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THE EVOLUTION, AND MEMORIES, OF SUBWAY GRAFFITI

Created by SARA FUSCO OCTOBER 12TH, 2011

The Evolution, and Memories, of Subway Graffiti - featured image

DESCRIPTION

Graffiti in New York began, most famously, with TAKI 183's quickly handwritten tags throughout the city in the 1960's. From TAKI, graffiti writers sprung up throughout all five boroughs, competing to rapidly "get up" and have their names in more places than anyone else.

Naturally the subway was the ideal vehicle for names to travel far and wide. And as the competition grew, so too did the style of writing. Throughout the 1970's and into the 1980's, there was a lightning-paced evolution in style -- from stick letters, to bubble letters, to 3D lettering, to comic characters, to wild style abstractions of lettering, to masterpieces that would take up whole cars and even whole trains.

The subway was an inspirational moving canvas, a mass communications tool, used to show off to writers from the Bronx to Brooklyn to Queens the latest innovation in graffiti style.

This project not only attempts to share a glimpse of where this innovation was happening, but also to reflect the tradition of storytelling -- and even exaggeration -- within graffiti writers' communities that shaped graffiti's development.

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