•    Gang graffiti: symbols specific to a gang and that gang’s “territory.”
•    Graffiti art: traditional name-based writing often seen in New York City and Philadelphia in the 1970s.
•    Street art: any graffiti that transcends name-based style, such as murals, stencils and stickers.

“I also documented the specifics of each instance like colors, letters, medium and graffiti type,” said Mabie. “In the end, the three types of graffiti I specified had distinct geographies that likely reflect cultural undercurrents associated with each type.”

Mabie said she was “pleasantly surprised” that her research paper, “Claiming Turf: The Spatial Distribution of Three Discrete Types of Graffiti/Street Art in Southeast Grand Rapids, Michigan,” received first place in the undergraduate student paper presentation category during the October 17 AAG annual meeting.

Mabie said her interest in this topic began long before attending college. While growing up in the southeast side of Grand Rapids, she saw graffiti in her surroundings and wanted to understand its meanings more thoroughly.

“Out of general curiosity, I started researching graffiti culture and quickly became fascinated by the history and evolution of this uniquely urban form, as well as its many applications,” said Mabie. “There was also a lot of public misconceptions about graffiti. It was a situation where the more I learned, the more I wanted to know.”

Mabie began her research while attending Grand Rapids Community College (GRCC) prior to being accepted to Grand Valley. During the summer of 2013, Mabie’s initial research at GRCC earned her the Geography Lives! Field Study Grant, which was established to provide promising GRCC geography students with funds to support geographic fieldwork.

Mabie is currently diving deeper into her research with her senior thesis project.

“The senior thesis is going to take the spatial distribution a step further and explore the cultural and demographic undertones of my study area, their change over time and how that relates to the spatial distribution of different graffiti types,” said Mabie.

Roy Cole, professor of geography and planning at Grand Valley, assisted Mabie in writing her senior thesis research proposal and said her research is unique because it combines two fields of study that don’t normally go hand-in-hand.

“I’ve never had a student with a similar topic,” said Cole. “What’s really interesting to me is her combination of art and science: analyzing artistic expression with the quantitative methods and the spatial science of the geographer.”

Cole said Mabie could also be credited for combining a topic conventionally studied in anthropology – the study of signs and symbols – with geography – the study of phenomena in space and place over time.

Mabie will present her senior thesis at the annual meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters at Andrews University in March 2015 and the annual meeting of the AAG in Chicago in April 2015.