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Urban Art: Elevating Aesthetics and Cultural Identity in Cities

The term “urban art” describes visual art forms that are created by and representative of city dwellers. While you may see pieces in galleries, urban art installations are primarily integrated into the landscape. They’re on buildings and street features.

There’s increasing recognition of how vital urban art installations are. They help to shape both the physical landscape of cities and influence the culture of communities. Let’s explore this vibrant medium a little further.

The Evolution of Urban Art Installations

Art in public spaces is nothing new. Even aside from Neolithic cave paintings, there are examples of murals and carved graffiti in the bustling cityscapes of ancient Maya. Much like today, these were used to communicate key facets of culture to others.

Since around the 1970s, though, installations in urban areas have tended to fall into a couple of distinct categories. There’s graffiti, which takes the form of painted text but can be far more artistically complex than this description. There’s also street art, which focuses on more varied imagery. Usually, street art is associated with murals , but it can also include stickers, sculptures, lighting, and even mosaics.

Urban art debate today has often centered around the legal considerations. Street art and graffiti can be sanctioned or commissioned by private building owners or local authorities. Though, it’s important to note that unsanctioned urban art is also a powerful form of expression, whatever Mayor Harrell’s feelings on the matter may be. While to some it may be vandalism, it is nonetheless a symbol of unrestrained creativity and social activism.

The effect is that today, urban art has a complex impact on cities. There’s an aesthetic vibrancy that elevates the architecture and other features. It also gives opportunities for citizens to contribute their artistic talents to something that gives them a voice in a challenging world.

Aesthetics and Urban Identity

Urban art installations contribute significantly to the aesthetics and identity of the city. In some instances, the identity may be limited, as “legitimate” murals can be restricted to select artists chosen for projects. However, the fact that artists also independently put their stamps on cities provides additional and untethered authenticity to the character of the landscape. Additionally, you’ll often find that street art in specific areas will reflect the nuanced cultural elements of individual communities. After all, art is frequently created through the filter of the artists’ cultural heritage, their struggles, and their celebrations. This means that urban art plays a role in teaching locals and visitors about who lives there. 

A great example of this is in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood . Street artists from a range of cultural backgrounds have been creating murals both directly on walls and on plywood. Particularly following the political and social upheaval surrounding Black Lives Matter and the Covid-19 pandemic, artists have been adopting the area as a canvas. They’re expressing how events have impacted their cultures and they’re protesting through the medium of art.

Community Engagement and Social Impact

Urban art tends to be accessible, both for audiences and artists. This is a quality that has made it an increasingly effective tool for community engagement. Festivals are providing spaces for artists to create meaningful work and for community members to connect to it. There are also projects designed to leverage the power of art to influence social challenges.

For instance, urban art can help boost public health education. Healthcare in the U.S. at the moment, including the state of oral healthcare , is riddled with financial, social, and geographical inequalities. This impacts how effectively communities are able to access treatment and knowledge. Organizations like Health Education through Art , have been effective in combining youth health education and advocacy with public art projects. This provides a forum to address challenges alongside the enrichment of creative activities.

Another example of impactful community urban art engagement is Mural Arts Philadelphia . The organization arranges multiple projects each year designed to bring community members together to build relationships and facilitate a dialogue around challenges. Its collaborations empower communities to direct their talents and ideas to explore culturally vital subject matter, such as restorative justice and sustainability.

Challenges and Opportunities

For all the benefits of urban art installations, there are challenges cities and arts organizations need to address. There has to be a focus on ensuring projects are accessible both for artists and the viewing public. It’s also vital to establish inclusivity measures that ensure underrepresented artists and communities can engage with projects.

Equally, though, there are opportunities, some of which may help address challenges. Projects could utilize innovative practices, such as incorporating quick response (QR codes) into art that links to descriptive text for people with visual impairments. Meaningful collaborations between diverse community members offer chances to share resources.

Particularly concerning issues of inclusivity and accessibility, it’s important for planning processes to be thorough, with chances for bottom-up engagement. Before a project begins, leaders should conduct feasibility studies . These help to determine how likely the project is to succeed and what resources are required to address the challenges. Studies will highlight physical risks that may be barriers to those with accessibility difficulties so accommodations can be arranged.

Future Trends

Just as public art has evolved over time, there are continued shifts in urban installations. There are already trends for interactive pieces that are not limited to visuals but also textures and sounds. Tech, such as augmented reality (AR) is also beginning to provide added dimensions to murals.

In the future, we’re likely to see even greater integration of tech, though this may be tempered by other priorities. Climate change may well affect how cities implement urban art, in line with sustainability goals . More sustainable materials could become the norm. Indeed, environmental messaging may have an even more prominent presence in the cultural content of installations.

Throughout these developments, it is vital for communities, businesses, and administrators to collaborate on supporting urban art installations. This is a uniquely accessible and powerful form of expression that has multifaceted benefits for communities. It also creates a legacy that tells the story of the city and the people who enrich it.

Harrell’s Anti-Graffiti Plan Sees $1.2 Million Cut But Council Leaves It Mostly Intact

Amanda Winstead (Guest Contributor)

Discover How Urban Street Art Is Shaping Our Cities & Culture

Urban street art’s not just graffiti on a wall; it’s the pulse of a city’s heart, a visual symphony played out on concrete canvases. As I wander through bustling streets, I’m captivated by the vibrant colors and bold messages that transform ordinary spaces into extraordinary spectacles.

From hidden alley masterpieces to towering murals, street art tells a story of cultural identity and social commentary. It’s a world where artists wield spray cans as their brushes and city walls as their easels, challenging passersby to see beyond the mundane.

Exploring the evolution of urban street art, I’ve seen it shift from underground rebellion to mainstream marvel, such as being implemented as graffiti tapestry .. It’s a testament to the power of creativity and its ability to reshape the urban landscape. Join me as I delve into the mesmerizing realm of street art, where every corner turned is a potential gallery of the streets.

The Evolution of Urban Street Art

From its humble beginnings tagged on side streets to towering murals on city skyscrapers, urban street art has undergone a phenomenal transformation. I’ve witnessed its acceptance in mainstream culture firsthand. Initially, it was an act of defiance , where anonymous artists expressed themselves outside the constraints of traditional galleries.

In the 1970s and 1980s, street art was synonymous with graffiti, often seen as vandalism. However, it’s vital to view this era as the gestation period for modern street art . Artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring broke through societal barriers, elevating their work from subway stations to art galleries. Their success paved the way for graffiti to be recognized as a legitimate art form.

As I delve deeper into this world, it’s clear that technology’s role has been significant. Digital platforms have launched street art into the global spotlight, giving artists a stage to broadcast their work. Furthermore, art enthusiasts and city dwellers alike now engage with street art through social media , sharing pictures that bring international attention to local pieces.

Street Art Festivals and Collaborations

The birth of street art festivals has acted as a catalyst for the movement’s growth. The following are some of the most notable festivals that I’ve attended:

• Pow! Wow! Hawaii : This international network of artists invites talents from across the globe to create epic murals.
• Nuart Festival, Norway : A pioneer in the street art festival scene, showcasing thought-provoking pieces.
• Upfest, UK : Europe’s largest street art and graffiti festival, attracting over 300 artists painting live.

These gatherings not only display talents but also foster collaboration between street artists and urban communities. They are transforming neighborhoods into open-air galleries and proving that street art can be a powerful tool for urban regeneration.

Mainstream Integration and Commercialization

Street art’s journey into the commercial world is undeniable. Major brands often commission street artists for advertising campaigns, blurring the lines between grassroots activism and corporate promotion. This commercialization raises questions about authenticity and integrity , but it also provides unprecedented opportunities for artists to gain recognition and financial stability.

By embracing various styles and methods, from stencil art to 3D installations , urban street art continues to evolve and defy categorization. Every piece tells a story; behind each mural is an artist’s vision and a reflection of contemporary culture.

Exploring Cultural Identity and Social Commentary

Urban street art often serves as a catalyst for exploring cultural identity, creating a space where conversation starts and barriers break down. As I delve into various street art scenes around the world, it’s evident that artists are using public spaces to celebrate cultural diversity and comment on societal issues. Murals , stencils , and installations become mediums through which stories of heritage and identity are vividly told, challenging onlookers to reflect on their own understandings and biases.

The dynamic aesthetics of street art capture more than just beauty; they address social justice themes , immigration, inequality, and more. Walking down streets adorned with bold art, I’ve witnessed how these visuals provoke thought and foster dialogue among community members.

• Affirming cultural pride
• Critiquing political policies
• Highlighting environmental concerns

Each piece of art is a piece to an ever-unfolding puzzle in the narrative of human experience. For example, in neighborhoods where gentrification is reshaping the demographic, street art can be a form of resistance or a plea for remembrance.

In cities like Berlin and Johannesburg, street art chronicles historical transformations and places them in the context of current societal movements. The walls in these urban landscapes don’t just speak; they shout echoes of the past while pointing to future possibilities.

Meanwhile, advancements in technology have given rise to digital street art forms, allowing for a loop of conversation that extends far beyond the physical locations of the artworks. Artists such as JR have utilized large-scale photography and augmented reality to create immersive experiences that challenge perceptions and bring to light untold stories.

Interactive murals with QR codes, for instance, lead to multimedia presentations about the inspirations behind the art or the messages intended by the creators. These innovative approaches are transforming the way street art initiates community introspection and underscores its role in modern-day social commentary.

By engaging with these public displays of artistry, I am not only witnessing the spirit of the times but also participating in a larger discourse on culture in the digital age.

From Rebellion to Mainstream Marvel

As I’ve followed the journey of urban street art, I’ve witnessed its incredible transformation from a countercultural movement to a celebrated mainstream phenomenon. Street art was once dismissed as mere vandalism, relegated to the shadows of the urban landscape. Yet, today it stands tall as a legitimate form of artistic expression that enriches cities and captivates the public.

Initiatives that once started as acts of rebellion now adorn the walls of galleries and museums. Renowned institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Tate Modern in London have embraced this art form, showcasing its vibrancy and depth. The acceptance at such illustrious venues underscores the dramatic shift in the perception of street art, acknowledging its rightful place in the art historical narrative.

In terms of real estate and urban development, street art has been a catalyst for change, breathing new life into once-neglected neighborhoods. Murals and installations have become assets, turning areas into tourist hotspots and increasing their commercial value. Developers and city planners frequently collaborate with street artists, leveraging their work to inspire community engagement and economic growth.

• Increased tourist attraction
• Enhancement of neighborhood aesthetics
• Property value appreciation

The art form’s ability to reach a wide audience without the traditional barriers of the art world has propelled its artists to celebrity status. Figures like Banksy , Shepard Fairey, and JR have gained international recognition, contributing heavily to street art’s mainstream allure. They’re not just artists but cultural icons, influencing fashion, entertainment, and social movements with their thought-provoking pieces.

As street artists continue to gain a foothold in the art market, the lines between street art and high art blur. Auction houses now regularly feature works by street artists, fetching impressive sums that reflect their newfound prestige. These developments don’t just validate street art as a movement; they also allow artists to sustain their practice, reaching broader audiences while staying true to the ethos of accessibility that defines the genre.

The narrative of urban street art is a tale of dynamic evolution . Whether it’s the pulsating glow of neon graffiti or the ephemeral beauty of a mural destined for demolition, each work symbolizes the relentless spirit of innovation that propels street art forward. It’s a testament to human creativity and an unyielding will to express oneself, with city walls as the canvas for our age’s most compelling stories.

The Power of Creativity in Reshaping Urban Landscapes

When I wander through the city streets, I’m captivated by the power of creativity that spills over the buildings and alleyways. Urban street art isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s a force that’s actively reshaping urban landscapes. Artists use city walls as huge public canvases, allowing their work to become a part of the community’s daily life.

Street art becomes a dialogue between the artist and the city, where every painted corner tells a story. Murals often reflect the neighborhood’s history or hopes, leading to a renovated sense of shared identity among residents. I’ve seen firsthand how art has the power to convert a once derelict block into a bustling destination for locals and tourists alike.

Technological advancements have played a critical role in this transformative power. Augmented reality and digital projections take street art to new heights, allowing artists to add interactive dimensions to their work. These elements appeal to the digitally-savvy generation, fostering deeper engagement with the art and the space it inhabits.

Moreover, the rise of social media has given street art a global audience. A talented artist from a small town can now achieve worldwide recognition instantaneously. This exposure not only elevates the artist’s work but can also draw attention to the lesser-known areas they beautify, potentially sparking urban renewal projects .

The proliferation of legal graffiti spaces and street art workshops reflects the recognition of its significant impact. These initiatives encourage not just the creation of new works but also the development of a diverse range of artists. Inclusivity in this art form is crucial, as it brings together a wide array of perspectives that challenge and enrich the urban landscape.

As street art gains institutional recognition, with galleries and museums hosting exhibitions, it ensures that the messages conveyed through these urban canvases reach an even broader audience. The integration of street art into formal art spaces validates its importance and reinforces its power to reshape cities not only physically but culturally and socially as well.

Finding Art in Every Corner of the City

Throughout the concrete labyrinth of our cities, I’ve noticed how street art has become an omnipresent component of urban life. Reflecting on my walks through various neighborhoods, it’s almost impossible not to encounter some form of art, whether it’s a sprawling mural or a tiny stencil tucked away in an alley.

Street corners , once overlooked, have turned into platforms for artistic expression. Murals often engulf entire facades of buildings, while smaller pieces play a game of hide and seek with those who are curious enough to find them. It’s impressive to see how these artists utilize every inch of urban space, turning streets into canvases that capture the cultural essence of the neighborhood.

Local businesses have started to embrace this explosion of creativity as well. It’s becoming increasingly common to spot commissioned artworks adorning the sides of shops, cafes, and bars, attracting customers and tourists alike. This synergy not only beautifies the area but helps establish a distinctive brand identity for businesses, which is essential in the competitive city environment.

In many cities, utility boxes, benches, and even sidewalks become unexpected carriers of artwork. These projects, often initiated by community groups or sanctioned by city art programs, aim to infuse mundane public spaces with bursts of color and creativity.

The rise of legal graffiti spots and authorized walls has also encouraged artists to leave their mark, engaging with the community in a dialogue that’s as visual as it is impactful. Art workshops and interactive street art tours further enrich this cultural exchange, allowing art to blossom in spaces that were once blank and ignored.

As I explore different parts of the city, one thing remains clear: urban street art isn’t just about the aesthetics; it’s a vibrant testimony of an area’s identity, history, and the collective stories of its inhabitants. Notably, as this form of expression receives broader recognition, those stories are being preserved and shared—resisting the transitory nature of the city scape and enshrining moments of creative brilliance in the shared memory of the community.

Urban street art has undeniably become a pulsating force in shaping the visual and cultural landscape of cities around the world. As I’ve explored the multifaceted dimensions of this dynamic art form it’s clear that it does more than just beautify blank walls—it sparks conversations, challenges perceptions and reflects the soul of the community. Artists have found in the cityscape a canvas for expression and a platform for visibility on a scale that traditional galleries could rarely offer. It’s thrilling to witness how street art transcends boundaries and becomes a universal language of creativity and resistance. Whether it’s through the vibrant murals that tell a neighborhood’s story or the digital works that connect us globally street art continues to evolve and inspire. It’s a testament to the indomitable human spirit and its relentless pursuit of expression. I’m left with a profound respect for the artistry and the transformative power of street art—it’s not just part of the urban fabric it’s a living breathing part of our collective human experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is urban street art and how has it evolved.

Urban street art is a form of public art originating from graffiti culture, which has evolved to become widely accepted in mainstream culture. It involves a range of creative expressions on city walls that now include digital media, and its global exposure has been amplified by technology and social media.

How does street art contribute to urban regeneration?

