The Evolution of Street Art
Street art has come a long way from the crude, graffiti on subway trains and their underground passageways of the 70’s in New York City. It wasn’t until 1980 that New York galleries even exhibited the emergent art form as legitimate, marketable art.
One of the earliest stars to rise from the streets was Keith Haring, who developed a love for drawing early on in life, learning basic cartooning skills from his father who was a cartoonist and through the popular culture of Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney of his day. He began his ascendance as a graffiti artist in the subways of New York and after several arrests decided to hone his skills at the School of Visual Arts (SVA).
Haring soon befriended Kenny Scharf and Basquiat, and it was within this alternative world that they triumphed in bypassing the art world and connecting directly to the people wielding this new street language of signs, following in the footsteps of pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein from the 60’s.
This generation of artists understood well how to infuse the power of images into a new, visual language with meaning derived from location and their relation to other images on the wall, in the same way hieroglyphics, cave paintings and other ancient languages had since time immemorial. Ancient Egyptians believed viewing hieroglyphs and meditating upon them for long periods would elevate the viewer’s consciousness to a higher state by connecting to a hidden sacred geometry embedded within the repeating glyphs. Haring’s imagery often contained references to ancient Egypt in the form of pyramidal shapes and thought-provoking hieroglyphic symbolism.
San Francisco’s De Young Museum hosted a hugely successful retrospective of Haring’s work late 2015, called The Political Line which drew large crowds of fans from across the globe. The exhibit went on to attract even more fans at the Kunstahl in Rotterdam. Haring’s energy is still very much alive, dancing and reverberating through his work and into our minds.
Ironically, the same art world that snubbed graffiti as an art form is now using it to raise its falling attendance. The latest survey from the National Endowment for the Arts shows a 21% drop in attendance to museums nationwide, with the cause of the dire metrics attributed to three top factors: time, cost and access. If people have to work several jobs to pay their rising, unaffordable rents, they aren’t going to have time or desire to pay fees to park and enter a museum. Several museums nationwide are now considering eliminating admission fees and some, like The Broad in Los Angeles have already done this and seen increased attendance by minorities and other younger visitor groups.
Graffiti has clearly outgrown its origins of simple name-tagging and territory-marking, evolving into an art form that is surprising the masses in different ways. Since it still exists outside the norms of the commercialized art world, the art form has a more fluid and quicker evolutionary process, unbound by standards.
Currently, it seems to be leaning towards causes of social justice and as an integral player in rejuvenating blighted neighborhoods across the globe. Even the noun has become outdated, most street artists today prefer to leave behind “graffiti” and use the terms, street art or writing to describe what they do.
Millennials and Gen Z’ers are connecting to this new expression of street art in as many different ways as the unconventional street artists can come up with. For them, the art form seems completely benign as they have no idea of its rough and tumble origins and ties to gangs or turf wars. For them, it’s just good, relevant art they get to enjoy for free. Aside from street art’s break-all-the-rules appeal, its very accessibility to the masses, no museum hours, lines or entrance fees, is precisely what makes it so easy to connect to. It’s that grassroots, talking-to-you-on-your-level that appeals to most anyone. There is more of a connection with the common man and his struggles than mainstream or lofty high-end art.
Street art is by the people for the people, the least autocratic, most democratic and open-source of all art forms.
It seems like everywhere you look today, you can find a powerful example of street art, even off-planet. One French street artist named, Invader found a way to wiggle his way into outer space, inside the International Space Station, where a gleeful astronaut posted a picture of his work and earned some street-cred, connecting with younger followers along the way.
The needle is moving and cities are improving on this new trend of promoting art and cultivating its artists, some have even gone so far as decriminalizing graffiti. San Francisco for example, still enforces it as a crime, but the city has created a variety of different programs to channel the talent of these artists into a benefit and away from vandalism. San Francisco Art Commission recently offered a grant that offered $1.2 million for an artist to install an artwork alongside an unsightly mammoth brick wall of Market Street. Their goal is to use commissioned murals or other works of art to beautify buildings as a more cost effective way to improve structures instead of tearing them down. SF beautiful, is a trust that helps owners victimized by illegal graffiti. It pays for half the costs to install murals with a selected roster of local street artists on their walls to avoid repetitive fines assessed to owners for clean up. The owners foot the other half.
