Advanced courses on graffiti and street art for professionals and enthusiasts

MOMO Urbanario School street art

The Urbanario School offers the unique opportunity to access advanced education in the fields of graffiti and street art.

Whether you are an art professional or an enthusiast of art in the streets, or if you simply want to know more about this field, the Urbanario School allows you to delve into an in-depth study of graffiti, street art and related practices.

Teaching at the Urbanario School is 100% online and is designed and imparted by Javier Abarca, one of the leading thinkers in the fields of graffiti and street art. Abarca has taught about these topics internationally at university level since 2005.

Our lectures

Learning at the Urbanario School

A unique opportunity

The Urbanario School provides students, academics, and professionals with suitable intellectual foundations for working in projects related to graffiti and street art.

If you are simply interested in these topics, the school will give you all the keys needed to understand and enjoy them.

Both in-depth and accessible

Our video-lectures lay out complex issues in simple terms, providing an accessible window to this often obscure field.

Even without any previous knowledge you will easily acquire a full understanding of every relevant question.

A flexible methodology

Our video-lectures are freely streamable anytime, and you get permanent access to them.

You choose the calendar for your live Q&A sessions, and you can download the recordings.

Quality teaching

Javier Abarca’s lectures are the product of a whole life of practice, research, networking and reflection, and have been worked on and improved for over 15 years. He has shared them with hundreds of students of every background, both in academic and independent settings.

Each video-lecture at the Urbanario School is profusely illustrated with carefully selected, high-quality images and videos. The school’s archive includes unpublished and exclusive material sourced from the teacher’s research work.

Learn with a leading thinker

The Urbanario School is also a showcase for the influential ideas developed by Javier Abarca in his texts and lectures. Abarca is known for his uniquely revealing critical approaches, as well as for his privileged access to obscure topics. The live Q&A sessions present opportunity for questions, reflection and debate.

Access our video-archive of guest artists

Our talks with guests provide students with unique views inside the processes and motivations of some of the most forward-thinking and reflective actors in the graffiti and street art scene.

Join our community of graffiti and street art enthusiasts

Our students come from different countries and backgrounds, and our live events always bring about interesting conversations. Our Telegram chats are unique sources for information and debate. In them, students, ex-students and artists friends of Urbanario mingle, and there is always new content to learn and discuss about.

Quotes about the teacher

Rafael Schacter (UK)Professor, critic and curator | University College London
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Javier Abarca is an inspirational thinker, theorist, and teacher. He understands graffiti from the position both of a practitioner embedded in the subculture, and of an educator able to translate this visual and cultural world into the space of the classroom. Javier’s teaching and mentoring will benefit all those who he comes into contact with; artists, students, and art professionals alike.
Pedro Soares (PT)Professor | Founder and director, Lisbon Street Art and Urban Creativity Conference | Universidade de Lisboa
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With an intense and thought-provoking character, Javier Abarca is guarantee of the sharpest and more unconstrained thoughts about graffiti. This free-thinker is simultaneously a pioneer of the most underground side of graffiti and the author of the first Spanish-language PhD-level thesis about graffiti and street art
Pietro Rivasi (IT)Critic and curator | Creator of Icone Festival, founded in 2002
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Javier Abarca is the kind of researcher graffiti culture needs: he has a strong background in the scene, curiosity and an extraordinary storytelling capacity. An impressive, top-level divulgator.
Carlo McCormick (US)Author, critic and curator
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With his head in the rigors of academia and his feet on the streets, Javier Abarca is one of the most compelling and erudite guides to urban aesthetic and practice out there. His intelligence and remarkable understanding are secondary only to the exceptional generosity by which he shares his great learning with others.
Robert Kaltenhäuser (DE)Critic and curator | Museum für Visuelle Dissidenz
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In addition to his virtually unparalleled achievements for independent research and networking in the field of Urban Art, Javier Abarca has been one of the standout forward thinking curators and critics in and on the genre ever since he raised his substantive voice.
Lachlan Macdowall (AU)Professor and author | University of Melbourne | Director, MIECAT Institute | Author of «Instafame, Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era»
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Javier Abarca is one the foremost scholars of graffiti, street art and urban creativity. As a practitioner, theorist, author, publisher and adventurer, Javier brings decades of experience, an encyclopaedic knowledge of urban creativity in all its forms and a restless curiosity to his craft.
Richard Brook (UK)Professor and author | Manchester School of Architecture, Art and Design
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Javier Abarca is one of the world's leading thinkers on graffiti and art in the urban environment. He has tirelessly promoted critical approaches that help to understand the value and values of ephemeral art movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His work is crucial in discourses around public space, spatial justice and rights to the city.
David Demougeot (FR)Director, Bien Urbain festival
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For many years Javier Abarca has studied independent public art as a complex subject, dealing with topics such as art history, societal changes, underground cultures and media dissemination. Avoiding clichés and snobbery, he manages to deliver his precise and relevant thoughts in a fluent and reachable way, naming the issues as no one else.
Dumar NovYork (US)Author of «What do One Million JA Tags Signify?»
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Javier Abarca has proven himself to be a leading expert in the field of Graffiti Studies as well as a detail-oriented producer of graffiti related events. His Unlock Book Fair is a pioneering happening which always brings fascinating perspectives and avant-garde approaches to interpreting the writing on the wall.
Andrea Caputo (IT)Publisher and architect | Editor of «All City Writers»
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Javier Abarca has not just witnessed the Graffiti Writing movement as one of the pioneers of the Spanish and Madrilenian scenes. Through the past decades, he has built a long-time investigation on the development of Graffiti Writing style, techniques and behaviors though countless international contributions.
Ulrich Blanché (DE)Professor and author | University of Heildelberg | Author of «Banksy, Urban Art in a Material World»
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Javier Abarca is one of the most important graffiti and street art researchers worldwide. His groundbreaking texts on topics such as the punk side of graffiti, Brazil stencil pioneer Alex Vallauri, or the significance of the human scale in illegal street art, have been especially important for my own research.
Peter Bengtsen (DK)Lund University | Author of «The Street Art World»
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As the person behind the Unlock Book Fair and the Tag Conference, Javier Abarca is a central figure in the community of researchers focused on graffiti and street art.

He has a long history of thinking and writing about these topics and, crucially, emphasizes the importance of paying attention to not just centrally-placed and flashy graffiti pieces and large-scale murals, but also to out-of-the-way and less conspicuous interventions.

Ilaria Hoppe (DE)Professor | Institute of Contemporary Arts and Media, Katholische Privat-Universität Linz
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Javier Abarca is one of the most interesting graffiti researchers worldwide. On the one hand, his extensive knowledge comes directly from the street, as he is one of the pioneers of the writing scene in Spain; on the other hand, he looks back on many years of research and teaching within academia. He also initiated the Tag Conference and the Unlock Book Fair, which have become important events of critical graffiti research at the interface between subculture and scholarship.
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