Street Art

What is Street Art? Street art is art created on surfaces in public places like sidewalks, exterior building walls, and highway overpasses. Street art tends to happen in urban areas, and yes, it's connected in certain ways to graffiti. Street art is usually created as a means to convey a message connected to political ideas, social commentary, or confrontation.

Typical StyleS of Street Art Not all street art involves painting. It can be done with stickers spread over surfaces or by methods like yarn bombing, a process where artists cover things like trees and telephone poles with knitting and colorful fibers. Street art can also be done with stencils, where the creator repeats the image all over a surface to make a statement.

History of Street Art Artists have desired to put art on walls for millenia. The earliest examples can be traced back to the cavemen. These are from the caves in Lascaux in France.

Contemporary History We can trace the beginnings of Street Art back to tagging, scratching initials or a name on public property, in New York in the late 1960s. It also ties to the graffiti artists of the 1970s and 1980s who were looking for new places to make art, reacting and rebelling against society's rules. Whereas traditional graffiti artists have primarily used spray paint to produce their work, "street art" encompasses many other media, such as LED art, mosaic tiling, stencil art, sticker art, reverse graffiti, "Lock On" sculptures, street installations, wheatpasting, woodblocking, yarn bombing, and rock balancing.

Early Graffiti Lee Quinones painted vibrant graffiti murals on NYC handball courts.

Keith Haring drew hundreds of chalk images in the NYC subway in the 1980s. Later moving into doing murals and fine art. These artists began to catch the art world's attention.

Jean Micheal Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s where the hip hop, punk, and street art cultures had merged.

Early Street Artists HAZE

Banksy Arguably the most controversial street artist in the world, Banksy has developed an entire art subculture devoted to his works. Banksy’s art can impact any location at any given moment. His identity remains unknown, even after over 20 years of being involved with the graffiti scene. He has worked with many different types of street art media and street art types. His work not only includes many powerful, often controversial images, but they may also be found throughout the Internet as viral images.

Shepard Fairey He first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (...OBEY...) sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. He became widely known during the 2008 U.S. presidential election for his Barack Obama "Hope" poster. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston has described him as one of the best known and most influential street artists.

Lady Aiko Japanese street artist based in Brooklyn, New York. In the contemporary art world AIKO is among the most important female street artists from this millennium. In a largely male-dominated form of art, AIKO is becoming an influential figure in contemporary street art. “It’s hard being a girl and a graffiti artist”, she sighs, but continues to make bold artworks that rival Banksy. Known for her ability to combine western art movements and eastern technical artistic skills

Ron English English, primarily a graphic artist and designer, has produced images on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. He coined the term POPaganda to describe a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history, populated with his original characters, including MC Supersized, the obese fast- food mascot featured in the movie Super Size Me, and Abraham Obama, the fusion of America’s 16th and 44th Presidents. Other characters in English’s paintings, billboards, and sculpture include three- eyed rabbits, cowgirls and grinning skulls – visual, with humorous undertones.

SWOON Mixed media artist who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of human figures. Originally known for her street art, she studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, receiving a BA in fine arts in 2002. She started to gain recognition for her street art around 1999 and large-scale installations soon thereafter; in 2005, she was the subject of an eponymous solo exhibition mounted by now-mentor Jeffrey Deitch. Swoon has since been featured in major museums including a 2014 solo show, Submerged Motherlands, at the Brooklyn Museum.

Miami Street Art – Wynwood Walls Developed by Tony Goldman in 2009. He was looking for something big to transform the warehouse district of Wynwood, and he arrived at a simple idea: “Wynwood’s large stock of warehouse buildings, all with no windows, would be my giant canvases to bring to them the greatest street art ever seen in one place.” Since its inception, the Wynwood Walls program has seen over 50 artists representing 16 countries and have covered over 80,000 square feet of walls. 

Miami Street Artists Registered Artist Monique Lasooji Kazilla Ivan Roque Luis Valle Trek6 Daniel “Krave” Fila Didi Contreras HecOneLove