Miami was one of the first cities to reinvigorate appreciation for street art, thanks to the artistic vision of Tony Goldman, a New York developer credited for re-discovering South Beach in the 80’s. Tony’s next foundling was Wynwood, a dejected, underdeveloped parcel of land abutting booming downtown Miami with its canyon of high-rise luxury condos. He saw the collection of vacant and underutilized warehouses with cheap paint and bad signage as blank canvases screaming to be repainted by an army of urban street artists. His vision was born in 2009 in the heart of Wynwood after commissioning Wynwood Walls, flying in well known artists such as; Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey, Aiko and Kenny Scharf to bring their creative imagery and help give birth to America’s first outdoor, street art gallery. Tony then bought two commercial spaces on either side of the Walls and his son and daughter set up restaurants (Wynwood Kitchen & Joey’s) in an area where Miamians would never dare step foot in during the day or even fewer, after dark.
The rest is history. Today, the art barrio is jam-packed with galleries and the streets are constantly changing with new commissioned and non-commissioned work and warehouses now selling in the multi-million-dollar range. The community also serves as an integral part of Miami’s yearly, international art fair — Art Basel that brings in millions more to the city’s coffers.
Tony was the first pioneer to elevate street art into a game-changing tool to revitalize blighted neighborhoods and make them viable, thriving communities fueled by one simple truth; that everyone loves to be moved by good art.
Major cities across the planet have adopted the same concept that Tony Goldman used to uplift Wynwood. Bogota, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Paris, Montreal, San Francisco, Brazil all proudly display and promote their street art, to create impact, attracting throngs of well-heeled street art aficionados that travel the globe just to experience and photograph the most talked about murals. Some cities like Montreal, Miami and Buenos Aires even offer street art tours and host yearly mural contests.
Even Google has jumped in on the burgeoning movement. Realizing the cultural value of street art, launching in June 2014, it’s Google Street Art Project, a global initiative that documents works from all major cities where anyone can see the images in high-resolution and even learn the stories behind the art, before they disappear forever.
Murals have proven instrumental in unifying communities under one theme, promoting an appreciation for its heritage. Residents in Los Angeles reclaimed the history of its community by funding a mural with the name “Skid Row City Limits” to mark the territory and prevent it’s moniker to be erased from history by city officials that would prefer to forget it’s association with the homeless. The mural eventually helped city councilman, Jose Huizar push to successfully lift the decade-old ban on murals in the city in 2013. The Skid Row mural was key in turning a negative into a positive for that community’s identity.
Another project promoting a community’s spirit is Wrinkles of the City, executed in Cartagena, LA, Berlin, Shanghai and Havana. This project successfully incorporated faces of local personalities and cultural icons as subjects for each mural, highlighting each city’s unique architectural qualities as well as enhancing its sense of identity.
Public spaces are being redefined as open-air art galleries, helping cities relate stories of its history and as a tool to instantly rehumanize their streets of their bland, monochrome concrete-lined byways. Peregrine Church is another game-changing street artist that created the Rainworks project, using concrete sidewalks to spread ephemeral messages of joy or inspirational quotes on rainy days by applying a non-destructive, clear coat that only reveals when wet, disappearing when dry.
The ante has now been upped for “writers” or street artists to create more images that taunt, tickle and mirror our society, much in the way theatrical plays satirize our everyday obsessions in this new form of “artivism”.
Street art has evolved into one of the most effective ways for us to reflect on ourselves in real-time, teasing us to think and reflect, essentially organic, non-commercial billboards that tap into the collective psyche of the masses.
Los Angeles street artist, Skid Robot paints dream images on walls behind the homeless while they sleep in an effort to spur dialog on a solution for fellow Americans suffering extreme poverty. He created a crowdfunding website that hopes to highlight the humanitarian crisis and plans to use the money earned from the project to purchase land to be repurposed as sustainable communities for the homeless similar to the Kibbutz model effectively used in Israel.
The Groundswell mural project in Brooklyn utilized the talents of 16 young artists to create a mural near a prison complex with a central theme, protesting the dilemma of mass incarceration in America. The organization believes in the power of images to be used as a tool to fight for social justice.
Banksy is well known globally for his use of politically charged imagery for maximum psychological impact. He has effectively used the medium to protest the massive concrete wall Israel erected to enclose the Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israel’s occupation of Gaza. More recently, he employed his “LeMiz” image and added tear gas to represent the horrific treatment of Syrian refugees in France, fleeing a brutal civil war that has leveled their country.
