The 1970s
Tagging and graffiti were really born in New York. In the early days of hip-hop (mid to late 1970s), a veritable flood of spray painters descended on New York. Artists painted entire subway trains at night so that their work would travel all over New York and the crews in the South Bronx would know that those on Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn were more talented and daring than they were. For two decades, there were style wars, during which graffiti artists competed with each other in skill, daring and creativity to develop new painting techniques (lettering, shapes, space, colors, etc.). The MTA (which manages the New York subway) left a fortune in cleaning up and, above all, these "visual nuisances" were totally assimilated to the climate of wild insecurity that hung over New York at that time.
Keith Haring
In the 1980s, a character arrives on the street art scene alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat. It was Keith Haring who painted the Bowery mural for the first time in 1982. It has long remained one of the most emblematic places of street art and graffiti in Manhattan. Goldman Properties bought the wall two years later. The mural remained intact until Haring's death in 1990. It was eventually repainted. On2nd Avenue, he also painted a mural in 1986 on the wall of a handball court to raise awareness of the growing crack epidemic in which New York found itself in those years. And, to go back in time a bit, in the mid-1960s, the Germania Bank Building, 190 Bowery was the huge home of commercial photographer Jay Maisel and his family. Maisel, who rented out the building's floors to artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, was a friend of artists and allowed graffiti artists to tag and paint the building along Bowery and Spring streets. The corner quickly became a favorite spot for street artists who regularly decorated the large boarded-up windows for more than a quarter century.
The Five Pointz plant
Located in Hunters Point, Queens (Long Island City), 5Pointz - Five Pointz or 5 Pointz Aerosol Art Center, Inc - was also considered "the Mecca of graffiti". Housed in a 20,000-square-foot decommissioned water meter factory, the building was made available to street artists in 1993 as part of a public program called "Graffiti Terminators" that was established to combat vandalism. The name 5Pointz was chosen for this building in reference to the fiveboroughs of New York City. This iconic location of New York City street art has been a landmark for graffiti artists for two decades. When Rudolph Giuliani became mayor in 1994, he also declared a ruthless war on graffiti (immediate cleanup, prison sentences, astronomical fines, police patrols, etc.). Nevertheless, LISA, the Little Italy Street Art Project, a nonprofit that has since expanded its list of murals beyond Mulberry Street, as well as into SoHo, NoHo, and the Lower East Side, was founded in 2012 by Wayne Rada. Shepard Fairey is producing several pieces for the LISA collection, including a mural in honor of Blondie's Debbie Harry on Bleecker and Bowery. Tristan Eaton's painting of Audrey Hepburn on Mulberry is one of the most photographed murals in New York.
The Banksy phenomenon
In October 2013, the famous and mysterious British street artist Banksy arrived in New York to create a series of graffiti and installations during an artistic marathon lasting several weeks called Better Out Than In. His New York adventures literally fascinated the media and public opinion, thanks in particular to certain stunts, such as this ephemeral stand: Banksy had his stencils sold anonymously for US$60 each. Only three customers will be interested. Knowing that the market value of these works can reach the million euros, the artist clearly wanted to ironize the art market and the excessive value of his own works. Then, sad news for graffiti lovers: on the night of November 18 to 19, 2013, the colorful walls of the huge abandoned factory of 5Pointz were repainted white. A year later, the buildings were razed. The site had been on probation for years, with the owners wanting to demolish the site for two towers in the gentrifying neighborhood, towers that have seen the light of day today. In 2014, Maisel also sold the building it owned and most of the graffiti has since been cleaned up, but artists continue to leave their mark.
JR in New York
That same year, French artist JR created a huge installation in the abandoned Ellis Island Hospital, plastering old photographs of immigrants arriving in New York. Recently, the faces of the figures outside the building were switched. Although they have the bodies of 19th and 20th century photographs, JR superimposed the faces of present-day Syrians he photographed while visiting a refugee camp in Jordan. In addition, since 2014, in the Lower East Side, East Harlem and Staten Island, another street artist project has allowed dozens of graffiti artists to paint on the streets. The artists range from the most emerging to the most established, such as artist Kenny Scharf or Buff Monster. But the most beautiful graffiti is now in Brooklyn: in Williamsburg along Kent Avenue, and in Bushwick around the Jefferson St. stop, on the L line, two of the last places where artists can still express themselves without risking a fine and without fearing to see their works repainted the next day.
The revival of street art in New York
Despite a very dissuasive repression campaign, some artists still dare to put their tags here and there. This is the case of the French artist Invader, or Shepard Fairey, the graffiti artist who created the red and blue Obama campaign poster entitled "Hope". Williamsburg, along with Wythe Street, is still one of the only neighborhoods in New York where graffiti has taken over the walls of red-brick buildings. A stroll through the East Village and a few corners of Queens also allows you to admire graffiti by recent artists. Also, check out the world's largest open-air gallery in Harlem, which houses the work of an artist named Franco, who exhibits from the Hudson River to the Harlem River on the metal curtains of 125th Street, which is known as Franco's Boulevard. Some graffiti artists paint the walls of the city legally. This is the case of the artists of the Bushwick Collective who decorate the walls of Flushing Avenue and Wyckoff Avenue. Every two or three months, the graffiti are replaced by new ones. Foreign graffiti artists are regularly invited to present their work. Finally, since its destruction, the 5Pointz factory had not said its last word: 21 of the street artists who had made these graffiti filed a lawsuit for the destruction of their works, and, in early 2018, the jury agrees with them and gives them the right to 6.7 million dollars in compensation. The trial is still ongoing, as the owners have appealed the decision. Graffiti is certainly much less present in the streets, nevertheless, many stores commission frescoes for their storefronts. Finally, of course - the artists having had to find other supports - the art galleries have long since recovered the phenomenon. If the original spirit of street art has become a little, even a lot, overused, it has also opened new ways of expression and renewal for this pictorial art.
