Street... Art?

Claude Monet.   Auguste Renoir.   Vincent Van Gogh.   Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.   Edgar Dégas.    Paul Cézanne.   Auguste Rodin.   Paul Gaugin  These are probably the names that come to mind when we think of les grands artistes français.  These are the artists whose works hang in the Paris' famed museums and in museums all around France - even in Rennes' Musee de Beaux Arts (Fine Arts Museum) that we visited at the beginning of the second week of the Language & Culture program.

But Rennes is home to another kind of art whose presence is felt - for better or for worse- throughout the city, le street-art.   The words "street art" probably evoke negative feelings in most of us and make us think vandalism and tagging and graffiti,  but at our afternoon workshop on street art we learned that while street art does include tagging and graffiti, it also includes so much more.   Our workshop guides, Tom and Matthieu, street artists from Rennes, said that the word "street art" is like the world "music."  Just as there exists a plethora of genres of music, there exists a wide variety of styles of street art, from murals commissioned by the city to illegal and destructive tagging of private property.

We learned that while the street art movement emerged from the hip hop movement in New York City, Rennes has become an global epicenter of the artform.  Rennes is the first city in France to set aside authorized walls and surfaces around the city dedicated to street art.  Rennes is also the home to a biannual urban art festival.   After taking a walking tour of the beautiful murals that cover the walls of Rennes' urban landscape, the language and culture students had a chance to see  the wide variety of impressive murals painted by renowned street artists from around the world from the last festival in 2023. 

We finished our time with Tom and Matthieu by leaving a mark on Rennes' street art scene.  We created our own mural with the phrase "EXPRESSION DE L'AME" (Expression of the soul) which was suggested by one of our students and voted for by the group.  Students worked in groups of two to fill in the letters with cans of spray paint, and the result was magnificent.  Now when students walk through Rennes, we hope that they notice and have an appreciation for the many kinds of street art that surround them.