A name in the newspaper
New York, July 1971. The New York Times reported on a teenager from Washington Heights who left his nickname and the number of his street, 183rd Street, all over the city: TAKI 183. He worked as a messenger and wrote his name in subway stations, on lampposts and walls. The article made him famous and spurred hundreds of young people to follow his example.
Soon the outsides of New York’s subway cars were covered with names, so-called tags, and later with large, colourful lettering, the pieces. For the city it was vandalism; for the writers, a way of becoming visible in an anonymous metropolis.
From the wall to the gallery
Around 1980 the art world began to take an interest in the new movement. Keith Haring drew with white chalk on empty black advertising panels in subway stations, hundreds of drawings of dancing figures, barking dogs and radiant babies. Jean-Michel Basquiat, with a friend, sprayed enigmatic sentences under the tag SAMO© on walls in downtown Manhattan before he became famous as a painter. In 1986 Haring painted the mural Crack Is Wack on a handball court in Harlem as a protest against the drug crisis.
Lady Pink was among the first women to gain recognition in the male-dominated scene of New York’s subway writers.
Stencil and poster
In Europe, forms of its own developed. In Paris, from 1981, Blek le Rat sprayed rats and life-size figures onto walls with stencils. In Zurich at the end of the 1970s, Harald Naegeli left thin, linear figures on concrete walls at night and was convicted for it. In Bristol in the 1990s, Banksy began with stencil pictures full of irony and political critique. He has never confirmed his identity, not even after a 2026 investigation by the Reuters news agency.
From 1989, the American Shepard Fairey spread stickers with the face of a wrestler, later under the slogan “Obey”. His Hope poster for Barack Obama became world-famous in 2008. Since the late 1990s, the Frenchman Invader has been sticking small mosaics modelled on old video-game characters in cities around the world.
Berlin: art on the Wall
The western side of the Berlin Wall was already covered in graffiti in the 1980s. After the fall of the Wall, more than 100 artists from all over the world painted a section about 1.3 kilometres long on the eastern side in 1990. The East Side Gallery is today one of Berlin’s best-known sights and is a protected monument.
Market and contradiction
Street Art has long been part of the art market. In October 2018, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon partly shredded itself at Sotheby’s in London immediately after the hammer fell, by means of a mechanism hidden in the frame. The altered work, now Love is in the Bin, was sold again in 2021 for around 18.6 million pounds.
This exposes a contradiction: an art that arose from free, illegal intervention in public space becomes an expensive commodity. At the same time, many cities now commission murals and festivals to upgrade neighbourhoods, which critics link to displacement and gentrification.
Why it still matters
Street Art brought art out of the museums onto the street and reclaimed public space as a place for art, protest and humour. It reaches people who would never set foot in a gallery. And it raises questions that are still open: who owns the city, and who decides what may appear on its walls?
Further reading
- Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant: Subway Art (1984).
- Cedar Lewisohn: Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution (2008).