Street Art History

Let’s talk about street art. We all know what it is. Street art exists; we can like or dislike it, but we can’t do anything about it. As for me, I adore street art. I was just wondering why someone decided to use aerosol paint and draw something on the wall or somewhere else. And when did someone decide that it’s not vandalism anymore but the art?

Actually, we can call Cave Art as the first street art. It means what street art appeared a long time ago, ca. 15,000 BCE. But can we call it “street art”? One of two words in “street art” is “street”. So, it implies that street art has to be on streets; but Cave art was in caves. Let’s think about purposes of street art. Its purposes are to use art to make sense of and manipulate our environment. It’s exactly that cave art did. So, we kind of can call cave art street art. But what’s next?

After cave art, much time had passed before something appeared that we could call street art. It was in the 1920s-30s in New York. This was work of gangs who drew the graffiti on the sides of train cars and walls.

In 1942, during the World War II, the graffiti “Kilroy was here” appeared wherever US servicemen were stationed. The graffiti was a bald figure with a big nose. It’s unknown if Kilroy was a real person or not, but his tag was the most widespread in that time.

Street art movement was popularized in the late 1960s and 70s. It was a time when young people started creating a movement and comparing with each other. Street Art that time was mostly the tagging. Artists got extra points for tagging inaccessible locations, often at great heights. That time street art artist were improving their skills and developing their unique typographical marks.

Keith Haring was one of the most important names in street art history. He was best known for his public art installations on subways in New York in the 1980s. These “subway drawings” helped him hone his signature style of squiggles, figures, and symbols, leading to shows at major museums, large-scale public works projects, and great fame. In 1988, he receives the diagnosis of AIDS. Since that moment AIDS theme became the main theme in his art.

Underscoring the significance of the street art movement, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of Basquiat’s work in 1992. Today, his pieces reside in the private collections of nearly every major institution and in the private collections of many prominent collectors.

In the 2000s and 2010s, street art went legal. In that time, street art festivals occurred everywhere in the world. The main purpose of these festivals was to show that street art need not be criminalized—in fact, it could be encouraged in a way that benefited both the city (tourism, ornamentation) and the artist (exposure, safe circumstances in which to execute large-scale or intricate pieces).

Today, we have a lot of different sponsored festivals of street art. These festivals help artists to prove themselves and help us to see the most beautiful street art in one place.