Street art festivals and collaborations transform neighborhoods into open-air galleries, enhancing aesthetics and community spirit, which leads to urban regeneration. This process strengthens local identity and can also stimulate economic growth through increased tourism and property values.

How has technology influenced street art?

Technology has greatly influenced street art by facilitating digital forms of expression and allowing artists to reach a global audience. Social media platforms enable artworks to be shared worldwide, creating a loop of conversation that extends far beyond the physical location of the pieces.

What themes does urban street art typically address?

Urban street art often serves as a platform for social commentary, addressing themes such as cultural diversity, societal issues, immigration, inequality, environmental concerns, and political critique. It provides artists with an opportunity to affirm cultural pride and highlight historical transformations.

How does street art affect local real estate markets?

Street art can positively impact real estate markets by increasing tourist attraction, enhancing neighborhood aesthetics, and potentially leading to an appreciation of property values. Areas with vibrant street art scenes may become more desirable, drawing in new residents and businesses.

What is the relationship between street art and cultural identity?

Street art is a tool for exploring and expressing cultural identity. Artists use urban spaces to capture the cultural essence of a neighborhood, often highlighting its history and the collective stories of its inhabitants. Such artworks can foster a sense of pride and belonging within communities.

How do businesses use street art for branding?

Businesses utilize street art to establish a distinctive brand identity by commissioning murals or integrating street art aesthetics into their branding. This creates a visually striking presence that can resonate with consumers and differentiate the business in a crowded market.

What role do legal graffiti spaces play in the recognition of street art?

Legal graffiti spaces and workshops provide artists with sanctioned opportunities to showcase their work, aiding in the recognition and legitimization of street art. These spaces enable experimentation without the risk of legal repercussions and can lead to street art’s integration into formal art spaces.

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Articles and Features

Street Art: History of the Art Movement and the Artists That Turned Cities Into Open Sky Museums

By Adam Hencz

“I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.” Jean-Michel Basquiat

Street art is regarded as one of the largest art movements that has achieved huge popularity and is still rapidly growing as an art form. Street artworks mainly appear in urban areas and public locations such as exterior walls of buildings, highway overpasses and bridges, and remarkably define the outlook of many neighborhoods and cities all around the world. Reflections on political and social issues are often central to street art which varies from sprayed tags, through stickers and knitted fibers wrapping telephone poles to monumental painted murals covering entire buildings. Street art, to a certain extent, is connected to and encompasses graffiti art.

Key dates: ca. 1960s – ongoing Key regions: originated from the metropolises of the United States, especially New York City and Philadelphia, now spread around the world Keywords: graffiti, subway art, guerilla art, public art, urban art, large scale murals Key artists: Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, Cornbread, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Lady Pink, Blu Key characteristics: created in public spaces with a strong political or social message

The History of Street Art 

People have been using natural surfaces to draw and paint on them since prehistoric times when handprints and paintings depicting hunting scenes were put on cave walls to evoke the prosperity and unity of small human communities. What we call street art today is inherently different from the aforementioned wall writings and dates back to modern times, to the war of infamous gangs of New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, when name-based tags and primitive graffiti started popping up on the streets, marking controlled territories by the gangs. A similar urban climate contributed to art murals finding their way into the cityscapes of Southern California’s metropolises around the same time. Well-documented origins of street art come from Philadelphia and especially New York City. In the 1960s, New York was going through hard times and was on the brink of bankruptcy. The vast areas of boarded-up buildings, vacant lots, closed down factories and construction sites became the canvas for a group of creative kids, first in Spanish Harlem, that led to the development of a whole art form that went from a simple signature all the way to murals that covered entire subway cars.

The New York Golden Age

The mid-1970s saw the evolution of different styles as many seminal street artists at that time would write their nicknames and pseudonyms in a unique manner with an original design, battling the quest to get noticed. Only a few artists captured the creative process and the early momentum of street artist communities, photographer Martha Cooper being one of the most respected names to do so. She started documenting the New York street art scene and street artists in the 1970s, and also largely contributed to the development of the whole movement by distributing her book called Subway art, published in the early 1980s. Cooper’s slim paperback edition quickly became a style guide for train writers and graffiti artists not only across the United States but in Europe as well.

During the 1980s, street and graffiti art found their way into art galleries and museums, at a time when artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat from the New York street art scene gave credibility to such realm and took their works from the street into the fine art world. Since then, the art form has secured its position in the art world and become validated as a cultural phenomenon, even though such practices are considered illegal in many cities around the world.

Themes & Techniques of Street Art

Often humorous and thought-provoking, Street Art covers an extreme wide range of themes and interesting techniques beyond the traditional graffiti and spray paint. 

Whilst territorial and rebellious in nature, street art tends to convey a social or political message that provokes discussion and reaction. Street art is often connected to activism that creates awareness about pressing social and environmental issues.

Street art is created in a vast variety of ways with a wide range of techniques. Tagging by aerosol paint is one of the most common and quickest ways to put out a work in public, while markers, paint, and innovations such as filling fire extinguishers with paint are also widely used. However, street art is not limited to paint and markers, as artists are using absolutely any kind of material and medium available such as stencils, stickers, posters, textiles, LED lights, mosaics or video projection. Yarnbombing, the act of taking colorful knitted or crocheted yarn or fiber to the streets, is one of the fairly new phenomena in the street art world.

 Graffiti vs Street art

Drawing the line between graffiti and street art can be difficult. The most obvious distinction is in intent. While street art is often commissioned, making graffitis is typically sanctioned and cities often treat the act of spraying graffiti as vandalism. Another distinctive feature of the two is that street art contains elements connected to graphic design and is more about imagery, while graffiti always has a text-based subject in the act of tagging and lettering. Graffiti art is largely associated with hip hop as well as punk subcultures and still represents a form of rebellion it is synonymous with.

Most famous Street Artists

We take a look at some of the most famous street artists of the past and the most influential street artists of the present day.

Despite his international fame, the identity of stencil-artist Banksy is still shrouded in mystery. An enigma himself, Banksy got noticed for spray-painting trains and walls in his home city of Bristol in the 1990s. Since then, the artist became a worldwide phenomenon, putting subversive and controversial messages on the streets all around the world. He also pulled off one of the most original auction stunts in art history, when his 2006 painting of Girl with Balloon unexpectedly self-destructed immediately after it was sold for more than a million dollars at a Sotheby’s auction.

Keith Haring

Keith Haring played a significant role in the rise of the 1980s New York street art scene, creating graffiti-inspired paintings and drawings that broke down the barriers between street culture and high art. Haring found a unique way to participate in the city’s creative boom, using his own visual language and symbols to comment on issues like drug addiction, sexuality, war and power. He first gained popularity in the early 1980s with his cartoon-like subway drawings, which were temporary works he would create with a piece of chalk using blank advertising posters at subway stops as his canvas.

Jean Michel Basquiat

Born to a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian immigrant father, Jean-Michel Basquiat, like many of his contemporaries, began his work on the streets of New York City. At the age of 20, he began working on paper and canvas in a so-called consolidated way, while studying art history on his own. He befriended his idol, Andy Warhol, who not only did a lot for his advancement and recognition but also collaborated with Basquiat. Basquiat struggled with the sudden fame and pressure for years in an escalation that resulted in a heroin overdose at the age of 27. After his early death, his reputation has soared and today, through his paintings and graffiti, Jean-Michel Basquiat is considered as one of the first and greatest exponents of visual art in the history of African American art.

CornBread, also known as Darryl McCray is widely considered as the world’s first graffiti writer and artist, living and working in Philadelphia. He started doing graffiti in the 1960s and helped put graffiti art into a contemporary context. He is a graffiti icon who works as a public speaker as well as a youth advocate.

Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey is a contemporary American street artist, who founded the well-known brand OBEY, which emerged from the skateboarding scene. Besides stencil works, Fairey creates murals as well as graphic illustrations and designs. He is the creator of former US president Barack Obama’s successful 2008 campaign logo and “Hope” poster.

The Ecuadorian-American painter, muralist and graffiti writer Lady Pink became a cult figure in the 1980s hip hop and graffiti scene, first getting noticed in the late 1970s for her subway train paintings. Throughout her career, she used graffiti as an act of empowering women and continues to mature as an artist, creating monumental works around New York as well as holding mural workshops for local communities.

Blu from Bologna, Italy, represents a younger generation of street artists. He is known for his ambitious projects and politically-charged epic-scale murals. His best-known project is MUTO, a blend of street art and stop-motion animation. ​​In 2016, he systematically erased and destroyed 20 years worth of murals he created on the streets of Bologna as a form of protest against the oppression of youth culture in the city.

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Music and Arts

The World of Street Art: Exploring the Global Urban Canvas and its Cultural Impact

Street art is a dynamic expression that bathes urban landscapes in vibrant colours and thought-provoking imagery. Around the world, these visual narratives function not only as a means of personal expression for the artists but also as a reflection of social and cultural currents within communities. From the historic alleyways of Europe to the bustling streets of South America, every piece of street art is a chapter in the larger story of human experience, capturing the pulse of various societies.

As a compelling medium transcending language, street art communicates with a broad audience, delivering messages ranging from political protests to heritage celebrations. This urban canvas is ever-changing, with new works appearing and older ones fading, echoing the fluid nature of city life itself. Artists utilise many techniques and styles to leave their mark, melding traditional methods with innovative practices. The result is a rich tapestry of aesthetic diversity that challenges viewers to engage with the art deeper, prompting reflection, dialogue, and, at times, action.

The Essence of Street Art

Street art has transformed the urban landscape into a vibrant tapestry of expression and dialogue . Once considered a form of vandalism, it has evolved into a legitimate and powerful art form, resonating deeply with culture and identity.

Graffiti, the early precursor to today’s multifaceted street art, etched its marks on city walls as an act of visibility, a claim to existence in a rapidly changing urban reality. These visual declarations ranged from personal taggings to elaborate pieces, setting the stage for an urban art revolution.

The essence of street art lies in its ability to converse with the public without the barriers of traditional art venues. It invites passersby to pause and reflect, engaging with themes of social commentary and giving a voice to the voiceless. This art is often temporary, weathering over time or being covered by new layers of paint, adding to its transient beauty and immediacy.

Amid the concrete jungles, these impromptu canvases reflect societal moods, often encapsulating local and global issues. From the silent whispers of a stencil to the loud clamour of a mural , street art speaks volumes about the times and places it inhabits, making it a potent force in shaping our shared urban identity.

It’s not just about aesthetics; street art has a role in beautifying and reclaiming spaces, turning bland facades into messages of hope, resistance, and humanity. Each piece serves as a cultural artefact, a snapshot of creativity as diverse as the communities it emanates from. Ours is a world where street art is a visual dialect for all to engage with.

Historical Evolution of Urban Art

We’re about to explore the fascinating progression of urban art from ancient times to the iconic artists that have defined its contemporary form.

Ancient Origins to Modern Movements

Urban art possesses a rich heritage that can be traced back to ancient civilisations. Chiselled etchings and painted walls were an integral way through which cultures such as Rome and Egypt immortalised their existence. Fast forward to the 20th Century, and urban environments became the canvases for graffiti and pop art. This era marked the transition from ancient expressions to modern movements, with the advent of graffiti intertwined with the rise of hip-hop culture.

During the 1970s, figures such as Taki 183 – a messenger from the streets of New York – became legendary for their tagging, prompting a wave of street art across urban spaces. Intersecting with music, fashion, and language, street art began to mirror the rhythm and voice of the disenfranchised, as well as the vibrancy of the ever-changing city.

The Rise of Iconic Street Artists

In the 1980s, artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged, bringing street art from the subway stations and alleyways into the art galleries. Their rich historical perspective work expanded the framework of what was considered art.

Soon, historians and lovers of art history would witness the evolution of urban art as it grew to include stencil art, with Banksy becoming the enigmatic face of this realm. Along with Shepard Fairey’s iconic “OBey” campaign, stencil art became a global phenomenon, harnessing the essence of societal and political discourse.

Our immersion into urban art is one of discovery, tracing lines back centuries and spiralling towards an array of modern, influential voices. Each piece offers insight into the artist’s psyche and the cultural and historical consciousness of our urban landscapes.

Techniques and Styles

We explore the sophisticated array of techniques and styles that constitute the eclectic world of street art, focusing on how artists convey powerful messages through the urban canvas.

Graffiti and Tagging

Graffiti primarily incorporates stylised lettering and design, often featuring vibrant colour schemes that splash across cityscapes. It starts with the simple tag, an artist’s signature synonymous with their identity. Artists expand upon this with intricate, wild styles that intertwine characters with interlocking letters and shapes, pushing the boundaries of typography and visual flow.

Stencilling and Murals

In contrast, stencilling applies a cut-out design to produce a clear, replicable image or pattern. Due to their visibility and size, these usually deliver bolder political or social statements. Murals, meanwhile, transform large walls into stunning, story-laden masterpieces imbued with character and local narratives, often becoming celebrated landmarks within communities.

Installations and Urban Interventions

Street installations transcend traditional two-dimensionality, incorporating three-dimensional works and repurposing urban elements into thought-provoking pieces. Whether it’s yarn bombing or hijacking street signs, these installations create surprise and intrigue, inviting passersby to interact with their environment in new ways. Urban interventions go a step further, often reclaiming public spaces to challenge the status quo or societal norms.

Cultural and Social Impact

As we explore the vibrant world of street art, it’s essential to recognise its substantial role in conveying cultural and social narratives. Our observations of this dynamic art form provide insights into how street art is a powerful platform for social commentary and activism within urban landscapes.

Street Art as Social Commentary

We often witness street art that holds a mirror up to society, reflecting the ongoing social issues within our communities. These artistic expressions tackle social justice, economic disparity, and cultural identity, offering bold and unfiltered perspectives on our urban reality. For instance, street art has become a visual dialogue about social messages, illustrating struggles and triumphs that resonate with many. By occupying public spaces, these artworks become accessible to a wide audience, igniting conversations and challenging viewers to engage with pressing topics of our times.

Activism and Political Messages

Street artists’ brushstrokes and spray paints frequently address political messages, with murals and stencils becoming a canvas for rebellion against injustice. From advocating for equality to questioning governmental policies, street art has raised awareness and sparked change. We’ve seen how such art can promote pride and solidarity among community members, galvanising support for causes and moving people toward collective action. Furthermore, activism through street art fosters community engagement. It transforms urban spaces into hubs of cultural discourse, serving as artistic displays and as rallying points for civic participation.

Community and Identity

Street art has become a powerful medium for expressing community pride and cultural identity within urban landscapes. This visual communication allows local communities to publicly voice their uniqueness and shared values. Murals and graffiti often reflect the local customs and heritage, bridging the gap between generations and fostering a renewed sense of belonging.

• Understanding Through Art : By encountering these artworks daily, residents and visitors gain insights into what makes a neighbourhood distinctive.
• Visual Stories : Each piece serves as a narrative, telling stories of the area’s past and present and sometimes hopes for the future.

In many cases, the very act of creating street art is a communal effort involving residents and artists alike. This collaboration strengthens communal bonds and affirms the neighbourhood’s identity. Moreover, street art can transform an ordinary urban environment into an open-air gallery accessible to all, promoting inclusivity and a democratic use of space.

Street art in various localities can instil pride within a community as they witness and participate in beautifying their surroundings. It is not uncommon for street art to become a landmark within a neighbourhood, symbolising its culture and providing a canvas that continuously evolves with the community.

While some may see street art as mere decoration, transformative works reflect cultural identity through vivid imagery that resonates with the residents. We see a fusion of creativity that mirrors the dynamics of our cities – a harmonious urban symphony of visuals speaking to all who wander through the streets.