Banksy’s efforts to snub the authorities and the mainstream art world came to a fevered pitch during his unauthorized residency of New York City titled, Better Out Than In. Hundreds of followers scuttled about the city, using social media to locate each piece in its mystery location before they were stolen, damaged by territorial local taggers or removed by building owners. Utilizing an irony laden, museum-like narrated voice to describe each installation, accessed only through his website, he dropped one surprise street art installation for every day.
In the single-most altruistic move of his career to date, Banksy bought a fifty dollar landscape painting from the 70’s, altered it by painting a Nazi soldier contemplating nature, titled it “The Banality of the Banality of Evil” and donated to an AIDS shelter called Housing Works. In the most blatant instance of this guerilla art form thumbing it’s nose at the mainstream art world, money-machine, the painting ultimately sold $615,000 at auction to benefit the charity. The bidder ultimately fell through but the intention to help and the impact of the gesture was not lost. His works still sell well in the six and seven figure range and he still donates his valuable art to the communities he occupies. Whether they stay up or are removed is up to each community. The donation and his unauthorized occupation of New York was a bold act of rebellion, serving to challenge future artists to find new ways to wiggle through the cracks in our unending network of rules and make the world a better place through protest art- without getting caught.
In cities that are more progressive towards welcoming street artists, their creativity is no longer criminalized, freeing them from the need to cower in the darkness to spray or paint their graffiti to evade arrest. In these cities, they have an opportunity to make a living utilizing and refining their talent. For example, in Buenos Aires, it’s illegal to paint on the side of a building in the public right of way without an owners’ permission. However, artists can do pretty much as they please with an owner’s authorization.
“In most cities in Europe this is not possible and the owner of the building needs planning permission or consent from the local authority to alter the appearance of the building.” said Fox-Tucker, who leads street art tours in Buenos Aires, several times a week.
The urban artists generally go door to door seeking approval from building owners before starting a mural. Owners usually agree, especially if the mural of aerosol, acrylic or oil paint will cover up political slogans and other graffiti already painted there.
Bordalo II, is a Portugese artist that fuses trash and found materials to create 3D street art in his native city of Lisboa, projecting an environmental message that stresses the importance of waste and recycling.
Louis Masai, another artist using the medium for environmental activism, launched a global, “Save the Bees” project, painting murals to bring awareness of the plight of the Bumble Bee. It started in London and has expanded to several cities stateside.
Tara Shahian, founder of Instagram page @streetpixel envisions street art will evolving into forms of expression we have yet to see. “I think it would be interesting to see more experimentation with how it may intersect with technology, perhaps through more interactive elements that take advantage of digital devices or the Web, bringing the artwork to life in new ways.”
It is an art form scratching and clawing its way out of its own boundaries by incubating social activism. It’s also a powerful tool that has the potential to bridge divided communities through public outreach. The Doart Foundation does just that with their roster of top graffiti artists from around the world that help them promote the need for artistic productions to create important humanitarian cultural conversations.
“Art is a friendly way to fight every kind of problem.” -Shamsia Hassani
In the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman and where most citizens cannot afford to go to any museum, one artist named Shamsia Hassani uses graffiti of female avatars to challenge preconceptions about the role of women in Afghani society, reinforcing the notion that art can bring about cultural and social change for her nation. She is also planting seeds for future street artists to take further.
As in any societal group, there is also a caste system that separates the ranks of street artists, that run the gamut from the youngest, new kids just starting to scribble their names on walls to large-scale muralists sought after the world over for their power to transform the ugliest city’s walls or playground enclosures through commissioned “building wraps”. Victor Reyes is a local Bay Area street artist that has worked his way up the ranks and is now sought after by building owners and public works departments to beautify unsightly buildings, construction sites and playgrounds all over San Francisco.
Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn are Dutch artists that have transformed the neglected faces of slums from Rio to Philadelphia — in what they like to call “urban interventions”. The project started in the Favelas of Rio to improve impoverished areas excluded from city planning budgets into colorful, lively icons of pride for each city. Instead of clearing their proposal with city officials, they were given permission by local drug lords to complete their beautification project. It has made such an impact that after their first project in the Santa Marta city of Rio in 2005, the city was named one of the world’s 10 most colorful cities, by Brazilian Vogue. In 2013, they launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised funds to realise their ultimate dream: to go back to Brazil and paint an entire favela hill. It funded but The war between police and drug gangs made the work too dangerous to continue so they transformed a main street named Vila Cruzeiro into a corridor of art and color instead.
