By RANDY KENNEDY

Anyone who has recently been lost around the southern reaches of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn could be excused for experiencing a flashback to the early ‘80s.

On the wall of a brick warehouse a huge mural unfurls itself, a loving re-creation of one of the more infamous pieces of graffiti ever to ride the subway: a 1980 work by the artist known as Seen that covered the length of a train car with the ominous phrase “Hand of Doom.”

The original work ? among those canonized in Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper’s 1984 landmark photographic history, “Subway Art” ? was a token of its troubled urban times, a reference to the song by the band Black Sabbath, with the words flanked by a hooded executioner and a time bomb.

The 21st-century version is gentler and more oblique. It reads “Joan of Arc,” and the hatchet man has been replaced by a representation of the martyred French saint. A few kilometers away, on a streetfront wall in a nearby neighborhood, a kineticlooking 1980 piece by the graffiti writer Blade has been re-created, with the five letters of his name changed to read “Plato.” On a coffee shop wall , a name piece from the same year by the artist known as Dondi has been faithfully resurrected but changed to read “Gandhi.”

And a copy of an early-’80s subway tag by the artist Sin appeared on a row of lockers inside Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with the addition of some philosophical heft: the name is now “Spinoza.” The pieces are the works of a newly formed collective of (mostly) former graffiti writers in their 20s and 30s. They have embarked on a citywide campaign to summon 50 or more of the most famous pieces of old-school graffiti out of the history books and back onto the streets.

The project, called “Subway Art History,” is unusual not only because the artists are making the pieces with the permission of businesses, schools and other perhaps nostalgic owners of blank vertical space, but also because of the nature of the pieces themselves. They are expressions of homage in a subculture that has almost always been defined by rebellion.

“In graffiti it’s like a teenage thing: ‘No way am I going to become my father, no way am I going to make anything that looks like anyone else’s’ ? and then, of course, you become your father,” said a 32-year-old former graffiti writer who helped form the collective.

He and other group members asked that their names be withheld, not for the usual reason ? the police ? but because the collective, which calls itself Slavery, is seeking to get away from the ego jockeying that normally accompanies graffiti work. The idea is to use the pieces to try to teach a two-part history lesson.

The first is about the glories of the early days of graffiti and the invention of a vernacular art form that has swept the world. The second lesson is about world history itself, in neighborhoods where education remains low on the list of priorities for many struggling teenagers.

The 32-year-old artist painted graffiti illegally for many years but is now a teacher . He said that the group started with Joan of Arc because the members saw her, dead at 19, as an emblem of both the power and the perils of youth.

Besides warriors, philosophers and characters from Western and Eastern mythology , he said that they plan to include artists, writers, and political and religious figures. He added: “ We hope that the people who see the words help each other figure out what they’re about, and that these things start a conversation .”

A print made of the Joan of Arc piece will be sold as part of Edition One Hundred, a new online art gallery that gives 10 percent of the profits to charity. The plan is eventually to compile photographs of all the pieces into a book. Mr. Chalfant, the graffiti photographer and historian, said that he had given his blessings to the project partly because such a tribute had few precedents in the world of New York graffiti.

“I think it’s a wonderful reverse of what usually happens, which is that these people whose shoulders everyone has stood on don’t get any credit,” he said.