A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage.
Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his art in 1997.
Leonard Hilton McGurr, known as Futura, and formerly known as Futura 2000, is an American graffiti artist.
Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been a proponent of independent arthouse cinema. Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director and the César Award for Best Director.
Barry McGee is an American artist. He is known for graffiti art, and a pioneer of the Mission School art movement. McGee is known by his monikers: Twist, Ray Fong, Bernon Vernon, and P.Kin.
Margaret Leisha Kilgallen was a San Francisco Bay Area artist who combined graffiti art, painting, and installation art. Though a contemporary artist, her work showed a strong influence from folk art. She was considered a central figure in the Bay Area Mission School art movement.
Kenny Scharf is an American painter known for his participation in New York City's interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf's do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often includes pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
Artstar is an unscripted reality television series set in the New York City art world, considered to be the first in the visual arts. Selected from an open call of over 400 applicants, eight artists participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects with the opportunity for a solo exhibition as well. The program documents the selected artists as they interact with leading critics, curators, collectors, and artists in New York, while making new works as part of the collaborative exhibition.
Crash is a graffiti artist.
Stephen J. Powers is an American contemporary artist and muralist. He is also known by the name ESPO, and Steve Powers. He lives in New York City.
Mary Boone is an American art dealer and collector. As the owner and director of the Mary Boone Gallery, she played an important role in the New York art market of the 1980s. Her first two artists, Julian Schnabel and David Salle, became internationally known, and in 1982 she had a cover story on New York magazine tagged "The New Queen of the Art Scene". Boone is credited with championing and fostering dozens of contemporary artists including Eric Fischl, Ai Wei Wei, Barbara Kruger, Laurie Simmons, Peter Halley, Ross Bleckner, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Originally based in SoHo, Boone operated two galleries, one on Fifth Avenue, the other in Chelsea. Following her 2019 conviction and sentencing to 30 months in prison for tax evasion, she indicated the intention to close both galleries.
RISK, also known as RISKY, is a Los Angeles–based graffiti writer and contemporary artist often credited as a founder of the West Coast graffiti scene. In the 1980s, he was one of the first graffiti writers in Southern California to paint freight trains, and he pioneered writing on "heavens", or freeway overpasses. He took his graffiti into the gallery with the launch of the Third Rail series of art shows, and later created a line of graffiti-inspired clothing. In 2017, RISK was knighted by the Medici Family.
Vito Schnabel is an American art dealer. He is the owner of Vito Schnabel Gallery, which has locations in New York, Santa Monica, and St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Blu is the pseudonym of an Italian artist who conceals his real identity. He was born in Senigallia. He lives in Bologna and has been active in street art since 1999.
Erik Brunetti is an American artist, designer, director and founder of the lifestyle and clothing brand FUCT.
Jeffrey Deitch is an American art dealer and curator. He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects (1996–2010) and curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Lives (1975) and Post Human (1992), the latter of which has been credited with introducing the concept of "posthumanism" to popular culture. In 2010, ArtReview named him as the twelfth most influential person in the international art world.
Tauba Auerbach is a visual artist working in many disciplines including painting, artists' books, sculpture, and weaving who lives and works in New York.
Art in the Streets was an exhibition held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles from April 17 to August 8, 2011. Curated by its then-director Jeffrey Deitch and associate curators Aaron Rose and Roger Gastman, it surveyed the development of graffiti and global street art from the 1970s to the present, covering the cities of New York City, the West Coast, London, and Sao Paulo with a focus on Los Angeles. It was supposed to travel to the Brooklyn Museum from March 30 to July 8, 2012. The exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled because of financial difficulties.
Jose "Prime" Reza, is an American graffiti artist born and raised in the Pico-Union District of Downtown Los Angeles. Prime is credited with being a founding father of Los Angeles stylized graffiti lettering, a hybrid of Cholo lettering and East Coast style graffiti that is often bold, aggressive, and monochromatic.
Stephen Posen is an American painter and photographer who works in both New York City and Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