Their Favela Project has transcended them beyond the definition of “muralists” by wrapping streets, entire buildings and even city squares with their visions for a new world.
A few artists have ventured into the arena of playing with perception in mind-bending, new ways that alter the way we perceive different dimensional planes. For years we’ve seen images spread virally over the Internet of 3D sidewalk chalk art but that too, eventually evolved into larger 3D images on the sides of buildings, creating massive, traffic stopping, tricks-of-the-eye. Others now utilize the new, edgy subtractive art form or “reverse graffiti” by cleaning walls to create their images without a drop of paint.
A Brazilian artist, Alexandre Orion used this art form as an environmental protest. By scrubbing soot off the inside of a tunnel, he created a series of skulls to remind drivers the effect their carbon emissions are having on the planet, embarrassing authorities enough that the city eventually had that tunnel and every other tunnel in Sao Paulo cleaned.
A new crop of street artists in San Francisco are practicing random acts of kindness in their version of street art. McFry’s free art or “music to the masses” donates records to anyone who finds them first, pasting them on newspaper stands or light poles. He advises followers via Instagram with images of his new local deliveries, only giving clues as to where they are installed. Within hours, the fresh batch of art is scooped up by eager fans.
Fnnch is another writer that uses childlike images to delight a public audience, making sidewalks a little sweeter and a lot cooler than the monochrome, sterile walkways we usually find.
Fnnch, a local tech freelancer in his 20’s has noticed that some of his pieces don’t get “buffed out” or erased, lasting longer than others. It seems to depend on the host neighborhood’s official that manages clean up, whether or not they survive. In 2015 the artist won a bid for a BART Transit Authority installation in San Francisco so his work can now be enjoyed by any commuter, sans fear of removal anytime soon.
A 57-year-old artist from the Mission District, Bill Hillman started his “Bini Faces” urban art project in 2004. His inspiration came from the American Indian tradition of gifting small talismans that serve as spirit guardians or talismans for good luck. Bini was an Athabaskan prophet who lived among the Tshimshian North American Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Bill Hillman has littered the sidewalks of San Francisco with his playful, gnome-like clay faces for passersby to catch a glimpse as they look down towards their mobile phones, potentially giving them a moment of a deeper thought. Like McFry, Bill likes the idea of people taking the pieces home in a new form of free and portable street art.
“We’re only here for a very short time, and we can live and die without making an imprint. I’d rather die poor and know I did something that was worth doing.” San Francisco artist, Shawn Bullen
There is an undeniable impact that this “illegal” art form has made on our modern culture. Only until recent time, do we now have a global audience watching and hungry for more, waiting to see how these unconventional artists will flip our switch next.
With all this evolution, it’s anyone’s guess where this art form will be in ten or twenty years, one thing is for sure, it will never go away. Storytelling is an integral part of human culture and street art is definitely relating a story. We are witnessing this bastard child of our culture going through a process of growth and rediscovery, armed with a new purpose, as a catalyst to bring about positive change. There will always be illegal forms of street art but there is definitely more work to be done to improve the way we curb, cultivate and define it.
“Graffiti is not just the vandalism it is often made out to be. It’s about freedom of expression and opinion, outside of any social or political controls, and can give a more accurate portrayal of each society; the important issues that the people face, along with a taste of their daily life, language, personal thoughts, and beliefs.” Rosanna Ring — archaeologist
Graffiti is a form of expression that has been with us since the first humans sprayed pigments over their hands with their mouths, leaving haunting handprints for us to find on a cave wall thousands of years later, reaching out to connect.
*Permission to reprint this article via creative commons license if attributed with a live backlink to this article.
References:
San Francisco Arts Commission call for new street artists
SF Beautiful Trust to create community murals in Bay Area
Miami’s game-changing Wynwood art community
Wynwood’s Art Basel 2014 collection of street art
Argentina’s support of street art
How a mural helped define infamous Skid Row in Los Angeles
Global city mural project — Wrinkles of the City
Rotterdam’s exhibit of Keith Haring’s street art
National Endowment for the Arts 2012 study of Art Engagement
Analysis of art participation in the US
Portugese artist Bordalo II’s recycled street art
Skid Robot’s Instagram page & his website
Banksy’s protest art in Palestine
Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn’s urban intervention Favela Project
