The decorative arts of the 19th century, and specifically Pennsylvania Dutch utilitarian stoneware, are rarely associated with hip-hop culture. Rarely, but, as visitors to "Timothy Curtis: The Painters' Hands" at the Current in Stowe will learn, not never. Curtis introduced his exhibition, which is on view through April 12, with a brief artist talk last Thursday. He is not your typical leather-elbow-patches-and-bow-tie art historian. The self-taught painter, who now lives in New York City but whose work is strongly rooted in Philadelphia, began his studies while incarcerated. Before then, growing up in the 1990s in North Philly's Kensington neighborhood, he was fascinated by graffiti. "When I was a young kid, around the age of 9, it felt like everybody was kind of born into graffiti," he said during the talk. He noticed it everywhere and started writing his own at age 10 or 11. Curtis said graffiti opened his world. In a city with strong territorial, cultural and racial divisions, he met graffiti writers from all over. He described graffiti as offering the artists — who, he stressed, were often children — a kind of passport to cross boundaries and connect with each other. The Current's main gallery is lined with 25 11-by-14-inch photographs of graffiti, which Curtis shot as a teenager in the mid-1990s. While many of Philly's street-level tags were regularly cleaned up, he and his friends found troves in the subway system. "We started noticing graffiti dated all the way back to the 1960s," he recalled. "It was kind of like going into an Egyptian tomb or some underground museum — this stuff existed still, and it was protected from the elements." Many of the photos feature the taggers' names, such as Cornbread, aka Darryl McCray, who is widely credited as the first graffiti artist of the modern era. McCray will offer a talk at the Current and visit local schools later in the exhibition's run. Curtis' images document the Philly-specific elongated, gestural style of the tags — their lettering, curves, flourishes — as well as the recurring motifs, such as stars, crowns and top hats, that the artists added to their monikers. The artist's thesis is that, stylistically, this graffiti is remarkably similar to another Philadelphia-based art form, one from a century earlier: Pennsylvania Dutch stoneware. In the center of the gallery, Curtis has assembled "The Garden," 19 pieces from his own collection…