# STREET ART // Walls as Canvases

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Category: Art
Slides: 15
Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:03.691Z
Tags: catalog, art, street

## Summary

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## Slide Outline

1. STREET ART
2. Walls as Canvases
3. NAME AS ART
4. SUBWAY ERA
5. WILD STYLE
6. KEITH HARING
7. JEAN-MICHEL
8. BASQUIAT
9. THE CRACKDOWN
10. STENCIL REVOLUTION
11. BANKSY
12. MURAL MOVEMENT
13. DISTRICTS
14. DIGITAL AFTERLIFE
15. CREDITS & VIEWING

## Slide Transcript

### Slide 1: STREET ART

- // 13-slide deck // wall to wall
- Walls as Canvases
- From midnight tags on Philly rowhouses to billion-dollar Banksys —
- a 60-year sprint of paint, politics, and provocation.

### Slide 2: NAME AS ART

- // origins // late 1960s
- Modern graffiti is born on two coasts. Philadelphia's Darryl
- "Cornbread" McCray scrawls his nickname across the city to win a
- girl's attention. In NYC, Greek-American teen Demetrius — tag
- Taki 183 — bombs subways on his messenger route. A 1971 New York
- Times profile of Taki ignites the bug citywide.
- Cornbread
- Philly, 1965-67. The first modern "writer."
- Taki 183
- Manhattan, 1969-71. Tag = name + street number.
- Julio 204
- Pre-Taki Bronx writer; lower fame, same blueprint.

### Slide 3: SUBWAY ERA

- // 1970s // iron canvas
- The MTA's silver trains become a moving gallery rolling through
- every borough. Whole-car burners. Top-to-bottoms. A pre-internet network
- where reputation traveled at 35 mph.
- Lee Quiñones
- Lower East Side; whole-car murals; later Wild Style (1983).
- Futura 2000
- Atomic-age abstraction; collaborator with The Clash.
- Phase 2
- Inventor of the bubble / "softie" letter.
- Style Wars (1983)
- Tony Silver + Henry Chalfant's PBS doc — the canonical record.

### Slide 4: WILD STYLE

- // the alphabet weaponized
- Letters fold into letters until only insiders can read them. Arrows,
- flares, 3D, force-fields. Photographer Henry Chalfant shoots
- thousands of doomed pieces — without him, half the canon is unrecorded.
- His book Subway Art (1984, with Martha Cooper) becomes the global
- instruction manual.

### Slide 5: KEITH HARING

- // 05 // chalk on black paper
- Pittsburgh-born, SVA-trained, Haring (1958-1990) draws his radiant
- babies, barking dogs and dancing figures in chalk on the matte-black
- ad-blanks in NYC subway stations — 40+ a day. Cops arrest him
- repeatedly. By 1986 he opens the Pop Shop: art for $5, a
- scandalous collapse of street and gallery.
- 1980-85
- Subway drawings — public, free, ephemeral.
- 1986
- Pop Shop opens in Soho; activism via merch.
- 1988-90
- HIV+ disclosure; Crack is Wack mural; dies aged 31.

### Slide 6: JEAN-MICHEL

- // SAMO© // 1977-1980
- BASQUIAT
- Brooklyn teen Basquiat (1960-1988) and friend Al Diaz spray cryptic
- aphorisms — "SAMO© AS AN END 2 PLAYING ART" — on Lower Manhattan
- walls. By 22 he's the youngest artist ever in Documenta; by 24
- on the cover of NYT Magazine; by 27 dead of an overdose. The
- market still hasn't recovered: Untitled (1982) sold for
- $110.5M in 2017.

### Slide 7: THE CRACKDOWN

- // reaction // 1984-89
- Mayor Koch declares war. The MTA spends $300M+ on the "buff" —
- chemical washes, graffiti-resistant paint, razor-wire layups, K-9 units.
- The Vandal Squad, founded 1980, treats writers as organized crime.
- On 12 May 1989 the last graffiti-covered train is pulled from service.
- Many writers move to canvas, illustration, fashion — or to Europe.
- Clean Train Movement, 1989
- Buff = grey-on-grey erasure
- Felony charges in NY by 1995

### Slide 8: STENCIL REVOLUTION

- // cardboard cut // 1981→
- Paris, 1981 — Xavier Prou, working as Blek le Rat, sprays
- small stencilled rats across the city: fast, repeatable, recognizable.
- He invents the visual language — life-sized figures, single-coat black —
- that Banksy will later admit "every time I think I've painted
- something slightly original, I find out Blek le Rat has done it as well,
- only twenty years earlier."

### Slide 9: BANKSY

- // Bristol → everywhere // 1990s+
- An anonymous Bristol writer turns stencil into headline. Girl with
- Balloon, the West Bank wall pieces, Dismaland, and the 2018
- Sotheby's self-shredding stunt. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010)
- is Oscar-nominated. In 2021 his Love is in the Bin sells for
- $25.4M. Identity: still officially unknown.
- 2002
- First LA show; stencils go international.
- 2005
- Nine pieces on the Israeli West Bank barrier.
- 2018
- "Shredding" of Girl with Balloon mid-auction.
- 2023
- Glastonbury inflatable life vest stunt; Channel-crossing satire.

### Slide 10: MURAL MOVEMENT

- // from vandalism to civic asset
- The same cities that buffed in the 80s now commission. Philadelphia
- Mural Arts (founded 1984 as anti-graffiti, now 4,000+ legal walls).
- Pow! Wow! Hawaii (2010→). POW! WOW! Worcester. Mural festivals in
- Lisbon, Mexico City, Lodz. Aerosol artists shift from outlaw to civic
- contractor — and argue, often, about what got lost.
- Permission walls
- Lift-bucket scale
- Brand sponsorship
- "Mural-washing" critique

### Slide 11: DISTRICTS

- // 11 // the painted neighborhood
- Wynwood (Miami)
- Tony Goldman's 2009 Wynwood Walls turn an industrial dead-zone into a $1B art-tourism corridor.
- Bushwick (Brooklyn)
- The Bushwick Collective curates an open-air gallery on warehouse rolldowns.
- Shoreditch (London)
- Brick Lane → Hackney; Stik, ROA, Invader, D*Face.
- Belleville (Paris)
- Rue Denoyez = the legal training-ground for a generation.
- Critics call it "street-art-as-real-estate-strategy": pieces beget cafés beget condos beget evictions.

### Slide 12: DIGITAL AFTERLIFE

- // the wall in your pocket
- A Banksy gets buffed in 48 hours but lives on Instagram forever. AR
- layers (Snap, Niantic, Apple Vision) let artists deposit pieces on
- sites they never physically touch. NFT graffiti, projection bombing,
- and geo-tagged AR tags reframe the medium: ephemerality is now
- optional, and ownership is contested differently than in 1973.
- @streetartglobe / @globalstreetart
- Google Street Art Project (2014)
- Insa "GIF-iti"
- AR overlay activism

### Slide 13: CREDITS & VIEWING

- // fin // refs & rabbit holes
- Cooper, Martha & Chalfant, Henry. Subway Art (1984) — the source.
- Castleman, Craig. Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (1982).
- Ellsworth-Jones, Will. Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall (2012).
- Tate Modern. "Street Art" exhibition catalogue (2008).
- Documentary: Style Wars (Tony Silver / Henry Chalfant, 1983, PBS).
- Documentary: Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010).
- ▶ Watch: Style Wars (1983)
- ▶ Watch: Exit Through the Gift Shop
- "All graffiti is low-level dissent, but stencils have an extra power. You
- have to either accept they have an opinion, or paint over them." — Banksy


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