When the four pillars of hip hop were established in the 1970s in the Bronx, graffiti was all about glory. Youth in rebellion against society and the law would run wild in the night streets, spraying their name up wherever people were likely to see it. In Ann Arbor, the art takes on a decidedly different slant. While a few locals still take pride in tagging, much of Ann Arbor's graffiti is about sending a message and improving the neighborhood.

Local graffiti artist Paolo Carone, an LSA senior, mostly uses stencils to create political messages and purposefully places them where they will be most appreciated.

“When I do stencils, it’s like a statement because it’s something you can read and it’s short … something you can get the gist of,” Carone said. “It’s like, ‘Yes I think this is unfair and I hope by reading this you at least consider that it’s unfair too, or you consider that it’s terrible that this is being ignored.’ ”

One of his favorite lines to use is “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Carone has this five-foot tall stencil on a number of abandoned buildings in Detroit, including a record store he liked that was being torn down, he said.

The dust in the poem represents a lifeless substance with no further meaning, Carone explained, like the rubble of the demolished record store.

“It’s specifically that there weren’t efforts to save these buildings or clean them up or anything, they were just efforts to get rid of it and turn it into a parking lot or just another bank,” he said. “There was no effort for an actual expressive use of this building.”

It's the artists who can bring this expression to life with their craft. Ellen Rutt, a junior in the school of Art & Design, painted a mural on the wall of University Towers apartment building on South University Avenue that used to face the old Pinball Pete's arcade building, which burned down nearly a year ago.

“Once they painted over the wall (after Pinball Pete’s burned down) it seemed like a really perfect opportunity to take advantage of this space that no one was doing anything with,” said Rutt, who lived in University Towers at the time.

The mural, called “The Garden,” features surreal flowers painted with various vibrant reds, blues and greens and was completed this past summer. Rutt painted her name and contact information next to the mural. She had no need to hide her identity, as she gained approval from the property manager of University Towers beforehand.

“(The property manager) had me fill out some sort of proposal and present an idea to her … just to make sure it wasn’t gang affiliated or really racist,” Rutt said. “While I was making it, people would come up and talk to me about it, ask me what I was doing and why I was doing it. I had quite a few officers approach me.”

Graffiti has long been criminalized as an act of vandalism and defacement of property. Ann Arbor law penalizes graffiti offenses with restitution, community service and a fine of up to $500. In addition, the graffitied business can pursue civil litigation. For this reason, many local graffiti artists wouldn’t consent to being interviewed for this story. Rutt said she knows people who engage in illicit tagging in Ann Arbor.

“People do tons of stuff on North Campus but it’s not nearly as public as doing it on Central Campus,” Rutt said. “There’s a very distinct group of people who travel around North Campus.”

Carone attributes the act of tagging to graffiti’s urban roots, where tags would represent territories that belonged to certain gangs.

“There is still that mid-’90s mentality of … someone towering over a certain area or being the king of something,” Carone said. “I’m not a really big fan of that way of thinking but it’s really integral — it’s like street advertising, like putting your band’s flier up.