Geographical Spread and Local Flavours

Street art has transformed urban environments into galleries that showcase diverse cultural expressions. It fuses local traditions with global trends, creating a visual dialogue that spans continents.

Global Art Form

Street art is a dynamic art form that exists in nearly every major city around the globe. From the graffiti-tagged alleys of North America to the vibrant murals that grace the streets of South America, it reflects the pulse of urban life. In Europe, street art adds a contemporary layer to historic cities, while in Asia and Africa, it often intertwines traditional motifs with modern narratives. Brazilian twins Os Gêmeos are prime examples of how artists meld global influences with regional aesthetics, earning worldwide acclaim for their colourful and surrealistic style unique to Brazilian culture.

Cultural Icons and Regional Styles

Each urban canvas reveals insights into cultural icons and regional styles. In Europe, particularly in London, street artists channel the city’s rich history into their work, often commenting on contemporary societal issues. Moving across to Africa, local traditions are communicated through art, with many pieces focused on community life and social identity. Within Asia, the spread of street art reflects both the rapid modernisation of cities and the preservation of Asian philosophies. It’s a blend of the old and the new, a testament to these diverse cultures’ resilience and evolving identities.

Economic and Political Factors

In the intricate tapestry of urban environments, street art emerges as a medium where economic and political narratives collide, challenging notions of property and authority to offer a potent display of sentiment and activism.

Public Spaces and Ownership

We witness in public spaces an ongoing tussle over ownership . Street art, inherently public, typically occupies spaces that city entities or private individuals legally own. This space occupation fuels a debate on the rights of artists versus those of the owners. Street art adds economic value by promoting tourism and local businesses, as discussed in “Street art/art in the street – semiotics, politics, economy” , but simultaneously can incite legal confrontations over property rights.

Art, Vandalism, and City Officials

The delicate boundary between art and vandalism is often navigated by city officials, who must balance fostering creative expression and upholding the law. While street art can convey powerful messages and enhance the visual landscape, instances deemed vandalistic can attract penalties and spark political discourse. The intervention of authorities often illuminates the politics involved, especially when seeking to push boundaries within the urban canvas, which is further explained through such dynamics revealed in “Exploring the Political Messages in Street Art – Street Buddha” . This interaction underlines the complexity of managing urban aesthetics and free speech by those in governance.

Intersection with Other Art Forms

As we explore the rich tapestry of street art, we find it weaving its way into various aspects of our visual and cultural landscape, significantly influencing pop culture and fashion and transitioning from outdoor urban canvases to the esteemed galleries of the art world.

Influence on Pop Culture and Fashion

The vibrant language of street art has made a lasting impact on pop culture. This art form often carries bold political and social commentary that resonates with a wide audience, and its aesthetics have been absorbed into the designs and motifs of contemporary fashion. Fashion designers have reinterpreted iconic elements of graffiti and pop art to create clothing lines that embody the rebellious spirit of the streets, thereby solidifying street art’s position as a global art form.

Street art’s vivid visual vocabulary has been incorporated into the merchandising of music artists, often blurring the lines between commercial and counterculture. This fusion can be seen in album covers, music videos, and even on-stage performances, showcasing how other creative sectors have embraced street art and left its indelible mark on the broader canvas of pop culture.

From Street to Gallery

Street art’s journey from the alleys and subways to the polished floors of galleries is a testament to its evolution as a respected art form. Once viewed as vandalism, it is now celebrated for its audacious creativity and powerful expression. Galleries and exhibitions now diligently curate street art, bringing it to a wider audience and granting it a legitimacy that has fostered dialogue between the urban streets and the traditional art establishment.

As cultural observers witness breathtaking murals and stencils transition into framed pieces within a gallery, we appreciate the transformation of perception surrounding street artists. They are now recognised as contemporary masters, their works commanding significant attention and value in the art market. This transition not only highlights the fluidity of art but also showcases the undeniable prowess of street artists in mastering both the spontaneity of street walls and the curated environment of galleries.

Innovators and Pioneers

We recognise the streets as more than mere pathways; they serve as a canvas for some of the most influential artists of the urban art scene. The movement has nurtured legends whose works have transcended the confines of the conventional gallery and embedded themselves into the fabric of urban landscapes. At the forefront of this movement are names that have pioneered the art form and continue to inspire new generations.

Banksy, an enigmatic figure, expertly weaves social commentary and satire into his pieces, making them some of the most recognisable works worldwide. Another notable figure, Shepard Fairey, rose to fame with his “Obey Giant” campaign and solidified his place in street art history with the iconic “Hope” poster during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Alternatively, Invader draws from popular 8-bit video games to tile cities with nostalgic mosaics. As for Blu, his large-scale murals often provide a stark commentary on political and environmental issues. Meanwhile, JR utilises his camera to turn residents into monumental artworks, challenging traditional perceptions of portraiture.

	Bold lines and vivid colours, engaging accessible imagery.
	Abstract approach and influence on graffiti’s direction.
	Raw imagery blending poetry, painting, and commentary.
	Bold lines and vivid colors, engaging accessible imagery.
	The godfather of graffiti, igniting the tagging movement.

Highlighting the lineage of innovation, Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the gritty New York scene and, alongside Keith Haring, bridged the gap between street and high art with his visceral, primitive scrawls and energetic figures. Not to be overlooked, TAKI 183’s simple act of tagging his moniker across NYC ushered in a new graffiti era.

Our journey through the urban landscape reveals a rich tapestry of expression, where each pioneer’s contribution has carved an indelible mark upon the walls of our cities and the annals of art history. Their messages persist, compelling us to observe, reflect, and engage with the world around us.

Conservation and Preservation

The very essence of street art lies in its ability to communicate powerful messages through vivid murals that transform urban landscapes into a mosaic of expressions. However, the conservation and preservation of these works pose significant challenges. With the beautifying impact they have on otherwise drab cityscapes, it’s essential to maintain their colour and vibrancy.

• Environmental Concerns : The materials used in street art can fade over time due to environmental factors such as pollution and sunlight. Protective coatings and regular maintenance can help preserve the brilliance of these urban masterpieces.

Sunlight	It can cause fading and deterioration of pigments.	Use of UV-resistant sealants.
Pollution	May lead to discolouration and chemical damage.	Regular cleaning and anti-graffiti coatings.
Vandalism	Destruction or defacing of murals.	Community surveillance and involvement.

• Iconic Landmarks : Many murals become landmarks in their own right, representing iconic figures or historical events that resonate with the local community. These artworks require rigorous methods that address the piece’s physical upkeep and original intent.

We recognise that each mural holds its narrative, contributing to the collective story of our urban canvas. Through concerted efforts in conservation, these landmarks can continue to enchant onlookers and offer commentary on our society.

Preservation efforts are not only a mechanism to protect; they also reflect a commitment to the cultural significance of street art. As these artistic displays face the threat of erosion over time, we are responsible for safeguarding them for future generations, ensuring that the messages they bear persist amidst the ever-changing face of our urban environments.

Influence of the Digital Era

The digital era has seamlessly blended with the texture of urban life , transforming street art’s outreach and methodology. The visual narratives of street artists now resonate beyond physical boundaries, capturing the essence of self-expression and social commentary.

Street Art and Social Media

Social media has magnified the impact street artists can have on urban culture. Once limited to the eyes of locals or passersby, a single mural can now journey across the globe in seconds. Platforms like Instagram have become galleries where street art gains momentum, with each post amplifying messages that often address the very nuances of urban life. The interplay between these visual spectacles and digital audiences fosters a novel online community that thrives on the ‘share and tag culture.’ This communal aspect also serves as a digital ledger, documenting the transient nature of street art, which is often at the mercy of the environment or city ordinances.

Digital Techniques and Online Communities

Adopting digital techniques, artists wield new tools to craft their creations. Software such as Photoshop and Illustrator nurture the translation of street art from concrete to digital canvas, forging avenues for innovation and intricate designs. Like other creatives, street artists join online communities that bolster collaboration and offer platforms for critique and appreciation. Here, artists can exchange ideas, methods, and projects that might be impossible in isolation. The digital age, therefore, is not merely a backdrop but an active catalyst that shapes how self-expression evolves and interacts with the sprawling canvas of the city.

In this section, we address some of the most pressing questions about the evolving landscape of urban street art, from its iconic masterpieces to the nuances of its legality.

What are the most iconic street art pieces, and where can they be found?

Iconic street art, such as Banksy’s ‘Girl With Balloon’ in London or ‘Hope’ by Shepard Fairey in the United States, can be seen worldwide. These pieces have left indelible marks on the cities where they reside, often sparking conversations about art and society.

How does street art contribute to political and social discourse?

Street art plays a significant role in voicing opinions on political and social issues, offering an unfiltered canvas for artists to address topics such as inequality, war, and environmental concerns, thus sparking public debate and potentially inspiring change.

In what ways has street art been commercialised in recent years?

The commercial sector has recently embraced street art, with artists collaborating with brands, creating product designs, or being represented by galleries, transforming the once-rebellious form into a recognised and marketable aspect of contemporary art.

What legal considerations exist for artists creating street art?

Legal issues can be complex; street artists must navigate copyright laws, potential charges of vandalism, and the need for property owners’ permissions, which also vary significantly from city to city and country to country.

How has the public perception of street art changed over time?

Public perception of street art has shifted considerably, with many now viewing it as a legitimate art form rather than an act of vandalism. This cultural shift has been reflected in the increased protection of street art and the inclusion of murals in urban development plans.

Which techniques and materials are commonly used by street artists?

Street artists commonly utilise spray paint, stencil, sticker art, and poster-making techniques. Some might also incorporate multimedia and unconventional materials, reflecting the innovative spirit and adaptability of the street art movement.

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Urbanism in Art: Exploring Cityscapes Through Architecture

Urbanism in art, particularly through the lens of architecture paintings, represents a captivating intersection of two disciplines: urban planning and visual arts. This fusion offers a unique perspective on how we perceive, interact with, and conceptualize the spaces around us. This article explores the role and impact of architectural paintings in the broader context of urbanism.

The Emergence of Urbanism in Art

Historically, urbanism in art has been a reflection of society’s relationship with its built environment. From the grand cityscapes of the Renaissance to the gritty realism of the Industrial Revolution, artists have long used their work to comment on the state of urban development. The depiction of architecture, in particular, serves as a time capsule of design trends, societal values, and the technological capabilities of the era.

The Role of Architecture Paintings

Architecture paintings go beyond mere representation of buildings and structures. They encapsulate the essence of a city or a particular urban environment. These artworks often highlight the interaction between human life and built forms, offering insights into the urban experience. By focusing on architecture, artists can explore themes of decay, growth, innovation, and the socio-economic forces that shape our cities.

Aesthetic and Symbolic Significance

The aesthetic appeal of these paintings lies in their ability to capture the intricate details of architectural design – the play of light and shadow, the texture of materials, and the harmony of structural elements. Symbolically, they can represent power, progress, or decline, serving as a commentary on urban life and its challenges.

Urbanism in Contemporary Art

In contemporary art, urbanism has embraced more abstract and conceptual approaches. Artists are experimenting with form, color, and perspective to convey the complexity of urban life in the modern world. This shift reflects the changing dynamics of cities, marked by rapid technological advancements and evolving societal norms.

Digital Influence and Future Trends

The impact of digital technology on architectural paintings extends beyond creation to the realm of reproduction. Online platforms, such as this website , specialize in offering high-quality reproductions of architectural paintings. These reproductions allow art enthusiasts to own and appreciate these detailed urban landscapes in their own spaces. The precision and quality of these digital reproductions are a testament to how technology can faithfully replicate the original work’s essence and detail. As we look to the future, the synergy between digital reproduction techniques and traditional painting methods is likely to further democratize access to art, making masterpieces of urbanism more accessible to a broader audience.

The Social Commentary of Urbanism in Art

Architecture paintings also serve as a powerful medium for social commentary. Through the depiction of urban decay or renewal, artists can address issues like gentrification, urban sprawl, and the environmental impact of urbanization. These artworks become a visual dialogue about the challenges and opportunities that cities face, encouraging viewers to reflect on their own experiences and the future of urban living.

The Global Perspective

Furthermore, urbanism in art provides a global perspective, showcasing the diversity of urban experiences across different cultures and regions. From the bustling streets of New York to the historic alleys of Venice, architectural paintings offer a window into the varied ways people live and interact in urban settings. This global view not only enhances cultural understanding but also highlights universal urban challenges, fostering a sense of shared experience and responsibility.

Urbanism in art, particularly through architecture paintings, offers a rich tapestry of insights into our collective urban experience. By capturing the essence of cities and the structures within them, these artworks provide a valuable perspective on the past, present, and future of urban living. As our cities evolve, so too will the art that reflects and critiques them, continuing a tradition that connects us to the spaces we inhabit.

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Street and Graffiti Art

Summary of Street and Graffiti Art

The common idiom "to take to the streets" has been used for years to reflect a diplomatic arena for people to protest, riot, or rebel. Early graffiti writers of the 1960s and 70s co-opted this philosophy as they began to tag their names across the urban landscapes of New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. As graffiti bloomed outward across the U.S., Street Art evolved to encompass any visual art created in public locations, specifically unsanctioned artwork. The underlying impetus behind Street Art grew out of the belief that art should function in opposition to, and sometimes even outside of, the hegemonic system of laws, property, and ownership; be accessible, rather than hidden away inside galleries, museums, and private collections; and be democratic and empowering, in that all people (regardless of race, age, gender, economic status, etc.) should be able to create art and have it be seen by others. Although some street artists do create installations or sculpture, they are more widely known for the use of unconventional art mediums such as spray paint, stencils, wheat paste posters, and stickers. Street Art has also been called independent public art, post-graffiti, and guerilla art.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• A central aspect of Street Art is its ephemerality. Any unsanctioned public work runs the risk of being removed or painted over by authorities or by other artists. No one can own it or buy it. Viewers are seeing a one-of-a-kind work that is likely not to last. This temporariness creates an immediacy and electricity around the work.
• Street Art can often be viewed as a tool for promoting an artist's personal agenda surrounding contemporary social concerns, with city facades acting in the same role as the old fashioned soapbox; a place to extol the artist's opinion on a myriad issues ranging from politics and environmentalism to consumerism and consumption.
• Many street artists use the public canvas of buildings, bridges, lampposts, underpasses, ditches, sidewalks, walls, and benches to assure their individual messages are seen by a wide swath of the population, unfiltered by target demographics or being accessible only to art world denizens.
• As advertising infiltrates, the communal consciousness on a constant daily basis, Street Art has oftentimes been coined a counter attack. Popular street artist Banksy has said, "To some people breaking into property and painting it might seem a little inconsiderate, but in reality the 30 square centimeters of your brain are trespassed upon every day by teams of marketing experts. Graffiti is a perfectly proportionate response to being sold unattainable goals by a society obsessed with status and infamy. Graffiti is the sight of an unregulated free market getting the kind of art it deserves."

Key Artists

Overview of Street and Graffiti Art

Street Art is supposed to be the ultimate in democratized art; seen by everyone, owned by no-one. But this hasn't stopped a Banksy becoming the movement's ultimate collectible; with celebrities including Justin Bieber, Serena Williams and Angelina Jolie, having acquired the elusive artist’s work.

Artworks and Artists of Street and Graffiti Art

Untitled (Tag on Pole)

Artist: TAKI 183

This work serves as an early example of tagging, the type of graffiti writing in which the writer scrawls his/her pseudonym (also known as their "tag") using spray paint or marker, as quickly as possible in as many locations as possible, with the goal of "getting up", or gaining credibility and fame for proliferating one's name around the city. An artist's tag is a pseudonym, which protects both the individual's identity and anonymity, while simultaneously providing the writer an opportunity to develop a new identity or persona (much like a digital avatar). In fact, TAKI 183 is often credited as being the first tagger (although some argue that CORNBREAD of Philadelphia was the first). As journalist Norman Mailer paraphrased the words of graffiti artist CAY 161, "the name is the faith of graffiti." More than anything else, graffiti writers convey their identity and their existence by painting their tag in public spaces. Although considered more as vandalism than art, tagging proliferated the idea that one could become known by demonstrating their presence in public spaces, thus providing the raw foundation for artists to evolve out from within.

