Clearly something new happened with the invention of the spray can, the influence of psychedelic posters, and color TV. But it’s safe to place the origins of a New York style in the late sixties, as a younger generation’s artistic response to the public protests of the Black Power and civil-rights movements. Humans have been writing symbols on walls since time immemorial. Miller, author of Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City Graffiti, the early years: Clockwise from right, a COCO 144 stencil, 1971 JOE 182, 1970 and CAY 161, 1971. Names of writers are rendered in the style in which they appeared on the city’s walls and subways (all caps usually indicates an artist from the seventies). What follows is the story of the people who invented graffiti, and those who watched them do it. And thanks in part to the Internet, which teems with graffiti Websites, it is a worldwide phenomenon in every language. Yet today, graffiti etched with acid can be seen on subway windows, and it’s alive and well on buildings around the city. Mayor Lindsay declared the first war on graffiti in 1972, beginning a long, slow battle that seemed to culminate in May 1989, when the last graffitied train was finally removed from service. For writers, this was a golden age, when the most prolific could become known as “kings” by going “all-city”-writing their names in all five boroughs. But Julio 204 was using a Magic Marker and spray paint on city walls as early as 1968, and in 1971, writers like JOE 182 began “bombing”-marking as many surfaces as possible.īy the mid-seventies, many subway cars were so completely covered in top-to-bottom paintings (known as “masterpieces”) that it was impossible to see out the window. The New York Times took notice in July 1971, with a small profile of a graffiti artist named TAKI 183. By the late sixties, it was flourishing in Washington Heights, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Modern graffiti actually began in Philadelphia in the early sixties, when Cornbread and Cool Earl scrawled their names all over the city. Now it’s finally ripe for retrospection: On June 30, the Brooklyn Museum features works by many of the artists interviewed here, while from June 29 at the Brecht Forum, the Martinez Gallery mounts a smaller show of movement veterans. Galleries and museums caught up to this view in the early eighties, when graffiti was briefly part of the era’s art boom. But for the writers who risked life, limb, and arrest, and the teenagers, filmmakers, and, eventually, curators who admired them, graffiti was an art form. Some saw it as vandalism and a symbol of urban decay. Graffiti today is such an accepted part of youth culture that it’s hard to imagine what New Yorkers experienced in the early seventies, as they watched their city become steadily tattooed with hieroglyphics. Afterward, he added ink and whiteout to the photo. TRACY 168, who began writing graffiti in the late sixties and invented wild style in the mid-seventies, painted this train in two minutes in 1974.
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