What separates illegal advertising from street art? For one, billboard companies who erect billboard ads without permits get fined an average of $100 per day in Los Angeles; street artists who paint without authorization on public property are tagged with felonies. While advertisement illustrations ask the public to buy products, street art invites the public to look at color. The first type of public exposure is normalized, while the latter form is criminalized.
More than just petty vandalism, street artists offer the average by-passer what others would pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to have: art. Street art is free, accessible, uncensored and unapologetic, from the murals in the alleys of the Mission District in San Francisco to the graffiti bombs in the billboards of LA.
Graffiti originated in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, eventually expanding worldwide (France, Brazil, Spain, Africa). Graffiti wasn’t the offset of people writing and drawing on walls, however. Humans were drawing stories on walls since prehistoric times. In New York, graffiti started out underground in the subways during the 1980s. When people saw their names traveling from city to city on the trains, the subways of New York were suddenly transformed spanning like this for a decade.
A New York subway in the 1980s.
[Photo Retrieved From: Defending Regicide]
Graffiti might be alarming and threatening to some because it is an uncensored manner of speech. Following the shooting of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer, street art portraits of him and messages of solidarity popped up across Oakland which condemned the death of young black men at the hands of police. In Palestine, graffiti is shown in the towering walls of the West Bank. An article in Global post titled, “West Bank: Ultimate holiday for graffiti artists?” touches upon this. The messages reject Israeli occupancy. Mujeres Creando is a group in the country of Bolivia with a high indigenous population that writes graffiti messages dismissing patriarchy and colonization.
Graffiti overall is a defiance of the way which society judges what is art and what isn’t. It does so while renouncing that some people have more freedom of speech than others because they are able to pay for it.
“Neither the land nor women are territories of conquest.”
– Mujeres Creando
[Photo Retrieved From: A Cozinha Refractária]
almendra 