Permanent Marker - New York City

Untitled (New York Subway Graffiti)

Artist: TRAP, DEZ and DAZE

The text in this "piece" (the common term for a work of graffiti art) reads "TRAP DEZ DAZE" (the tags/pseudonyms of the artists), although the style and placement of the letters may make it difficult to discern for viewers not familiar with this style of lettering. The text uses several bright colors, and employs outlining and shading to give the impression of three-dimensionality. This piece, like much New York graffiti of the 1980s, was completed on the side of a subway train. This choice of location would have garnered greater prestige for the artists, as writing on subway cars put them at very high risk of apprehension by the authorities, and thus considered more daring. Writing on subway cars was also a sure way to rapidly increase one's fame, as the artwork would then travel around the city's subway system, being seen by a far greater number of people than would a stationary piece on a wall. This piece is a typical example of "wildstyle" graffiti, which includes complex, interlocking or overlapping letters, and sometimes cartoon-like characters and other images, all painted in bright colors. Photojournalist Martha Cooper noted in 1982 that "inaccessibility reinforces that sense of having a secret society inaccessible to outsiders [...] a writer will therefore often make a piece deliberately hard to read." As well, graffiti writers frequently attempt to create a sense of depth and three-dimensionality in wildstyle works. These types of pieces garner higher levels of respect for writers as opposed to "throwups" (simpler pieces using maximum two or three colors to create two-dimensional bubble text) or "tags", because wildstyle work involves more artistic prowess and takes longer to complete, thus putting the writer at a higher risk for run-ins with police.

Spray paint - New York City

Artist: Blek le Rat

This work, created by spray-painting onto a wall over a pre-cut stencil, depicts a couple in the midst of dancing. As we can see, the use of the stencil allowed the artist to create a striking, sharp image with clean, crisp lines, using only black spray paint over a white surface. In 1971, Blek le Rat took a trip to the United States, where he was amazed by the graffiti he saw all over the city centers. When he returned to Paris, he began to try his own hand at this form of expression. Seeing Fascist stencils in Italy during his youth, as well as political paintings in French Algeria, left a lasting impression on him, and in 1981 he decided to start making his own stencil works around Paris, beginning with small rats. Like Bristol's Banksy, Blek le Rat sees the rat as an ideal symbol for the graffiti artist, as both operate under cover of darkness to evade capture and eradication. Blek le Rat explains, "I began to spray some small rats in the streets of Paris because rats are the only wild animals living in cities, and only rats will survive when the human race disappears and dies out." He then moved on to larger stencil projects, becoming the first known artist to work with stencils to create pictures rather than just text. He explains the benefits of working with stencils, saying, "There are no accidents with stencils. Images created this way are clean and beautiful. You prepare it in your studio and then you can reproduce it indefinitely. I'm not good enough to paint freehand. Stencil is a technique well suited to the streets because it's fast. You don't have to deal with the worry of the police catching you."

Spray paint - Frasso Telesino, Italy

Artist: Keith Haring

This mural in the historic city of Pisa in Tuscany is filled with graffiti artist Keith Haring's signature motifs including his generic "radiant" figures and many other illuminated forms. It is universally recognized as the artist's unmistakable cartoonish Pop style. The work is a good example of the way some renegade street artists were able to move from their unsanctioned urban canvases into a credible art forum. Haring's notoriety in the public consciousness catapulted him to the type of fame that motivated a city to commission his unique style for their own public building. Haring first gained attention with his subway art that was created using white chalk on black, unused advertisement backboards in the underground stations that were his preferred painting "laboratory." The radiant baby became his most popular symbol, first used as his identifying tag before taking a life of its own as his preferred character. His bold lines, vivid colors, and active figures carried strong messages of life and unity. He often used lines of energy to emphasize kinetic movement, vitality, and euphoric spirit. By 1982, Haring had established friendships with fellow emerging street artists Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also became close friends with Andy Warhol. His work grew more politically active during the era of AIDS and his popular "Silence Equals Death" imagery became a key branding visual for New York's HIV activist group ACT UP. He created more than 50 public works between 1982 and 1989 in dozens of cities around the world. In April 1986, Pop Shop was opened in Soho and made Haring's work readily accessible to purchase at reasonable prices. When asked about the commercialism of his work, Haring said: "I could earn more money if I just painted a few things and jacked up the price. My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art."

Mural - Pisa, Italy

Artist: Shepard Fairey

In 1998, American street artist Shepard Fairey, who spawned from the Southern California skateboarding culture, created a graphic sticker campaign inspired by wrestling icon Andre the Giant while attending the Rhode Island School of Design. The stickers, written with the words Obey Giant, popped up all over the urban landscapes where Fairey lived and traveled, becoming the artist's visual, public experiment with phenomenology. Inspired by German philosopher Martin Heidegger's description of phenomenology as "the process of letting things manifest themselves," Fairey was attempting to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes, but obscured; things so taken for granted that they become muted by abstract observation. Thus, the famous wrestler's face became a familiar motif on the streets, its repetition causing notice while remaining meaningless, until it eventually became just another familiar piece of the urban landscape, unquestioned or analyzed. Fairey became widely known during the 2008 presidential election for his Barack Obama HOPE poster. He is one of the most influential street artists who have crossed into the gallery zone as he is included in collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City among others.

Hip Hop Rat

Artist: Banksy

This graffiti piece features a black and white stenciled rat. Banksy often uses the image of the rat as a personalized symbol representing himself, as he, like his graffiti artist predecessor Blek le Rat, felt an affinity with this city-dwelling creature that is active at night in order to evade apprehension and eradication. He says, "If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day." Since the 1990s, Banksy has rapidly risen to international fame, arguably becoming one of, if not the most well-known contemporary street artists, despite maintaining anonymity by keeping his true identity a secret. His works have sold at auction for hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. Much of his work (especially in his earlier days) used stencils, allowing him to execute pieces in a matter of seconds and remain undetected by authorities. Since the early 2000s, he has also executed other types of unsanctioned interventions, including sculptures and performative actions. Most of his work aims to offer political and social criticism. Soldiers and police officers, as well as popular cultural icons (like Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse) recur in many of his pieces. He marked the end of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference by painting four murals on global warming. One included the phrase, "I don't believe in global warming" submerged in water. In 2005 he traveled to the Israel-Palestine West Bank barrier wall and executed nine murals on the wall (including a dove with a bulletproof vest and a heart-shaped target over its chest, a child beneath a ladder stretching to the top of the wall, and the silhouette of a young girl being lifted upwards by a bunch of balloons). Banksy has also held various notable exhibitions, such as his 2006 Barely Legal show in a Los Angeles warehouse, which featured a live Indian elephant painted with the same red and gold floral pattern as the wallpaper that was pasted up in the section of the warehouse where the elephant was displayed. This created controversy, as animal rights activists protested the elephant's involvement. However, the show was immensely popular, with several A-list Hollywood celebrities in attendance. Another one of Banksy's exhibitions, Banksy vs. Bristol Museum (2009) featured Banksy's own take on famous historical paintings, as well as animatronics, sculptures, and installations.

Spray paint

Untitled (Guantanamo Prisoner at Disneyland)

In September of 2006, Banksy snuck a life-size inflatable doll dressed as a Guantanamo Bay prisoner into the Disneyland theme park in California, and installed it within the confines of the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride. The work remained in place for over an hour before park officials noticed it, shut down the ride, and removed the doll. A spokeswoman for Banksy said the work was intended to highlight the situation in which terror suspects find themselves in at the controversial detention center in Cuba. The artist hoped that by confronting carefree park-goers with what appeared to be an actual Guantanamo Bay prisoner in "the happiest place on earth," he might shock them into thinking more seriously about the implications of the war on terror. This work serves as a prime example of how sculptural works by street artists are particularly useful in orchestrating jarring experiences that reflect the political or social climate. Banksy has carried out a number of other such performative illegal interventions. In 2004, he produced 100,000 fake British £10 notes, replacing the picture of the Queen's head with that of Diana, Princess of Wales and changing the text "Bank of England" to "Banksy of England." He tossed these into a crowd at the Notting Hill Carnival that same year, which some people then attempted to spend in local shops. In March 2005, he surreptitiously hung various modified artworks of his own (such as a Warhol-esque painting of a discount soup can) in New York City's Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and Brooklyn Museum. In August/September of 2006, he placed approximately 500 fake copies of Paris Hilton's debut CD, Paris , in 48 record stores around the UK, modified with his own cover art (photoshopped to show Hilton topless). Other pictures in the album insert featured Paris with her chihuahua Tinkerbell's head replacing her own, and one of her stepping out of a luxury car, edited to include a group of homeless people, with the caption "90% of success is just showing up." Music tracks were given titles such as "Why Am I Famous?" "What Have I Done?" and "What Am I For?" The public purchased several copies of the CD before stores were able to remove them. The purchased copies went on to be sold for much more on online auction websites.

Inflatable doll, orange jumpsuit, black hood, and handcuffs - Disneyland, California

Art Less Pollution

Artist: Alexandre Orion

This work, which took seventeen nights to complete, serves as an example of "reverse" graffiti, in that the artist did not actually apply any material to the surface of the wall where he was working, but rather, created images of over 3,500 human skulls in a space measuring almost 1000 feet long, by merely wiping away the heavy layer of soot that had accumulated on the wall of this transportation tunnel from vehicle exhaust pipes. Here, the repeated skull image, combined with the method of image creation, conveys the idea that the pollution of urban centers is a deadly problem affecting countless people. Orion says that, "I wanted to bring a catacomb from the near future to the present, to show people that the tragedy of pollution is happening right now." Reverse graffiti poses a unique problem for law enforcement officers, who are generally conditioned to understand Street Art as a form of vandalism. However, in the case of reverse graffiti works such as this, the artist has done little more than clean a portion of a public surface. Orion explains, "There is no crime in cleaning. The crime here is against the environment, it is a crime against life." Authorities in Sao Paulo ultimately decided that there was nothing they could charge Orion with, and the episode even prompted city officials to order the monthly cleaning of every transportation tunnel in the city.

Scraped-off soot - Max Feffer Tunnel, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Liquidated Chanel Logo

Artist: ZEVS

French street artist Aguirre Schwarz, better known by his tag "ZEVS" (pronounced as "Zeus") creates what he calls "Visual Violations," taking spray paint to public advertisements in his Liquidated Logos series. This series involves the application of water-based paint, which drips down heavily from well-known corporate logos (such as the luxury design house Chanel and the fast food restaurant McDonald's). He first created works illegally in public spaces, "liquidating" logos on billboards, storefronts, and city walls, and later adapted them for his gallery shows. Cultural critic and curator Carlo McCormick has referred to ZEVS as the "most subversive" of all contemporary French street artists. In fact, Zevs was arrested in Hong Kong in 2009 after spraying this liquidated Chanel logo on the side of a Giorgio Armani shop. Indeed, throughout the history of Street Art, artists have commonly targeted public advertisements and corporate space as a rebellion against the consumerism and commercialization that pervades contemporary society. These artists have adopted a confrontational attitude toward marketing, asking: If advertisers are permitted to visually pollute purportedly "public" places, why can't citizens be a part of that dialogue? As cultural critic and curator Carlo McCormick writes, "One of the most salient features of graffiti is its approximation of branding. At its most basic level, the tag mimics the ideographic compression, repetition, and saturation that we would expect of corporate logos and marketing campaigns." Banksy argues that, "To some people breaking into property and painting it might seem a little inconsiderate, but in reality the 30 square centimetres of your brain are trespassed upon every day by teams of marketing experts. Graffiti is a perfectly proportionate response to being sold unattainable goals by a society obsessed with status and infamy. Graffiti is the sight of an unregulated free market getting the kind of art it deserves." In recent years, ZEVS has been recreating his Liquidated Logos on canvas and exhibiting them in galleries, such as at his 2011 solo show Liquidated Version at the De Buck Gallery in Chelsea, New York City. While the formal qualities and compositions of his paintings remain identical to one another, their subversive power is diminished when relocated in the rarified environment of a gallery or museum. The Liquidated Logos , when seen in the street, explicitly and directly confront corporate capitalism. Bold graffiti imagery in public spaces surprises viewers through visual appropriation of recognizable motifs, and these familiar yet perverted slogans register as protest and vandalism. Meanwhile, the same imagery in a gallery space lacks the agitation, hostility, and contradiction, which according to art historian Claire Bishop, "can be crucial to any work's artistic impact."

Paint - Hong Kong

Bethlehem Boys

Artist: SWOON

This wheat paste poster work, installed on the wall and window of a shop front, depicts three young boys wearing baggy pants, sweaters, and sneakers. The two older boys look out at the viewer, one of them with his mouth partly opened, as if addressing passers-by and implicating them in the work. SWOON (née Caledonia Curry) is a female street artist who was born in New London, Connecticut, raised in Daytona Beach, Florida, and now resides in New York City. She began creating Street Art in 1999, spending several days in her studio preparing wheat paste posters made of recycled newspaper, and then transporting the finished works to urban public spaces where she pasted them onto walls. She, like many other street artists, favors this method as it allows her to execute detailed works while spending minimal time at the intended location. She has explained that Street Art was important to her as it allowed her to have an impact on the urban landscape, rather than disappearing into obscurity by creating commercial art that would remain hidden inside a gallery or private collection. SWOON's wheat paste works frequently depict people, including her friends, family members, and other individuals she has seen in the locations where she executes her works. Culture critic and curator Carlo McCormick writes of SWOON's figures that, "when you pass a figure by an artist like SWOON, the effect has the familiarity of an old neighbor you have not seen for a long while." He explains that a great deal of public art and Street Art is based on the desire to remember and commemorate common people and events, as evidenced by the phenomenon of memorial graffiti carried out in Latino communities in the United States and the UK, and in the 2003 Ghost Bike movement in the United States, where white bicycles were placed at the sites of road accidents where cyclists were killed. In her own way, SWOON leaves traces of people she knows, allowing their spirits to live on in the community even though they may have gone, or grown older and changed.

Recycled newspaper, paint, and wheat paste - St. Louis, Missouri

Beginnings of Street and Graffiti Art

Precursors to contemporary graffiti and street art.

Graffiti, defined simply as writing, drawing, or painting on walls or surfaces of a structure, dates back to prehistoric and ancient times, as evidenced by the Lascaux cave paintings in France and other historic findings across the world. Scholars believe that the images of hunting scenes found at these sites were either meant to commemorate past hunting victories, or were used as part of rituals intended to increase hunters' success.

During World War II, it became popular for soldiers to write the phrase "Kilroy was here," along with a simple sketch of a bald figure with a large nose peeking over a ledge, on surfaces along their route. The motivation behind this simple early graffiti was to create a motif of connection for these soldiers during their difficult times, cementing their unique brotherhood amongst foreign land and to make themselves "seen." This was closely aligned with the motivation behind contemporary graffiti, with the writers aiming to assert their existence and to repeat their mark in as many places as possible.

Beginnings of Contemporary Graffiti in the United States

Contemporary (or "hip-hop") graffiti dates to the late 1960s, generally said to have arisen from the Black and Latino neighborhoods of New York City alongside hip-hop music and street subcultures, and catalyzed by the invention of the aerosol spray can. Early graffiti artists were commonly called "writers" or "taggers" (individuals who write simple "tags," or their stylized signatures, with the goal of tagging as many locations as possible.) Indeed, the fundamental underlying principle of graffiti practice was the intention to "get up," to have one's work seen by as many people as possible, in as many places as possible.

