Cedar Lewisohn
Cedar Lewisohn is an artist, writer and currently works as a curator at The Southbank Centre in London, UK, having held previous curatorial roles at The Museum of London, Hangar Bicocca (Milan), Birmingham Museums, Northwestern (Qatar), Tate Britain and Tate Modern. Cedar curated the landmark Street Art exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008. He has written for and edited numerous periodicals and is the author of Street Art (2008) and Abstract Graffiti (2011). Cedar holds a degree from the Camberwell College of Art and was a researcher at The Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands.
Photo: Pete Woodhead
First modern graffiti art
Modern graffiti is an art form involving names or monikers (aka “tags”), words or pictograms typically being spraypainted onto buildings, urban infrastructure and other public areas. Given its traditionally subversive, often illicit nature – meaning most graffiti is kept anonymous or signed cryptically – it’s difficult to pinpoint the who, when and where behind the movement’s origins, but it is widely accepted to have emerged in the eastern USA from the mid-1960s onwards, particularly in cities such as Philadelphia and New York. Key figures held up as pioneers of the genre are “Cornbread” (aka Darryl McCray), “Julio 204” (aka “Topcat 186”) and “Taki 183” (aka Demetrius, surname unknown).
In its most basic sense, graffiti – i.e., the act of etching/daubing/painting words, numbers, symbols or illustrations on surfaces in public places – can trace its roots to Neolithic cave art, the oldest examples of which date back some 50,000 years. Through the millennia, many surviving examples of wall doodles and messages left behind by members of the community have come to light, whether it’s insulting inscriptions made by rival groups of builders inside ancient Egyptian pyramids, rude jokes and political adverts in the volcanically preserved ruins of Roman Pompeii or the monograms of royalty and nobles etched into the windows of medieval buildings while on tour.
In recent times, graffiti and street art more generally have moved into a more complex cultural space, where in some cases it is still regarded as antisocial behaviour and vandalism, whereas in others the works have been embraced by local authorities, with many cities now proudly running urban art tours for tourists, commissioning street artists to help regenerate and beautify run-down areas and even staging dedicated street-art exhibitions in some of the world’s most prestigious galleries. Street art’s transition from the covert and banal to the mainstream spotlight of popular culture and even fine art is typified by the meteoric success of artists such as the late US artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the anonymous British street artist Banksy.