Side walk art and other art work

Graffiti History

Graffiti has a long and proud history. The subculture surrounding graffiti has existed for several decades, and it's still going strong. The graffiti artists (or "writers" as they prefer to call themselves) are passionate, skilled, community-oriented, and socially conscious in ways that profoundly contradict the way they've been portrayed as common criminals and vandals.

Birth and Evolution

Graffiti, if we define it as any type of writing on the wall goes back to ancient Rome, and if drawn images count, then we could point to the first graf artists. But the style of urban graffiti that most people have seen and know about, the kind that uses spraycans, came from New York City in the late 1960s, and was born on the subway trains. Taki 183, who lived on 183rd street in Washington Heights, worked as a messenger who traveled all throughout the city. While he did so, he would use a marker and write his name wherever he went, at subway stations and also the insides and outsides of subway cars. Eventually, he became known all throughout the city as this mysterious figure. In 1971, he was interviewed for an article by the New York Times. Kids all over New York, realizing the fame and notoriety that could be gained from "tagging" their names on subway cars (that traveled all over the city, naturally) began to emulate Taki 183. The goal was to "get up" (using the slang of the day), to have one's name in as many places as possible, and as kids competed against each other to get famous, the amount of graffiti on trains exploded.

Tagging and More

For tagging on the insides of trains, permanent markers worked, but using spraycans of paint quickly became popular as well, especially for tagging on the outside of trains. Graffiti became so much more than simple tagging, however. Graffiti writers, in addition to getting their name around as much as possible, would try to outdo each other in terms of style. At first, writers would try to make their tags (or signatures) more stylish than anyone else's. Later on, they would add more colors, special effects, and they'd make their name bigger. Spraycans allowed large pieces of graffiti to be created fairly quickly which was important because writers didn't want to get caught by the police or people working for the MTA (Metropolitan Transit