The exact geographical location of the first "tagger" is difficult to pinpoint. Some sources identify New York (specifically taggers Julio 204 and Taki 183 of the Washington Heights area), and others identify Philadelphia (with tagger Corn Bread) as the point of origin. Yet, it goes more or less undisputed that New York "is where graffiti culture blossomed, matured, and most clearly distinguished itself from all prior forms of graffiti," as Eric Felisbret, former graffiti artist and lecturer, explains.

Soon after graffiti began appearing on city surfaces, subway cars and trains became major targets for New York City's early graffiti writers and taggers, as these vehicles traveled great distances, allowing the writer's name to be seen by a wider audience. The subway rapidly became the most popular place to write, with many graffiti artists looking down upon those who wrote on walls. Sociologist Richard Lachmann notes how the added element of movement made graffiti a uniquely dynamic art form. He writes, "Much of the best graffiti was meant to be appreciated in motion, as it passed through dark and dingy stations or on elevated tracks. Photos and graffiti canvases cannot convey the energy and aura of giant artwork in motion."

Graffiti on subway cars began as crude, simple tags, but as tagging became increasingly popular, writers had to find new ways to make their names stand out. Over the next few years, new calligraphic styles were developed and tags turned into large, colorful, elaborate pieces, aided by the realization that different spray can nozzles (also referred to as "caps") from other household aerosol products (like oven cleaner) could be used on spray paint cans to create varying effects and line widths. It did not take long for the crude tags to grow in size, and to develop into artistic, colorful pieces that took up the length of entire subway cars.

New York City's Graffiti “Problem”

By the 1980s, the city of New York viewed graffiti's inherent vandalism as a major concern, and a massive amount of resources were poured into the graffiti "problem." As Art Historian Martha Cooper writes, "For [New York City mayor Ed] Koch, graffiti was evidence of a lack of authoritarian order; as such, the presence of graffiti had a psychological effect that made all citizens its victim through a disruption of the visual order, thus promoting a feeling of confusion and fear among people." The New York Police cracked down on writers, often following suspect youth as they left school, searching them for graffiti-related paraphernalia, staking out their houses, or gathering information from informants. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) received a significant increase in their budget in 1982, allowing them to erect more sophisticated fences and to better maintain the train yards and lay-ups that were popular targets for writers (due to the possibility for hitting several cars at once). However, writers saw these measures as a mere challenge, and worked even harder to hit their targets, while also becoming increasingly territorial and aggressive toward other writers and "crews" (groups of writers).

In 1984, the MTA launched its Clean Car Program, which involved a five-year plan to completely eliminate graffiti on subway cars, operating on the principle that a graffiti-covered subway car could not be put into service until all the graffiti on it had been cleaned off. This program was implemented one subway line at a time, gradually pushing writers outward, and by 1986 many of the city's lines were completely clear of graffiti. Lieutenant Steve Mona recalls one day when the ACC crew hit 130 cars in a yard at Coney Island, assuming that the MTA wouldn't shut down service and that the graffitied trains would run. Yet the MTA opted to not provide service, greatly inconveniencing citizens who had to wait over an hour for a train that morning. That was the day that the MTA's dedication to the eradication of graffiti became apparent.

However graffiti was anything but eradicated. In the past few decades, this practice has spread around the world, often maintaining elements of the American wildstyle, like interlocking letterforms and bold colors, yet also adopting local flare, such as manga-inspired Street Art in Japan.

From Graffiti to Street Art: Greater Variation in Styles, Techniques, and Materials

It is important to note that contemporary graffiti has developed completely apart from traditional, institutionalized art forms. Art critic and curator Johannes Stahl writes that, "We have long since got accustomed to understanding art history as a succession of epochs [...] But at the same time there has always existed something outside of official art history, a unruly and recalcitrant art, which takes place not in the sheltered environs of churches, collections or galleries, but out on the street." Graffiti artists today draw inspiration from Art History at times, but it cannot be said that graffiti grew directly out of any such canon or typology. Modern graffiti did not begin as an art form at all, but rather, as a form of text-based urban communication that developed its own networks. As Lachmann notes, rather than submitting to the criteria of valuation upheld by the institutionalized art world, early graffiti writers developed an entirely new and separate art world, based on their own "qualitative conception of style" and the particular "aesthetic standards" developed within the community for judging writers' content and technique.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, many graffiti writers began to shift away from text-based works to include imagery. Key artists involved in this shift included Jean-Michel Basquiat (who wrote graffiti using the tag SAMO) and Keith Haring , whose simple illuminated figures gave testament to the AIDS epidemic, both of whom were active in New York City. Around the same time, many artists also began experimenting with different techniques and materials, the most popular being stencils and wheat paste posters.

Concepts and Styles

Since the turn of the millennium, this proliferation has continued, with artists using all sorts of materials to complete illegal works in pubic spaces. The myriad approaches have come to be housed under the label of "Street Art" (sometimes also referred to as "Urban Art"), which has expanded its purview beyond graffiti to include these other techniques and styles.

The term "graffiti" comes from the Greek "graphein," meaning "to scratch, draw, or write," and thus a broad definition of the term includes all forms of inscriptions on walls. More specifically, however, the modern, or "hip-hop" graffiti, that has pervaded city spaces since the 1960s and 1970s involves the use of spray paint or paint markers. It is associated with a particular aesthetic, most often utilizing bold color choices, involving highly stylized and abstract lettering known as "wildstyle," and/or including cartoon-like characters.

Photographer and author Nicolas Ganz notes that graffiti and Street Art practices are characterized by differing "sociological elements," writing that graffiti writers continue to be "governed by the desire to spread one's tag and achieve fame" through both quality and quantity of pieces created, while street artists are governed by "fewer rules and [embrace] a much broader range of styles and techniques." Anthropologist and archaeologist Troy Lovata and art historian Elizabeth Olson write that "the rapid proliferation of this aggressive style of writing appearing on the walls of urban centres all over the world has become an international signifier of rebellion," and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard has called it the "symbolic destruction of social relations."

Stencils (also known as stencil graffiti) are usually prepared beforehand out of paper or cardboard and then brought to the site of the work's intended installation, attached to the wall with tape, and then spray painted over, resulting in the image or text being left behind once the stencil is removed. Many street artists favor the use of stencils as opposed to freehand graffiti because they allow for an image or text to be installed very easily in a matter of seconds, minimizing the chance of run-ins with the authorities. Stencils are also preferable as they are infinitely re-useable and repeatable. Sometimes artists use multiple layers of stencils on the same image to add colors, details, and the illusion of depth. Brighton-based artist Hutch explains that he prefers to stencil because "it can produce a very clean and graphic style, which is what I like when creating realistic human figures. Also, the effect on the viewer is instant, you don't need to wait for it to sink in."

One of the earliest known street artists to use stencils was John Fekner, who started using the technique in 1968 to stencil purely textual messages onto walls. Other well-known stencil artists include French artists Ernest Pignon-Ernest and Blek le Rat, British artists Nick Walker and Banksy , and American artists Shepard Fairey and Above.

Wheat Paste Posters

Wheat paste (also known as flour paste) is a gel or liquid adhesive made from combining wheat flour or starch with water. Many street artists use wheat paste to adhere paper posters to walls. Much like stencils, wheat paste posters are preferable for street artists as it allows them to do most of the preparation at home or in the studio, with only a few moments needed at the site of installation, pasting the poster to the desired surface. This is crucial for artists installing works in unsanctioned locations, as it lowers the risk of apprehension and arrest. Some street artists who use the wheat paste method include Italian duo Sten and Lex, French artists JR and Ludo, and American artist Swoon.

Sculptural Street Art Interventions

Some street artists create three-dimensional sculptural interventions, which can be installed surreptitiously in public spaces, usually under the cover of darkness. This type of work differs from Public Art in that it is rebellious in nature and completed illegally, while Public Art is officially sanctioned/commissioned (and thus more palatable to a general audience). Unsanctioned Street Art interventions usually aim to shock viewers by presenting a visually realistic, yet simultaneously unbelievable situation. For instance, in his Third Man Series (2006), artist Dan Witz installs gloves on sewer grates to give the impression that a person is inside the sewer attempting to escape. Works like these often cause passers-by to do a "double-take."

Reverse Graffiti

Reverse graffiti (also known as clean tagging, dust tagging, grime writing, clean graffiti, green graffiti, or clean advertising) is a method by which artists create images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. According to British reverse graffiti artist Moose, "Once you do this, you make people confront whether or not they like people cleaning walls or if they really have a problem with personal expression." This sort of work calls attention to environmental concerns in urban spaces, such as pollution.

Other Media

There are street artists who experiment with other media, such as Invader (Paris), who adheres ceramic tiles to city surfaces, recreating images from the popular Space Invaders video game of 1978. Invader says that tile is "a perfect material because it is permanent. Even after years of being outside the colors don't fade."

Many other artists use simple stickers, which they post on surfaces around the city. Often, these stickers are printed with the artist's tag or a simple graphic. Others invite participation from the audience, like Ji Lee who pastes empty comic speech-bubbles onto advertisements, allowing passers-by to write in their own captions.

Others still use natural materials to beautify urban spaces. For instance, in 2005, Shannon Spanhake planted flowers in various potholes of the streets in Tijuana, Mexico. She says of the project, "Adorning the streets of Tijuana are potholes, open wounds that mark the failure of man's Promethean Project to tame nature, and somehow surviving in the margins are abandoned buildings, entropic monuments celebrating a hyperrealistic vision of a modernist utopia linked to capitalist expansion gone awry."

There are also artists who create Street Art interventions through the use of clay, chalk, charcoal, knitting, and projected photo/video. The possibilities for Street Art media are endless.

Later Developments - After Street and Graffiti Art

Mainstream acceptance.

Street Art continues to be a popular category of art all over the world, with many of its practitioners rising to fame and mainstream success (such as Bristol's Banksy, Paris' ZEVS, and L.A.'s Shepard Fairey). Street artists who experience commercial success are often criticized by their peers for "selling out" and becoming part of the system that they had formerly rebelled against by creating illegal public works. Communications professor Tracey Bowen sees the act of creating graffiti as both a "celebration of existence" and "a declaration of resistance." Similarly, Slovenian Feminist author Tea Hvala views graffiti as "the most accessible medium of resistance" for oppressed people to use against dominant culture due to its tactical (non-institutional, decentralized) qualities. For both Bowen and Hvala these unique positive attributes of graffiti are heavily reliant on its location in urban public spaces. Art critic and curator Johannes Stahl argues that the public context is crucial for Street Art to be political, because "it happens in places that are accessible to all [and] it employs a means of expression that is not controlled by the government." Street artist BOOKSIIII holds an opinion not uncommon of many of today's street artists, that it is not inherently wrong for young artists to try to make money from galleries and corporations for their works, "as long as they do their job honestly, sell work, and represent careers," yet at the same time he notes that "graffiti does not stay the same when transferred to the gallery from the street. A tag on canvas will never hold the same power as the exact same tag on the street."

This movement from the street to the gallery also indicates a growing acceptance of graffiti and Street Art within the mainstream art world and art history. Some apply the label "post-graffiti" to the work of street artists that also participate in the mainstream art world, although this is somewhat of a misnomer, as many such artists continue to execute illegal public interventions at the same time as they participate in sanctioned exhibitions in galleries and museums. This phenomenon also presents difficulties for art historians, as the sheer number of street artists, as well as their tendency to maintain anonymity, makes it hard to engage with individual artists in any sort of profound way. Moreover, it is difficult to insert Street Art into the art historical canon, as it did not develop from any progression of artistic movements, but rather began independently, with early graffiti and street artists developing their own unique techniques and aesthetic styles. Today, street artists both inspire and are inspired by many other artistic movements and styles, with many artists' works bearing elements of wide-ranging movements, from Pop Art to Renaissance Art .

Street Art's status as vandalism often eclipses its status as art. More recently, as mentioned above, many artists are finding more opportunities to create artworks in sanctioned situations, by showing in galleries and museums, or by partnering with organizations that offer outdoor public spaces in which street artists are permitted to execute works. However, many others continue to focus on unsanctioned illegal works. Part of the allure of working illegally has to do with the adrenaline rush that artists get from successfully executing a piece without being apprehended by the authorities. Moreover, carrying out illegal/unsanctioned attacks on privately owned surfaces (such as a billboard being rented out by an advertising agency, or a politically-charged surface such as border walls), serves as a direct confrontation with the owner of that space (be it a marketing firm, or a political entity).

Technology and the Internet

With the advent of the Internet and the development of various graphic software and technologies, street artists now have a multitude of tools at their fingertips to assist in the creation and dissemination of their works. Specialized computer programs allow artists (like San Francisco-born MOMO) to better plan for their graffiti pieces and prepare their stencils and wheat paste posters, while digital photography used in conjunction with the Internet and social media allows Street Art works to be documented, shared, and thus immortalized where previously, most pieces tended to disappear when they were removed by city authorities or painted over by other artists.

Useful Resources on Street and Graffiti Art

• Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall By Will Ellsworth-Jones
• Banksy: Art Breaks the Rules By Hettie Bingham
• Banksy in New York By Ray Mock
• Banksy. Myths & Legends: A Collection of the Unbelievable and the Incredible By Marc Leverton
• Covert to Overt: The Under/Overground Art of Shepard Fairey By Shepard Fairey
• OBEY: Supply and Demand By Shepard Fairey
• Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution Our Pick By Cedar Lewisohn
• Street Art: Famous Artists Talk About Their Vision By Alessandra Mattanza
• Street Art: International By Lou Chamberlin
• Urban Art Legends By KET
• Street Art Today: The 50 Most Influential Street Artists Today By Björn Van Poucke and Elise Luong
• Street Art World By Alison Young
• Street Art from Around the World By Garry Hunter
• Global Street Art: The Street Artists and Trends Taking Over the World By Lee Bofkin
• It's a Stick-Up: 20 Real Wheat Paste-Ups from the World's Greatest Street Artists By Ollystudio Limited
• Understanding Graffiti: Multidisciplinary Studies from Prehistory to the Present Our Pick By Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton
• Graffiti World (Updated Edition): Street Art from Five Continents Our Pick By Nicolas Ganz
• Street Fonts: Graffiti Alphabets from Around the World By Claudia Walde
• The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti Our Pick By Rafael Schacter
• Subway Art Our Pick By Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper
• Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents Our Pick By Nicolas Ganz
• Graffiti L.A.: Street Styles and Art By Steve Grody
• Freight Train Graffiti By Roger Gastman, Darin Rowland, and Ian Sattler
• Graffiti Kings: New York City Mass Transit Art of the 1970s By Jack Stewart
• Graffiti New York Our Pick By Eric Felisbret
• The Faith of Graffiti Our Pick By Norman Mailer and Jon Naar
• Street Art on Google Art Project
• Street Art Utopia
• Global Street Art
• Street Art Locator
• Wooster Collective
• An Ethnography of Iconoclash: An Investigation into the Production, Consumption and Destruction of Street-art in London By Rafael Schacter / Journal of Material Culture / 2008
• Symbiotic Postures of Commercial Advertising and Street Art: Rhetoric for Creativity By Stefania Borghini, Luca Massimiliano Visconti, Laurel Anderson, and John F. Sherry, Jr. / Journal of Advertising / 2010
• The Call and Response of Street Art and the City By Scott Burnham / City / 2010
• The Business of "Getting Up": Street Art and Marketing in Los Angeles By Damien Droney / Visual Anthropology / 2010
• Graffiti as Spatializing Practice and Performance Our Pick By Tracey Bowen / Rhizomes / 2013
• 'Our Desires are Ungovernable': Writing Graffiti in Urban Space Our Pick By Mark Halsey and Alison Young / Theoretical Criminology / 2006
• 'Just as Good a Place to Publish': Banksy, Graffiti and the Textualisation of the Wall By Anindya Raychaudhuri / Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities / 2010
• Shepard Fairey on that Obama Poster By Rhys Blakely / The Times / October 13, 2012
• Infamy (Feature-length documentary)
• Piece By Piece: San Francisco Graffiti Documentary
• The Deepest Depths of the Burrow: Street Art & Graffiti Documentary
• BBC A Brief History of Graffiti
• Exit through the Gift Shop (Feature length documentary)

Similar Art

Do women have to be naked to get Into the Met.Musem? (1989)

One Day This Kid... (1990)

Related artists, related movements & topics.

