What Does Urban Art Offer that Online Art Can’t?
Stretching along 125th Street in Harlem, New York, are dozens of murals depicting everything from community member spotlights to intricate Manhattan skylines. They line the buzzing street on storefront security gates. Their colors and sentiments reflect passing community members. In 2021, a community-based arts program, Together, We Are New York, unveiled these street pieces highlighting New York City neighborhoods gravely affected by COVID.
Diego Ampudia, a twenty-two-year-old Columbia University student studying industrial engineering, connected with Harlem’s iconic street. “I used to take the bus along 125th to work every day and would always see the same mural. It felt empowering and I wasn’t even a part of their community…” Although intended to highlight the Harlem community, the murals even touch those passing through the neighborhood. Ampudia, born in Mexico but raised in Texas, began spray painting when he was seventeen. He both seeks inspiration and inspires others through urban art.
In the age of widespread online discourse, urban art still succeeds as a means of communication. Its ability to symbolize community character and priorities through physical means distinguishes it from the more fleeting expressions that occur within the global online community. Murals like those on 125th reach all kinds of people but root themselves in a community, more permanent than an Instagram post on someone’s daily scroll. And people care about their community’s representation. From the removal of confederate statues like Stonewall Jackson in Richmond, Virginia, to the creation of murals for victims of racial violence like George Floyd, public displays reflect a community’s values and missions. On city walls, people converse publicly. Teachers teach these conversations, artists illustrate them, and community members learn from them.
Jon Ritter, a New York University Urban Design and Architecture professor, teaches urban art’s unique impact by bringing his students to NYC’s public parks. Ritter studies how murals and statues manifest a community’s priorities as a culture– how they can express and shape larger social and political contexts. “Since the real explosion of discourse around Confederate monuments seven to eight years ago, I think a lot of us think more about what’s around us, right?” He and his students investigate what current public sculptures and murals represent, how they were placed there, and how they activate space or don’t. They engage in “re-seeing works, seeing the older works in new ways.” Ritter referenced Stonewall Jackson’s statue and the graffiti that covered its surface, expressing the Richmond community’s tension regarding the celebration of a Confederate general officer. “The fact that these things have been there for a long time and are still salient and can be re-appropriated by something like graffiti is fascinating.”
Sometimes, it is not only a mural or statue that expresses a message to the public but the layering of other art on top of the initial expressions. Artists add to each other’s pieces, similar to how users comment on each other’s posts online. But, in person, these overlappings appear more tangibly and permanently. Someone may scroll through conversations online, never returning to a post, while community members pass street murals daily, witnessing how the art changes. “You see the kind of layers of graffiti, the wall paste, and the street art. There is this kind of ecology; these walls seem to grow and change like an unauthorized intervention,” said Ritter.
AIFOS, a thirty-two-year-old Argentinian graffiti artist who wants to preserve her full name while speaking about graffiti, talked about the unspoken rules between graffiti artists when graffitiing atop each other’s art. “Graffiti bombs, tags, and pieces are okay,” she said. In other words, particular additions to a piece are acceptable if they do not overwhelm the initial piece. “I am always guided by these rules when I’m painting.” Graffiti art is an energized art form for AIFOS, especially in Buenos Aires. “Depending on the current government, they are responsible for covering up graffiti or not. For example, during Cristina’s government in 2012, the city of Buenos Aires was covered in graffiti; it was the golden age… When the street is intervening, we are physically exposed. We have to interact with the environment, the weather, the people, etc. The adrenaline is always present, something that generally does not happen when you are at home or in a studio.”
AIFOS believes in urban art’s distinct public impact compared to private art. “I think it is very effective. Graffiti, unlike a museum, for example, is exposed and available to everyone who walks on the streets, so it reaches many people.” Although online artistic movements can reach more people globally, there is something specific about how urban art reaches people. Of course, there is a permanence to anything published online, but a singular post does not maintain a presence in viewers’ lives like a community mural. Community members walk by their neighborhood’s mural daily; they’re unavoidable in this way.
Ritter articulates urban art’s unavoidable and permanent essence by describing its “afterlife.” Posters rolled onto city walls function as urban art, too. “Think about how those get torn down or stay up, or people put something over them. I mean, it’s their afterlife, right?” A poster torn on the wall then shows the results of a conversation between two people: the one who put up the poster and the one who reacted to its statement. “The reaction they create certainly suggests that what we’re talking about, like works of art in public places, are meaningful, and they get people invested, right? In a way that’s visible and tangible.” Ritter compared these street interactions to online ones. “Obviously, online discourses reach more people, you know, but they are also more fleeting, right? So, around localized communities, this reckoning with these images and their reputations that people walk by every day becomes more real in your consciousness in a way. So I think I want to believe that there’s something more enduring about them.”
“Of course, some people might take it for granted, but I think urban art has the potential to speak a million words if someone wants to listen,” commented Ampudia. So, as online conversations cloud themselves, city walkers may want to commit to viewing and “listening” to city walls for a representation of public dialogue.
