Published: June 6, 2019 | Last Updated: June 6, 2025
What is Street art? Definition & Meaning
Street art is a form of visual art created in public spaces without traditional authorization, often combining social commentary, subcultural identity, and site-specific expression through graffiti, murals, stencils, projections, and installations.
The tradition of visual messaging in public spaces goes back a long way. Graffiti appears in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where residents scratched word games, animal drawings, and personal names into stone.
Similar markings have been found in ancient Mayan cities. These early examples show that the urge to leave public marks, often without permission, has existed across cultures and centuries.
Origins of Contemporary Street Art and Cultural Role
Street art began gaining momentum in the 1960s and 1970s during the graffiti boom in New York City and Philadelphia.
Artists like TAKI 183 and Jean-Michel Basquiat marked city walls and subway trains to assert presence, claim territory, or challenge public space ownership.
These unsanctioned expressions connected to counterculture, civil rights, and urban protest.
Graffiti and Street Art: Distinct but Overlapping
Graffiti usually focuses on stylized text and tags, emphasizing identity, repetition, and aerosol skill.
Street art expands that scope, using figurative imagery, messages, or installations. It draws on poster design, pop culture, and protest art, and may or may not include traditional graffiti techniques. Some artists operate in both areas. Others reject the label “graffiti” altogether.
Some scholars use the term “independent public art” to describe unsanctioned street works. Scholar Javier Abarca highlights its resistance to institutional boundaries, noting how it often spreads across multiple buildings and surfaces, ignoring property lines and legal constraints.
Techniques and Materials
Street artists use a wide range of tools and surfaces. Spray paint and stencils are common for quick, repeatable images.
Murals are often brush-painted with the support of lifts or scaffolding. Other methods include wheat-pasting paper cutouts, applying stickers, or sculpting small 3D pieces onto walls and poles.
Stencil art, made famous by artists like Banksy and Blek le Rat, involves cutting designs from cardboard or acetate. This allows for fast application and consistent reproduction across cities. Some artists use multiple stencil layers to create shading and depth.
New technologies have introduced digital elements. QR codes now appear in murals, linking viewers to artist portfolios or background information. Projection mapping lets animations temporarily appear on buildings. Augmented reality tools allow viewers to scan murals and activate hidden content on their phones.
Themes and Social Commentary
Street art often addresses urgent social or political themes. These include housing inequality, police surveillance, gentrification, climate change, and censorship. Many artists respond to local events. Others address global concerns using symbols, satire, or confrontation.
In Minneapolis, a mural depicting George Floyd inside a sunflower became both a memorial and a global symbol of protest. Created by Cadex Herrera, Greta McLain, and Xena Goldman, the piece includes the words “Say Our Names” and lists victims of racial violence. Members of the community contributed to its creation and maintained the space as a site of mourning and activism.
The Urban Art Mapping project later cataloged thousands of similar works across the world. Researchers studying the archive found that murals created near protest sites tended to focus on immediate anger and loss, while pieces farther away leaned toward broader ideals like hope or justice.
Community and Participation
Some works invite active public involvement. The artist duo Allora & Calzadilla created “Chalk,” a touring installation using human-sized sticks of chalk. In each city, passersby were encouraged to draw directly on sidewalks and walls. The art emerged through collaboration, not just individual vision.
These types of projects turn street art into a civic event, one shaped by neighborhood voices, local concerns, and shared effort. The meaning often comes from the act of participation itself.
Street Art in Film and Media
Street art appears in both documentaries and narrative films. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, Paranoid Pictures) explores the blurred lines between documentation, authorship, and art-world hype.
Style Wars (1983, Public Art Films) focuses on early subway graffiti writers in New York. Both films highlight how public art functions within systems of visibility and control.
In fiction, street art adds realism and tension to urban settings. In Do the Right Thing (1989, Universal), graffiti and murals reflect the neighborhood’s racial tensions and political undercurrents.
Legal, Temporary, and Archived
Some cities now sponsor mural festivals or public art commissions. Events like POW! WOW! or Nuart invite artists to paint sanctioned large-scale works. These projects often involve permits, funding, and community planning. They help transform public space while removing the legal risks tied to unauthorized work.
Unauthorized art still plays a central role. Many artists intentionally work without permission, seeing risk and impermanence as part of the process. Pieces may be painted over, added to by others, or removed by authorities. For some, this temporary nature keeps the work honest and immediate.
Projects like Urban Art Mapping help preserve these short-lived pieces. By digitally archiving walls before they disappear, they document both artistic intent and the political moments that shaped them.
From Streets to Institutions
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work shows how street art can move from walls to museums without losing its roots. He began as a teenager tagging “SAMO” on buildings in New York to critique the commercial art world. Within a few years, he was showing paintings in major galleries while still drawing on street-based imagery and energy.
Basquiat’s triptych Horn Players references jazz musicians, religious art, and graffiti all at once. It reflects the complexity of street art’s legacy, an expression born from rebellion, shaped by public interaction, and now studied in classrooms and displayed in major institutions.
Summing Up
Street art is a layered, evolving form that combines visual skill, public intervention, and political message. Whether painted on a legal wall or sprayed in the dark, it forces attention and reshapes how people see their surroundings. As artists continue experimenting with both analog and digital tools, street art remains a living archive of resistance, community, and public memory.
Read Next: Curious how art movements shaped film?
Explore our full Visual Art Timeline to see how styles like Surrealism, Cubism, and Suprematism influenced cinema’s most experimental moments.
Or keep browsing our Film Movements & World Cinema section for more on the histories that shaped screen culture around the globe.