Content compiled and written by Alexandra Duncan

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols

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Home / 2021 / September / The writing on the wall: exploring the cultural value of graffiti and street art

The writing on the wall: exploring the cultural value of graffiti and street art

Doctoral candidate’s research interprets graffiti’s deeper meaning among Latinx and Black urban subcultures in Los Angeles

September 14, 2021

By Allison Arteaga Soergel

Ismael Illescas grew up admiring the graffiti around his neighborhood in Los Angeles. He had migrated to the city with his mother and brother from Ecuador in the 1990s as part of a large Latin American diaspora. In his urban environment, he found himself surrounded by beautiful, cryptic messages. They were written on walls and scrawled daringly across billboards. Little by little, he began to understand the meanings behind some of these messages. And, eventually, he started writing back. 

Illescas became a graffiti writer himself, for a time. He has since given it up, but he never lost his initial sense of curiosity and admiration. In fact, now, as a doctoral candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies, his dissertation research has taken him back to Los Angeles, where he gathered insights from current and former graffiti writers about how their work connects with concepts of art, identity, culture, and space. 

For those who create it, graffiti is an expression of identity and an outlet for creativity, social connection, and achievement, according to Illescas’s research. Some of the most popular graffiti yards in Los Angeles are abandoned spaces in communities of color that neither the economy nor the city has been willing to invest in, he says. But graffiti allows Black and Latino young men to transform these areas into spaces of congregation and empowerment. 

“In a city where these youth are marginalised, ostracized, and invisibilized, graffiti is a way for them to become visible,” Illescas said. “They feel that the system is against them, and upward social mobility is limited for them, so putting their names up around the city is a way for them to achieve respect from their peers and assert their dignity, and that doesn’t come easily from other places and institutions in society.”

Graffiti also offers what Illescas calls an “illicit cartography,” meaning that it can be read like a cultural map of the city. Graffiti styles in East Los Angeles, for example, reflect Mexican-American artistic influence that began with Pachuco counterculture in the 1940s. Rich graffiti writing traditions emerged, including “placas,” or tags that list a writer’s stylized signature, and “barrio calligraphy,” which blends rolling scripts with Old English lettering. In the 1980s, those traditions then incorporated colorful, whimsical East Coast influences.

“The result is that Los Angeles has a really unique graffiti style,” Illescas said. “Although outsiders might not necessarily notice it, you can easily see the Mexican-American artistic influence in the aesthetics, and that has become associated with Latinx urban identities.”

Graffiti is a multiracial and multi-ethnic subculture, and Illescas says his research aims to recognize the specific contributions of Black and Latinx communities. He’s also critically examining the subculture’s hypermasculinity and how that may limit its transformative potential.  And he’s particularly interested in shedding light on how race may affect public perceptions of graffiti.

Depending on the context, graffiti can either be publicly admired as “street art”—and valued up to millions of dollars—or it can be criminalized at levels ranging up to felony charges and years of jail time. In Los Angeles, a city which many researchers consider to be highly racially segregated, Black and Latinx communities, like South Central Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, are the places where graffiti is most likely to be severely criminalized and lumped together with gang activity, Illescas says.

Meanwhile, Illescas says street art is more likely to be recognized as such within arts districts, where officially sanctioned “beautification” projects use public art to attract more business and new residents, which can contribute to gentrification issues. And some of the most famous street artists are actually white men, like Banksy or Shepard Fairey, who have each attained international recognition for the artistic value of their illegal works. 

“This is where systemic racism occurs,” Illescas said. “You have some people who are more prone to being criminalized and severely punished for a very similar act, and that punishment falls mainly on young Black and Latino men.”

For these reasons, Illescas has found that many graffiti writers of color have mixed feelings about the growing public appreciation for street art. 

“On the one hand, it’s a capitalistic appropriation of transgressive graffiti into commercialized street art,” Illescas said. “But it also ties into the efforts of graffiti writers who have been pushing for years to decriminalize their art and demonstrate its artistic and social value and the types of knowledge that it brings with it.”

Street art has, in fact, already brought opportunities for some veteran Black and Latino graffiti writers, who told Illescas they had recently been commissioned for their art or had found jobs as tour guides in arts districts. But each of these artists got their start creating illegal graffiti tags. Illescas believes that decriminalization will ultimately require transforming public appreciation of street art into a deeper understanding of the expressive value of other forms of graffiti. And he hopes his research might aid in that process.  

“The graffiti that we see up in the streets may seem like an insignificant tag or scribble to some people, but there’s a lot of meaning behind it,” he said. “There needs to be a recognition that graffiti is actually a visual representation of someone’s identity, and it’s also potentially their starting point to a very meaningful artistic career.” 

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Street Art Renaissance: From Vandalism to Urban Beautification

Accouchement Of Street Art 

Art In general into public spaces and walls have been common since ages. Many early dwellers used walls of caves as mediums to convey messages and teachings. Writing on walls has been very fascinating for humans to communicate better and it dates back to as of 50000 years, the first ever oldest cave painting discovered in Spain.

Graffiti and mural art in public places started around 1970’s in Philadelphia and New York and evolved into street art (Ross, 2016). 

However, with time this form of art has resulted into an identity for a certain group of people and has started to be recognised as a form of folk art. 

When Street art or graffiti was adapted by other parts of the world it was recognised as a modified version of art blended into their culture. 

But, along with it around many parts of the world, it started escalating as a crime as it was considered as destruction of public property in the name of art and harsh actions were taken to enforce it. 

People also started using art on public property or walls to show their aggression or disagreement towards the government or people in power to bring in change. 

50 years down the line of evolution of street art, people started using it for various purposes and in spite of it being called illegal through the years, it evolved to be accepted as a form of art and beautification or for promotional purposes around the world. 

Gradually, art on walls and graffiti evolved into a movement and was first ever introduced by a 18 year old boy’ CornBread’ who was known for his trouble making skills as a kid. 

The evolution of graffiti has been long since then and better, earlier when graffiti was used for rebellious outroar , it shifted into touristy spots , where people started calling it a form of art to be enjoyed visually. 

The Voodoo Perspective

As the art grew as a movement, it was taken up by many different people and perceived differently in different parts of the world. It represented a public form of expression which was used to portray different emotions of the artists. Few took it up into their own hands and made it a form for expression of disagreement, being destructive to public spaces and property. 

People started developing the kind of a mindset where they wanted to express their thoughts but going against the rules. Alongside it also developed punk culture and other cultures which were very accommodative of such art. These cultures were pretty much disapproved of by society and were considered to be the dark side of the growing society. It developed into the transgressive part of the society which was being ignored and made its own set of rules for the distinguished world they wanted to carry forward. 

And therefore it turned into a hideous part of the society, which faced a lot of criticism and surfaced underground for a long period of time. 

Society considered the expression of such art to be very much of a crime, as it involved destruction of public property but on the contrary few artists considered it as a new art form and art movement that has developed and was appreciative of it. It was known for its thriving subculture. 

Transition 

Street art has experienced transition in many perspectives and has travelled a long way to be today called a successful art movement . The transitional phases of it have seen its own highs and lows through decades, being called illegal at times to being recognised and valued as a very cohesive, commercially successful art movement. 

Over time, street art became enormously accepted and matured as a medium to conveyance and deliverance, easily to be picked up by the Society, So much so that it was renamed to be Urban Art later on. 

Street art never remained the same as its history suggests. It gained popularity and acceptance. 

Street art’s journey to the walls of a museum from the walls along the streets was long and bumpy but, this was made a reality by very promising and bold artists like Banksy and many such similar artists, who defined issues to the public through their art. Such art provided a visual interaction that moved emotional strings for the common public and sparked change. Such art started getting recognition and started occupying the walls of museums. 

Street art began to be curated, as it held value of change that could be stirred into the society. Banksy’s work started to be valued. The tag of street art being a vandalised form of art was termed logical and came into the good books of appreciation. 

It gained recognition and started to be curated, it changed to a movement , considered emotionally intertwined into the society for a change. Connecting each and every individual coming across the piece of art, that could be rejoiced by all, without involvement of currency and mediums that obstructed the message or motif, street art had to reach masses and bring change. 

Reference List

A History of Graffiti – The 60’s and 70’s (2018) SprayPlanet By Montana Colors . Available at: https://www.sprayplanet.com/blogs/news/a-history-of-graffiti-the-60s-and-70s (Accessed: August 25, 2023).

Fincher, B. (December16,2019) The Evolution of Street Art , Canvas . Available at: https://canvas.saatchiart.com/art/art-history-101/the-evolution-of-street-art (Accessed: August 20, 2023).

Olivier, C. (2017) Street Art: Commercialised vandalism or a form of art? In what ways did Banksy influence the acceptance of street art into galleries?

Ross, J. I. (2016) Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art . New York, NY: Routledge.

Wrest, R. (2012) GRAFFITI AS VANDALISM: AN ANALYSIS OF THE INTENTIONS, INFLUENCE, AND GROWTH OF GRAFFITI . California State University.

Nabaneeta is a Researcher in the field of Building Adaptation to climate change, working on assessment of carbon footprint and carbon emissions. A highly motivated individual to express and create consciousness amongst everyone for climate change. A dedicated individual to express the urgency. She is also a very enthusiastic individual to grow and learn and incorporate different ideas on a variety of subjects.

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Conversations with the Collection

Working as a museum without walls, early american painting, landscape painting, genre and still life painting, cosmopolitanism and the gilded age, urban realism and the american scene, early abstract and modernist painting, introduction.

David Peters Corbett

Professor, Courtauld Institute, University of London, UK

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Here are two paintings, both made during the 1890s, both small in their dimensions, loosely or rapidly painted, and focused on urban everyday scenes: Street Corner in Paris (Fig. 1) by Robert Henri (1865–1929) and Evening on a Pleasure Boat (Fig. 2) by Maurice Prendergast (1858–1924).

Robert Henri (1865-1929)

Street Corner in Paris , 1896

Henri’s picture, which measures only 3 7/8 by 6 1/8 inches (9.8 × 15.6 cm), uses fluid but substantial paint to describe the rush and bustle of a city street. A figure in the foreground leans rightward as she strides toward a group of people, barely articulated, that occupy the middle ground. Behind this scatter of human presence, a canvas awning and solidly planted tree anchor the eye and buildings rear up, marking this as a city scene. The dominant impression, however, owes as much to the lushness and vitality of the brushwork as to the subject matter. The evident rapidity of the artist’s application of paint conveys the woman’s rolling gait, the ambulatory, vivid presence of the city’s inhabitants, and also their distance and anonymity. Henri’s figures possess the vagueness and indeterminacy of the stock figures art historians call staffage—groups or individuals that could be classified, recognized, or ignored in terms of “type,” rather than as discrete personalities. Henri’s small panel painting is a pochade—a swift, telling sketch—and derived from the example of the leading painter of nineteenth-century Parisian life, Édouard Manet (1832–1883). Its vision of the city is both pictorially seductive and indifferent to its human actors, a visual experience rather than a social one.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858–1924)

Evening on a Pleasure Boat , 1895-97

Prendergast’s picture is slightly larger, at 14 3/8 by 22 1/8 inches (36.5 × 56.2 cm), and shows four well-dressed girls and one adult woman in a line, sitting against the railing of a boat as it steams through Boston Harbor. In an echoing frieze behind them, the cityscape of Boston passes in a regular rhythm, interrupted by the upright supports of the deck and by ships’ masts to the right and left. Prendergast’s rapid, generalized execution and summary description of the figures, along with the grid imposed by the rails, draw the fluency of the paintwork to our attention and reduce any sense of individuality. The girls appear as variations on a theme of decorous excitement set by their postures. The emphasis is on the scene’s typicality rather than on either the woman’s pleasure at the spectacle or the girls’ various negotiations of demureness. Though the city is visible behind them, they are distanced from it by the orientation of their seats and their prim attitudes. Evening on a Pleasure Boat is one of Prendergast’s earliest oils, painted at a time when he was mainly working in watercolor. The thin, expressive paint owes something to watercolor technique, and reinforces the sense of a consciously painterly work.

The emphasis in these paintings on the physicality and expressive immediacy of paint and its ability to seize urban experience evokes the work of the American expatriate James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), whose canny balancing of representation and painterliness was powerfully influential in both the US and Europe during the final years of the nineteenth century. 1 Henri’s Parisian pochade, with its assertive central awning, recalls the prints and small painted sketches of shop fronts such as Carlyle’s Sweetstuff Shop (c. 1887, Terra Foundation for American Art) that Whistler began making in the 1880s. 2 Several of these employ horizontals and verticals in a grid effect similar to Prendergast’s lattice organization in Evening on a Pleasure Boat , while their rapid execution can be seen as a complement to the influence of Édouard Manet (1832–83) in Henri’s painting. Prendergast may also have been referencing Whistler’s images from the 1860s of the East London waterfront, a forest of masts and busy boats at the heart of a world city.

The painted sketches of Henri and Prendergast embody the tension, present throughout this period of American art, between aesthetic concerns—the designed, decorative, or explicitly painterly—and social ones, specifically the urban scene. The counterpoint between social description, with its rhetorical claims for authenticity, even grittiness, and aesthetic intent animates these images. Both artists offer views of human interaction in the modern city—Henri’s busy Parisians as much as Prendergast’s decorous observers—while foregrounding the artists’ expressive responses. In addition to this persistent dualism, these works raise the issue of how American painters represented modernity and responded to questions about the human experience of cities.

Painted about a dozen years later, The Palisades (Fig. 3) by George Bellows (1882–1925) and Brooklyn Bridge (Fig. 4) by Ernest Lawson (1873–1939) confirm a sense of the modern city as intense and demanding. Bellows’s Palisades depicts the view from Riverside Park in uptown Manhattan looking across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Between piles of snow in the foreground, a cleared path provides an opportunity for two walkers. Below the rolling snowbank on their right bare earth fades down to the river, marked on the near side by pylons, a pier, and a shed, and on the other by a cliff face of the Palisades. Between these two edges tugboats head down-river, while along the shoreline a train heading downtown belches a cloud of steam that fills the top right-hand corner of the canvas.

George Bellows (1882–1925)

The Palisades , 1909

Ernest Lawson (1873–1939)

Brooklyn Bridge , 1917–20

Bellows was a prominent member of the Ashcan school, the group of painters (including John Sloan [1871–1951], Everett Shinn [1876–1953], and George Luks [1867–1933]) who followed Henri’s urging to paint the American scene, and his example in choosing to depict the New York of their daily lives. The Palisades is one of several paintings Bellows made around this time depicting the Hudson along Manhattan (then called the North River) and its adjacent cityscapes. Here he represents the strange modernity of a place where the city and the landscape meet and are transmuted. The river—a marker of the natural world—is brought within the urban sphere by the tugs, the strolling watchers, and the industrial structures at the water’s edge. At the same time, the park can be seen as the city’s attempt to reimagine itself as rural (though it achieves only an urban version of the natural world). The steam from the train merges almost indistinguishably with the white clouds and snow. The meshing of natural and artificial realms is asserted in this vaporous, condensed substance, which occupies so much of the canvas.

