Graffiti is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire.
Venice is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles within the Westside region of Los Angeles County, California.
Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art," "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art.
David Choe is an American artist, musician, actor, and former journalist and podcast host from Los Angeles. Choe's work appears in a wide variety of urban culture and entertainment contexts. He has illustrated and written for magazines including Hustler, Ray Gun and Vice. He has an ongoing relationship with the Asian pop culture store-cum-magazine Giant Robot.
Helen K. Garber is an American photographer known mostly for her black-and-white urban landscapes of cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Paris, Amsterdam and Venice. Her images are in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, Portland Art Museum, Yale University and the George Eastman House.
Judith Francisca Baca is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which is the largest communal mural project in the world.
OSGEMEOS are identical twin street artists Otavio Pandolfo and Gustavo Pandolfo. They started painting graffiti in 1987 and their work appears on streets and in galleries across the world.
Since the 1980s, the area surrounding the Sydney inner west suburb of Newtown, New South Wales (NSW), Australia—including the suburbs of Newtown, Enmore, Erskineville, Camperdown and St Peters—has been known for its wide range of prominent graffiti and street art on walls. The public visual art in the Newtown area consists of a variety of styles and methods of execution, including large-scale painted murals, hand-painted political slogans, hand-painted figurative designs, spray painted semi-abstract designs "tags"), and other stylistic developments such as stencil art and street poster art, "Yarn bombing", and sculptural items cast from plaster and other materials.
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.
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.
The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.
In recent years, Atlanta has become one of the USA's best cities for street art. Street artists have prominently created murals in Krog Street Tunnel, along the BeltLine, and in neighborhoods across the city. The street art conference, Living Walls, the City Speaks, originated in Atlanta in 2009.
James Prigoff was an American photographer, author, and lecturer focusing on public murals, graffiti, and spraycan art. He has traveled extensively throughout the world documenting these art forms, and his personal archive of 100,000 slides may well be the most comprehensive of any individual mural and graffiti documentarian.
Allison "Hueman" Torneros is a Filipino-American graffiti artist, painter, and illustrator, based in Oakland, California. Hueman's best-known works include the Golden State Warriors 2022-23 City Edition Uniforms & basketball court, Bloom, a mural in the Los Angeles Arts District commemorating community advocate Joel Bloom, and the cover artwork for Pink’s 2019 record, Hurts 2B Human. As street art is a medium dominated by men, Hueman is noted as a female artist who has achieved significant renown.
"Daku" is a graffiti artist from Delhi, India. Daku means "bandit" or "dacoit" in Hindi. Active since 2008 in several cities across India, he creates wheat pastes and murals which satirize and protest social and political issues. He is celebrated for his work as "India's Banksy", but he disagrees with the comparison since his art has different styles and message.
Meeting of Styles is an international network of graffiti artists and supporters, which sponsors graffiti mural creation events in over sixteen countries. The purpose of the events is to promote and legitimize the art form. The idea surged in 1995 in Germany, reorganized under the current name in 2002. Events create murals in various kinds of locations, which can include public spaces such as subways. However, there have been conflicts with authorities during and even after events.
Bisco Smith is a New York-based contemporary artist with roots in music and graffiti. Bisco works in a variety of formats, including canvas and large outdoor murals, and is recognized for his lyrical approach to deconstructed expressionism characterized by gestural marks and abstracted text that embody the energy of a moment. Using music as his muse, he approaches each canvas as unique opportunity to channel the expression of his inspiration by stripping his compositions to their fundamental essence of motion and rhythm. Bisco's works, painted predominantly in black and white, embody the creative spontaneity that exists at the intersection of music and paint.
More than 600 murals depicting American professional basketball player Kobe Bryant have been painted in dozens of countries, including Croatia, Haiti, Uganda, and the United States. Many were created following his death in the 2020 Calabasas helicopter crash.
Greater Los Angeles, California, is home to thousands of murals, earning it the nickname "the mural capital of the world" or "the mural capital of America." The city's mural culture began and proliferated throughout the 20th century. Murals in Los Angeles often reflect the social and political movements of their time and highlight cultural symbols representative of Southern California. In particular, murals in Los Angeles have been influenced by the Chicano art movement and the culture of Los Angeles. Murals are considered a distinctive form of public art in Los Angeles, often associated with street art, billboards, and contemporary graffiti.