A further transformation occurs toward the top, where sharp splinters of trees and roiling billows of steam, immense in relation to the tiny train beneath them, abandon mimesis almost entirely and turn explicitly into paint. Bellows sets up a mobile series of substitutions, from steam to clouds to paint, which destabilizes the relationship between representation and the world it seeks to describe. Into this strange and unresolved environment Bellows inserts two strolling, top-hatted figures: positioned on a ridge, looking across at the yet untamed Palisades, these figures allow us to consider a different view—one that skips over the train and boats with their implications of a busy commercial world, taking in just the icy blue of the river and the black rock face above it. They see an aesthetic, rather than the dingy world of modernity. 3

Instead of the urban-natural transition zone of Bellows, Lawson’s painting concentrates on the striking presence of the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbol of American progress completed in 1883. By the turn of the century, artistic expressions of the sublime—images evoking awe and mystery—had moved away from the wildernesses that had inspired nineteenth-century American painters and had begun to seek out the soaring buildings and complex infrastructure of the twentieth-century city. As this technological sublime became a prime mode of representing American modernity, the marvel that was the Brooklyn Bridge emerged as one of its principle subjects. It was ceaselessly represented and written about in popular and official culture in the decades after it opened. 4 But Lawson’s painting contains another, perhaps surprising, element: painted from the Brooklyn side, looking toward Manhattan, it depicts in the foreground a cluster of buildings from the 1860s, including the Fulton Ferry Terminal—an instance of the supersession of one defining technology by another. 5 The Fulton Ferry had been the first public steamboat service between Brooklyn and Manhattan in the early nineteenth century, and had been critical to the development of Brooklyn Heights as a commuting community. 6 Hard hit by the opening of the bridge, the ferry and its old-fashioned terminal suggested the rapidity of change when Lawson painted his scene.

In this sense, the picture seems less a vision of technological sublimity than of the melancholy traces of a vanishing past. Lawson and Bellows both seem somewhat disenchanted with the industrialized American city of their time. The sulfurous atmosphere and lowering sun of the Lawson, like the dark blues and disintegrating wooden structures of the Bellows, seem to reflect a world of rapid change and decay. Human beings are peripheral to these urban spaces. The protagonists of these paintings are the rivers, and the mechanical systems that gather around them. Manhattan’s rivers are part of the story of its growth and development, but they are also separate from it.

A quite different vision of New York can be found in two paintings of the 1930s: Pip and Flip (Fig. 5) by Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) and Coney Island (Fig. 6) by Harry Roseland (1867–1950). Both expand on the theme of waterfront pleasures that had been explored in earlier Ashcan painting, including Bellows’s Beach at Coney Island (1908, private collection) and Sloan’s South Beach Bathers (1907–08, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota). The somberness of Lawson’s Brooklyn Bridge and Bellows’s Palisades is absent here; people move to center stage, explored as masses and as objectified subjects.

Reginald Marsh (1898–1954)

Pip and Flip , 1932

Harry Roseland (1866–1950)

Coney Island , 1933

Roseland’s Coney Island bears comparison with the Coney Island pictures taken in the 1940s by the documentary photographer Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899–1968), such as Coney Island Beach (Fig. 7). Weegee, like Roseland, emphasized people en masse, fluctuating, fractal, and infinitely mobile. He captured individuals within the crowd who looked up as the photographer, famously, mugged and danced to attract their attention. The people in Roseland’s crowd, however, turn away from the painter (and viewer), pursuing their own activities and blending into an anonymous, immeasurable mass.

Coney Island Beach , 1940

Gelatin silver print, 8 1/8 x 10 in. (20.6 x 25.4 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ford Motor Company Collection, gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987.1100.252

Marsh focused on the culture of popular entertainment, leisure, and exploitation. In Pip and Flip , a river of humanity passes from right to left across the composition, a flow of social, racial, and gender types that ebbs toward the picture’s edges and crests before the entrance to World Circus, a famous Coney Island “freak show.” 7 Above them, brash signs for the acts inside dominate the canvas through egregious scale and color. In the center, where two burlesque performers and one of the headliners stand above the crowd, a huge clown face is capped by a word play where a hanging flag transforms “World Circus” into “Wild Circus.”

“Pip” and “Flip” were the stage names of the microcephalic sisters Elvira and Jenny Snow, who also appeared in the movie Freaks , directed by Tod Browning and released the same year. Robin Jaffee Frank has written about Marsh’s painting and the realities of Coney Island and its entertainers, stressing Marsh’s emphasis on sexuality and the coarser human emotions. 8 The sodality of linked girls who stride across the midpoint of the painting, the burlesque dancers who pose to attract the crowd, the interplay of types and glances—all contribute to a vision of the city quite distinct from the empty built spaces of Lawson’s Brooklyn Bridge or the emotional distance of Bellows’s Riverside Park . Coney Island represented a different American modernity.

Up to now, all the pictures I have discussed have been of urban locations—Paris and Boston, and New York City from Riverside Park to Coney Island. The last two paintings I will discuss, however, use modernist stylistic devices to represent rural environments: in Bucks County Barn (Fig. 8) by the precisionist painter Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), the material structures of human endeavor stand without their makers, while After Church (Fig. 9) by Romare Bearden (1911–1988) is jammed with human presence, as palpable and obdurate as buildings.

Charles Sheeler (1883–1965)

Bucks County Barn , 1940

In the early years of the twentieth century, Sheeler had depicted New York City in paintings, works on paper, and photographs, but at the same time he repeatedly portrayed the landscape and architecture of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he shared a colonial house in Doylestown with his friend the painter Morton Schamberg (1881–1918) until the latter’s death from influenza in 1918. Sheeler’s Bucks County Barn exhibits the tension between realism and self-conscious aestheticism we saw in Henri and Prendergast. Sheeler’s first sustained artistic encounter with vernacular architecture occurred in the late 1910s, when he produced a large number of photographs and works on paper depicting the interior of his Doylestown house and nearby buildings. 9 By the 1930s, rural and historic subject matter of this sort, which had been seen as eccentric and innovative when he began, had become a more common modernist interest, and Sheeler’s impersonal, precisionist technique had become identified with the depiction of industrial and urban sites. His formal geometries and evocation of historical America through vernacular structures suggested to critics and contemporaries a specifically American modernism. 10

Bucks County Barn , like Lawson’s Brooklyn Bridge , is unpeopled. The only living things are two cows behind a split-rail fence and a dog passing by a kennel, which divides his body. Human presence is implicit in the architecture and tools—means of structuring the world. Mortality and the dissolution of the body are evoked by the collapsed fence and a damaged board on the porch roof.

Romare Bearden (1911–1988)

After Church , 1941

Bearden, a generation younger than Sheeler, adapted the formal simplifications and spatial contradictions of modernism to a subject it had rarely been tasked with: African American life in the twentieth century. Born in the southern state of North Carolina, Bearden moved with his family to New York as a young child. After Church is one of several works that emerged from a return visit to the South he made in the early 1940s. On the face of things, the subject is a brief and unremarkable moment as men leave a country church after a service, but the mood is silent and ominous. The composition is dominated by the heads and shoulders of large figures who push up against the picture plane, while in the distance rolling hills and leafless trees frame two smaller figures and the gray clapboard church.

Bearden’s subtle understanding of historical and contemporary painting is evident in the Matisse-like flattening of form and brilliant colors. The men appear near to us and therefore implicitly require a response, but this immediacy is subordinated by the formal choices Bearden makes and by the closure of feeling in the figures’ faces, deportment, and address to the spectator. One is seen in profile, his eyes hidden by the brim of his hat; the frontmost raises a handkerchief to his face and glances off to the side; a third, wearing a cloth cap and smaller than the others, stands apart and faces us squarely, but his eyes are lowered and do not meet the viewer’s. The faces of the figures behind cannot be seen at all. Everyone and everything appears simultaneously direct and evasive. This depiction of the Jim Crow South, seen from the perspective of a New York painter, is a further example of an American artist consciously maneuvering between pictorial strategies, personal vision, and social subjects.

Bearden’s painting returns us to the concerns with which this essay opened: the decorative and aesthetic, the socially meaningful, the desire to characterize the present moment, and the questioning of American identity and its symbols. If much of this activity concentrated on the nation’s greatest metropolis—its most dizzying exemplar of mankind’s technological interventions in the natural world—it also looked further afield, to the “old world” of Paris and to the deep American time of Boston Harbor, Pennsylvania farm country, and the former Confederacy.

Linda Merrill, After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)  ↩︎

In addition to Carlyle’s Sweetstuff Shop (c. 1887), Whistler is represented in the Terra Foundation’s collection with A Brittany Shop with Shuttered Windows (c. 1893) , A Chelsea Shop (1894–95) , and Flower Shop, Dieppe (1897 or 1899) .  ↩︎

This connects to Bellows’s many paintings of snow scenes in the city, such as Blue Snow, the Battery, 1910, Columbus Museum of Art, which won him popularity during his lifetime.  ↩︎

Richard Haw, The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Sarah Kate Gillespie et al., Icon of Modernism: Representing the Brooklyn Bridge, 1883–1950 (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2016).  ↩︎

“Interpretation” , Ernest Lawson, Brooklyn Bridge , 1917-20.  ↩︎

William R. Everdell, Rowboats to Rapid Transit: A History of Brooklyn Heights (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Heights Association, 1973).  ↩︎

On this compositional device in Marsh’s paintings, including Pip and Flip , see Carmenita Higginbotham, “At the Savoy: Reginald Marsh and the Art of Slumming,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts , vol. 82, no. 1/2 (2008): 16–29.  ↩︎

Robin Jaffee Frank, Coney Island: Visions of An American Dreamland, 1861–2008 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), especially 96–99.  ↩︎

Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition (Allentown, PA: Allentown Art Museum, 1997) and Karen Lucic, “The Present and the Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Yale University, 1989).  ↩︎

Wanda Corn, “Home, Sweet Home,” chap. 6 in The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).  ↩︎

William Glackens (1870–1938)

Bal Bullier , c. 1895

The Grand Canal, Venice , c. 1898–99

Everett Shinn (1876–1953)

Theater Scene , 1903

Salem Willows , 1904

George Luks (1866–1933)

Knitting for the Soldiers: High Bridge Park , c. 1918

Robert Henri (1865–1929)

Sylvester , 1914

Rockwell Kent (1882–1971)

Cranberrying, Monhegan , c. 1907

Figure in Motion , 1913

Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975)

Slaves , 1925

Walter Ufer (1876–1936)

Builders of the Desert , 1923

Chicago , 1930

Archibald J. Motley, Jr. (1891–1981)

Between Acts , 1935

Edward Hopper (1882–1967)

Dawn in Pennsylvania , 1942

Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000)

Bar-b-que , 1942

Walt Kuhn (1877–1949)

Clown with Drum , 1942

Sierra Madre at Monterrey , 1943

Conservation, exposition, Restauration d’Objets d’Art

Home Issues HS Vandalism and Art The duality of Graffiti: is it va...

The duality of Graffiti: is it vandalism or art?

Introduction.

1 Graffiti is found in many societies with different cultural contexts and has become a witness and an ethnographic source of information on urban art development (Waclawek, 2011). Modes of expression are mainly related to visibility, notoriety, choice of venue, transgression, and are often a mean to react and protest while remaining anonymous, by illegally introducing messages in the public space. Contemporary graffiti is also described by its controversial issues between social, style and aesthetic forms along with vandalism aspects. Facing a worldwide plethoric production, the assumption that Graffiti is a positive urban art form raises some paradoxical questions regarding ephemerality and “visual pollution” with a growing art market demand. However, it is often seen as illicit production and vandalism asset. For instance, removing graffiti or restricting the practice of graffiti from the public space has been a controversial issue for artists and authorities. A question therefore arises: how can the aesthetic and pictorial aspects of these acts of creation be considered as acts of vandalism? ( Bengsten, 2016).

Fig. 1 Vandalism

Vandalism by Goon and Chick, 1985

© Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff

Fig. 2 Vandalism?

Keith Haring, New York, 1983

© Laura Levine/Corbis

The problem of temporality

2 Similarly, the notion of temporality, by dissociating conservation and transmission must be considered. The growing interest leads to different perceptions probably with greater attention to the act of "heritage" at the expense of the act of protest. The patrimonialization of graffiti and, to a large extent, of Street Art is an essential point, because graffiti writers or street art practitioners often see institutions as "looters" who, come to preserve cultural acts that other public institutions have condemned (Omodeo, 2016).

3 Heritage is primarily a process which, in principle, prevents any destruction or voluntary surrender of an artwork, which are a corollary of creation and its limitation of copyright in time. For most “writers”, Graffiti is not an act thought out on the basis of a future conservation. The issue is visibility and notoriety, by the number, size and/or the choice of venue. Regarding paint materials, so many spray paint brands are available to the general public in hardware stores. Graffiti writers would not necessarely comply with this rule as their preferences for brands are more related to habits, opportunities and word of mouth, along with, plastic qualities and not for resistance properties.

Alterations

4 If Graffiti question the artistic approach of the artist and the context of their creation, it also poses those of alteration mechanisms, sometimes irreversible, these colors, which are significant from the point of view of heritage conservation. This encourage today to have a different perspective than that of the material history of the work with the creative process, the components used and the effects of environment parameters and ultimately, of time (Colombini, 2017).

5 The traditional methods of conservation are questioned; which must intervene and what modifications in relation to the original one can be accepted? (Beerkens, 2005). Is it essential to invite the artist to take part in the heritage process? One must look at the field of Muralism, mainly in the USA, to find more innovative and frequent restoration procedures. Indeed, the restoration of murals, often monumental paintings, is a civic and collective act within the "neighborhood". The actors of the restoration/renovation are both volunteer civilians trained and supervised by experienced conservators, artists and more generally, of persons engaged in neighborhood committees (Shank, 2004). This is not without rewards and sometimes reveals abuses that go beyond the artistic acts.

Fig. 3 Conservation

Community mural conservation

© 2014 Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles

Fig. 4 A public Art project, 1985

6 The practice of graffiti and its legislation ambiguities are at stake. Graffiti and Street Art have their own definitions and interpretations, but they have something in common with illegal acts when it comes to the artistic act carried out on surfaces without the given permission by a property owner, whether public or private. We are now witnessing a radicalization of practices both from two points of view: legality and vandalism. The character of these acts explains why some artists (not only from the graffiti scene) have seen their career highlighted with arrests, penalties and sometimes trials, while their works are copyrightable (Moyne, 2016).

7 T he question of authenticity of paint arises when, aesthetic and style expertise, may not be sufficient to ascertain whether the juridical designation of Street Art as “Art” versus graffiti as vandalism. This is even truer for legal graffiti, mainly because of the variability of quality of the known and the good quality of spray paints, supposedly meant to last, as opposed to, the use of cheap brands of spray paint as illegal graffiti (Marsh, 2007).

Duality of the phenomenon

8 This paper relates to the duality of the modern graffiti phenomenon, as to whether it is a vandalism act or a cultural production. It focusses on a comparison study, mainly through artist interviews, between the evolving graffiti practices in Western major cities where illegality is often reclaimed by artists, and the fast emergence of graffiti in China, where this artistic expression is not only watched through its illegal and vandalism forms, but also for its aesthetic perceptions, though practices happen in restricted areas for expressing social, anti-official and political actions (Valjakka, 2011). Graffiti are buffed, almost straight away, by city cleaners the so called “buffers”, who are in the streets to remove all sorts of inscriptions from plumbers to whatever girl ads. If they cannot scrap it out, they paint over and that is why graffiti never lasts. At the same time, the relationship with authorities has improved very much over the last few years. It is more and more common to negotiate with the police by explaining what graffiti writers are doing, colours and mode of expression for everybody, in order to, embellish the streets rather than litter or vandalize them. From a civilization where calligraphy has been the core of the artistic production, the writing on a wall has different meanings than in a Euro-American context (gangs and political + social protests). Confronting these two almost opposite approaches, it allows a better understanding of this artistic form, as to whether it is considered vandalism or art. This controversial interrogation can be illustrated by the artist Bando’s quote “Graffiti is not vandalism, but a very beautiful crime”.

List of illustrations

		Title	Fig. 1 Vandalism
		Caption	Vandalism by Goon and Chick, 1985
		Credits	© Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff
		File	image/jpeg, 100k
		Title	Fig. 2 Vandalism?
		Caption	Keith Haring, New York, 1983
		Credits	© Laura Levine/Corbis
		File	image/jpeg, 68k
		Title	Fig. 3 Conservation
		Caption	Community mural conservation
		Credits	© 2014 Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles
		File	image/jpeg, 108k
		Title	Fig. 4 A public Art project, 1985
		Credits	© Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff
		File	image/jpeg, 90k

Electronic reference

Alain Colombini , “ The duality of Graffiti: is it vandalism or art? ” ,  CeROArt [Online], HS | 2018, Online since 09 December 2018 , connection on 31 July 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ceroart/5745; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ceroart.5745

About the author

Alain colombini.

Contemporary art scientist. Centre Interdisciplinaire de Conservation et de Restauration du Patrimoine (CICRP), Marseille – France

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Graffiti and street art between ephemerality and making visible the culture and heritage in cities: insight at international level and in bucharest, 1. introduction: understanding graffiti and street art as concepts and urban subculture, 2. materials and methods, 3. graffiti and street art—approaches and meanings, 4. results: graffiti and street art at international and local level—a comparative analysis in terms of media for works and topics related to culture and heritage.

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5. Discussion

6. conclusions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Cercleux, A.-L. Graffiti and Street Art between Ephemerality and Making Visible the Culture and Heritage in Cities: Insight at International Level and in Bucharest. Societies 2022 , 12 , 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12050129

Cercleux A-L. Graffiti and Street Art between Ephemerality and Making Visible the Culture and Heritage in Cities: Insight at International Level and in Bucharest. Societies . 2022; 12(5):129. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12050129

Cercleux, Andreea-Loreta. 2022. "Graffiti and Street Art between Ephemerality and Making Visible the Culture and Heritage in Cities: Insight at International Level and in Bucharest" Societies 12, no. 5: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12050129

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Toward an Ecological Urbanism: Public Engagement in Contemporary Art Practice

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This survey essay presents the artworks of ecologically engaged artists working within the context of the urban environment and its relationship to broader bioregions. The author reflects on the interdependency of urban infrastructure on living systems and their services, focusing on artworks that align with this ethic and weaving them within three areas considered imperatives toward an ecological urbanism. The projects vary in their approaches to engage communities toward awareness and stewardship of the natural world through an understanding of ecological systems.

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The Public Artist as a Fringe Agent for Sustainability: Practices of Environmentalist Driven Art-Activism and Their Digital Perspectives

Art, science, and life: where arts-based research and social-ecological transformation can meet

Cities and Urban Studies: Four Perspectives on Art Museums

Victor Margolin, “Reflections on Art and Sustainability,” 28.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group II, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, report number 5, Spring, 2014. Retrieved March 10, 2014. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/

Ibid. Working Group I, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. September, 2013. Retrieved March 10, 2014. https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/

Jeffrey Hou, “Hybrid Landscapes,” 1.

Not all artists presented in this essay consider themselves as “eco-artists” or that their practice is exclusively “eco-art.” I use the words “ecologically directed” rather than “eco-art” but borrow nuances of an evolving definition of the term, which falls under the umbrella of “environmental art.” See the environmental art page on Wikipedia.org.

Gary Snyder quoted in “Between Social Ecology and Deep Ecology: Gary Snyder’s Ecological Philosophy” by Paul Messersmith-Glavin, 20.

Paul Messersmith-Glavin, “Between Social Ecology and Deep Ecology: Gary Snyder’s Ecological Philosophy,” 20.

Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” quoted by David Stairs in “Biophilia and Technophilia,” 40.

David Stairs, “Biophilia and Technophilia,” 37.

Cagan H. Sekercioglu, “Ecosystem functions and services,” 45.

The relatively new subfield of environmental economics attempts to include the costs and benefits of alternative environmental policies to deal with air pollution, water quality, toxic substances, solid waste, and global warming. It differs from ecological economics, which emphasizes the economy as a subsystem of the ecosystem with its focus upon preserving natural capital (Wikipedia.org).

http://www.who.int/gho/urban_health/situation_trends/urban_population_growth_text/en/

Mohsen Mostafavi, “Why Ecological Urbanism? Why now?” 26.

To track trends see USGS site http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-trends.html . Although this shows consumption from 1950 to 2005, it does not indicate supply levels. For this see http://tinyurl.com/mowtfbt . For water data both current and past and surface and ground, see USGS Water Data Discovery, http://water.usgs.gov/data/ . For climate change impact on water resources, http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptation/water.html

The artists’ website is comprehensive with a well-produced video documentation of each project this collective does with the community, http://www.desertartlab.com/

Sue Spaid, “Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies,” 89.

Jude Schwendenwien, Alan Sonfist quoted in “Breaking Ground: Alan Sonfist, et al.” 41.

Oliver Kellhammer quoted from his website: http://www.oliverk.org/art-projects/land-art/cottonwood-community-gardens

Patricia Johanson, http://patriciajohanson.com/endangered-garden/

http://www.flap.org/toronto-lights-out.php . Also see NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/world/americas/casualties-of-torontos-urban-skies.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.clemson.edu/extension/natural_resources/wildlife/publications/fs32_wetland_ecology.html

Susan Platt, “The Planet According to Maya Lin: What is Missing? and Confluence Project,” 144.

Maya Lin interview, http://www.cornell.edu/video/artist-maya-lin

Parenthesis added to indicate the artist’s passing in December, 2012.

The project was a commissioned by the Arts Catalyst in the UK. Both the exhibition and the mobile applications were developed to focus on species in the UK. http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/detail/a_memorial_for_the_still_living/

Several western US states make it illegal for residents to collect rainwater. Colorado reversed its laws in 2009 after a study found that it would not “rob water owners of their rights.” See NY Times.

David Wicks, “Record of Creative Work,” 29–30.

Tim Collins quoted in Glenn Harper’s “Tim Collins and Reiko Goto: Art Has Everything to Do With It,” 119.

Glenn Harper, Ibid.

Reiko Goto quoted in Ibid.

Mohsen Mostafavi, Ibid., 17.

James P. Collins, Ann Kinzig, et al., “A New Urban Ecology,” 416.

Stephan Barthel and Christian Isendahl, “Urban gardens, agriculture, and water management,” 224.

György Kepes, “Art and Ecological Conscience,” 6.

Patrick Clancy (Pulsa Group), “The City as an Artwork,” 210. This essay presents Pulsa’s aspirations to transform the information systems which support man-made environments exemplified in the city into life-enhancing experiences comparable to those primordially enjoyed by humankind in nature.

Brief course outline available at The Buckminster Fuller Institute website, see link: http://bfi.org/design-science/primer/eight-strategies-comprehensive-anticipatory-design-science

Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems”.

TJ Demos, “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology,” 27.

In a work shown concurrently, Krefeld Sewage Triptych (1972), Haacke presents conclusive data on the volume and types of industrial and household pollution levels found in the untreated sewage, tracing these back to the polluters, including that of the city of Krefeld, of which the Museum belongs to. Demos gives some credit to this institutional critique.

Tega Brain, “The Politics and Poetics of Coexistence,” 68.

“A side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved, such as the pollination of surrounding crops by bees kept for honey,” Google definition.

http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/nopark

Stats are as of 2011. Consult EIA website for various informative data sets. NYS data consulted May 21, 2014. http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=ny\#tabs-1

Tiffany Holmes, “7000 Oaks and Counting (2007),” 20.

Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga interview about the project, http://vimeo.com/16336508

Judith Messina, “Green tech powers up NYC companies,” no pagination.

Edward A. Shanken, “Investigatory Art: Institutional Critique, Real-Time Systems, and Network Culture” (lecture).

See video interview of Allcorn at: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/humanplus/human-pollination-project/

Artists’ website, consulted on May 22, 2014. http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/projects/510/0

John Thackara, “Into The Open,” online: http://opendesignnow.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself

Caren Cooper interview with Diane Toomey, “How Rise of Citizen Science is Democratizing Research,” online at: http://e360.yale.edu/content/print.msp?id=2733

Pete Johnson, quoted in “Breaking the Growth Habit” by Bill McKibben (63).

http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/newsrelease/13169

http://www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-63.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Denes

A bushel of wheat weighs 60 lbs. Gene Logsdon in Small-Scale Grain Raising conservatively estimates 40 bu/acre which converts to 42 lbs of white flour and 60 lbs of whole wheat flour per bushel.

Paul Schmelzer, “Practical propaganda,” Art21 blog, March 1, 2009.

http://gardenregistry.org/

Stephanie Smith, “Marjetica Potrč,” Beyond Green, 108.

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Michails, M. (2015). Toward an Ecological Urbanism: Public Engagement in Contemporary Art Practice. In: Marchese, F.T. (eds) Media Art and the Urban Environment. Future City, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15153-3_1

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This study revealed that the constructions of Pearl Island and Millennium Island as well as five beach nourishment projects mainly exerted a positive impact on the evolution of Haikou Beach. The beach in Pearl Island's wave shadow area may form a tombolo in a hundred years. In the context of heightened coastal engineering development, leveraging the existing large and future larger archives of satellite imagery to analyze the complex changes of urban beaches helps mitigate the absence of field data, aiding in the development of targeted beach erosion protection and remediation strategies with scientific, engineering, and societal significance. coastal engineering; offshore artificial island; sand replenishment; beach evolution; remote sensing 290 IMAGES An Analysis of the Significance of Graffiti and Street Art Free Essay Urban Art and Street Art: What’s the Difference? Urban Essay II Wall Art, Canvas Prints, Framed Prints, Wall Peels 🌱 Essay about an artist. 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Whether urban street art is condemned or idolised, it has undeniably opened new ways of visioning and ex-periencing the urban fabric of everyday life. The visual encounter is changing, considering the multidisciplinary nature of urban street art, and the economic, political, and social climates, of the urban landscape of the cit- Discover How Urban Street Art Is Shaping Our Cities & Culture Urban street art isn't just about aesthetics; it's a force that's actively reshaping urban landscapes. Artists use city walls as huge public canvases, allowing their work to become a part of the community's daily life. Street art becomes a dialogue between the artist and the city, where every painted corner tells a story. What is Street Art? History & Famous Artists Street art, to a certain extent, is connected to and encompasses graffiti art. Key dates: ca. 1960s - ongoing. Key regions: originated from the metropolises of the United States, especially New York City and Philadelphia, now spread around the world. Keywords: graffiti, subway art, guerilla art, public art, urban art, large scale murals. The World of Street Art: Exploring the Global Urban Canvas and its Updated On: March 28, 2024 by Maha Yassin. Street art is a dynamic expression that bathes urban landscapes in vibrant colours and thought-provoking imagery. Around the world, these visual narratives function not only as a means of personal expression for the artists but also as a reflection of social and cultural currents within communities. Urbanism in Art: Exploring Cityscapes Through Architecture Urbanism in art, particularly through the lens of architecture paintings, represents a captivating intersection of two disciplines: urban planning and visual arts. This fusion offers a unique perspective on how we perceive, interact with, and conceptualize the spaces around us. 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Graffiti and mural art in public places started around 1970's in Philadelphia and New York and evolved into street art (Ross, 2016). However, with time this form of art ... Street Art, Ideology, and Public Space Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. Street Art, Ideology, and Public Space - Masters Thesis - Urban Studies ... The conceptual model developed from the literature includes public art, urban environment, perception, participation and prospect of public art in urban context. This research is exploratory in nature ... Urban Realism and the American Scene Here are two paintings, both made during the 1890s, both small in their dimensions, loosely or rapidly painted, and focused on urban everyday scenes: Street Corner in Paris (Fig. 1) by Robert Henri (1865-1929) and Evening on a Pleasure Boat (Fig. 2) by Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924). Robert Henri (1865-1929) Street Corner in Paris, 1896 Henri's picture, which measures only 3 7/8 by 6 1/ ... Understanding What Is Urban Art Cultural Studies Essay Urban art has become a vast expanding movement. The diversity of different styles and approaches are becoming a key factor within the design practice. In my opinion majority of urban art is influential, as it is an expression of an opinion/ ideal. Therefore as the opinion is self created it makes the work original. The duality of Graffiti: is it vandalism or art? Introduction Graffiti is found in many societies with different cultural contexts and has become a witness and an ethnographic source of information on urban art development (Waclawek, 2011). Modes of expression are mainly related to visibility, notoriety, choice of venue, transgression, and are often a mean to react and protest while remaining anonymous, by illegally introducing messages in ... Societies The paper aims to analyze, on one hand, the evolution and interpretation of graffiti and street art phenomenon in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, and at international level, and on the other hand how this subculture is related to aspects of culture and heritage. The analysis of the evolution followed by graffiti and street art in Bucharest is doubled by the investigation of the messages ... Toward an Ecological Urbanism: Public Engagement in Contemporary Art They are joining urban ecologists and other professionals in attending to urban ecosystems and infrastructures by engaging policymakers, planners, and the general public. In his essay, Art and Ecological Conscience (1972), György Kepes states, "Environmental homeostasis on a global scale is now necessary to survival. Creative imagination ... CFP Urban Art creating the urban with art (Berlin, 14-16 Jul 16) URBAN ART: CREATING THE URBAN WITH ART 14-16 July 2016 - Humboldt University Berlin Keynote: Prof. Dr. Frank Eckardt ... Gordon Matta-Clark's 1976 Made in America and Keith Haring's 1986 Berlin Wall mural, this essay considers how these artists used graffiti practice to reveal the economic, social, and political processes with which West ... 27 Pieces of Awesome Street Art from Nicosia, Cyprus (Photo Essay) Here are my favorite of my favorites, trying to mix up styles, media, parts of the city, etc. Cyprus is across the Mediterranean Sea from Syria and has many cultural ties. Pro Syrian Refugee graffiti is common. A commissioned piece showing the pride and highlights of northern Nicosia. Nicosia is also called Lefkosia. Urban Art Forms Essay Examples Urban Art Forms Essays. Culture Is Contested: Graffiti Introduction Brightly sprayed graffiti on New York City sub-urban trains during the seventies was seen not merely as senseless dirtiness but as a protest against the demands of cleanliness by those who wanted total order. Rather than simply inscribing anarchic colours on urban ... Urban Art Association Urban Art • Street Art. Posts 481,609 • Threads 32,479 • Online 47. New Print Releases, Vinyl Toys, Bearbrick, Sneaker Collectors, Gallery Show and Exhibition News. Urban Art Research Papers Therefore, Urban Art is a phenomenon of the 'Low', which indeed evolved from a subculture, but clearly has features of mass culture: it is easily accessible to a wide audience on the street and online, works of Urban Art are often produced in series and at a low price.Urban Art messages are striking, comparable to advertising, and serve as ... Satellite-Derived Shoreline Changes of an Urban Beach and Their Urban beaches, oscillating between development and protection, are more frequently and strongly affected by human activities; therefore, comprehensive and detailed studies of the geomorphological evolution of urban beaches affected by coastal engineering are imperative. Based on 769 satellite images from 1986 to 2023, this study employed a transect-focused approach to investigate the ... essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis