In 1981 a young Parisian named Xavier Prou began spraying small black rats through hand-cut stencils onto the walls of his city. He signed them Blek le Rat. The rats were quick to make, hard to remove, and impossible to misread: the one animal that had always owned the streets of Paris was now claiming its walls. Prou had seen the graffiti on New York’s subways a decade earlier and understood that Paris, with its limestone facades and its police, needed something faster and more legible than a wildstyle piece. He chose an image instead of a name. That choice is the birth of street art as a form distinct from graffiti, and nearly everything that followed, from Banksy’s stencils to the murals that now cover whole sides of buildings in Newark and Jersey City, runs through it.

This guide sets out what street art is, how it grew out of graffiti and then away from it, the forms it takes, the argument it keeps having with the cities it decorates, and where in New Jersey and Haiti you can go and stand in front of it. It is the second of three CreARTivity guides to the urban arts, following our explainer on graffiti and ahead of one on guerilla art.

What street art is

Street art is visual art made in public space, usually without permission at first and increasingly with it, whose primary content is an image rather than a name. That last clause is the whole distinction. Graffiti is a lettering culture: the writer’s chosen name, in a personal style, judged by other writers. Street art is an image culture: a picture, a figure, a message, made for the general passer-by and judged by whether it stops them. The two share walls, tools, and often the same practitioners, but they are aimed at different audiences and they answer to different rules.

The position this magazine takes is that street art is best understood as public illustration. It does what an illustration does in a book: it interrupts, it comments, it makes an idea visible at a glance. What changes is the page. A wall on a busy street is read by thousands of people who did not choose to open the book, which gives street art both its reach and its ethical weight. Nobody consents to seeing it. That is its power, and it is also why it will never be a settled matter who is allowed to put it there.

Where it came from

The roots are in New York in the late 1970s, when a few artists took the energy of subway graffiti and pointed it at a wider public. Jean-Michel Basquiat, writing as SAMO with his friend Al Diaz, left cryptic aphorisms on downtown walls. Keith Haring drew his radiant babies and barking dogs in white chalk on the black paper that covered unsold advertising panels in subway stations, sometimes dozens in a day, and was arrested for it more than once. Both moved quickly into galleries, and both proved that images on walls could carry a name into the art world faster than letters could.

Paris added the stencil. After Blek le Rat’s rats came life-size stencilled figures, and a generation of French pochoiristes followed him through the 1980s. In 1989 an American art student named Shepard Fairey began pasting stickers of the wrestler André the Giant around Providence, Rhode Island, a joke that grew into the Obey Giant campaign and, twenty years later, into the Hope poster of Barack Obama’s 2008 election run, probably the most reproduced political image of its decade. In Bristol, in the 1990s, an anonymous artist working as Banksy took up the stencil, and has since acknowledged the debt with unusual candour, saying that every time he thinks he has painted something original he finds Blek le Rat did it twenty years earlier.

The 2000s were the decade street art stopped being a subculture. Tate Modern put six street artists, including JR, Blu, and Os Gemeos, on its river facade in 2008. In 2009 the developer Tony Goldman commissioned a set of murals on warehouse walls in Miami’s Wynwood district and called them Wynwood Walls; the neighbourhood has been an open-air museum, and a case study in what murals do to property values, ever since. Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011, the same year the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles broke its attendance records with the exhibition Art in the Streets, and the same year the French artist JR used a TED Prize to launch Inside Out, a project that has since pasted enormous black-and-white portraits of ordinary people onto walls in more than a hundred countries. Then, in October 2018, a framed Banksy print of Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby’s in London for 1.04 million pounds and, seconds after the hammer fell, began shredding itself through a mechanism hidden in the frame. It was the most public joke ever made about the art market, and the market answered by valuing the half-shredded work higher than the whole one.

The forms, so you can name what you see

Street art is defined more by its techniques than graffiti is, because the technique is usually chosen for speed and for the surface. The stencil is cut from card or acetate, held to the wall, and sprayed in seconds; it allows a detailed image to be repeated exactly, which is why so many of the form’s most famous images are stencils. The paste-up, or wheatpaste, is a drawing or print made at home and glued to the wall with a flour-and-water paste; JR’s giant portraits are paste-ups, and so are most of the posters you see layered on hoardings. Stickers are the smallest and most portable form, and whole careers have been built on them. Mosaics, most famously the pixelated space invaders that the French artist Invader has cemented onto walls in cities across the world since the late 1990s, trade speed for permanence. Yarn bombing wraps lampposts and railings in knitting. Installations put an object where a wall would be. And the mural, the largest and now the most common form, is a painting on an entire wall, almost always commissioned, and almost always made by someone who learned to paint at scale somewhere less official.

When you look at a piece of street art, ask a different set of questions from the ones you would ask of graffiti. Not who wrote this, but who is this for? What does it want me to feel in the two seconds I have? Does it use the wall, the doorway, the pipe, the crack, or would it look the same on a canvas? The best street art is site-specific in a way galleries cannot reproduce; a Banksy rat looks like a rat because it is at rat height, next to a drain.

The argument street art keeps having

Street art lives on a fault line, and the line runs through the word permission. Uncommissioned work is a crime in almost every jurisdiction and the source of the form’s credibility; commissioned work is legal, paid, and the source of most of what you now see. The two are increasingly hard to tell apart on the wall, and the difference matters to the people who live behind it.

The sharpest version of the argument is about neighbourhoods. Murals raise foot traffic, and foot traffic raises rents. Wynwood in Miami went from warehouses to one of the most expensive districts in the city inside a decade, and the artists who made it famous were, for the most part, not the ones who profited. Critics call this artwashing: using public art to make a place feel safe and interesting for people who are about to displace the ones already there. Defenders answer that a painted wall is better than a blank one, that artists are paid, and that no one has yet proposed a way for a neighbourhood to become beautiful without also becoming desirable. Both are right, and any serious mural program now spends as much time on who is commissioned and who is consulted as on what gets painted.

The second argument is about ownership. When Banksy paints a wall, the wall belongs to someone else, and the painting, worth more than the building, has repeatedly been cut out and sold without the artist’s consent. When a developer whitewashes a legal mural site, as happened at 5Pointz in Queens in 2013, the artists can, as they did in 2018, win a judgment under the Visual Artists Rights Act, which treats aerosol work of recognised stature as protected art. The law has not caught up with a form whose whole premise is that the artist does not own the surface.

Street art in New Jersey

New Jersey has two of the strongest mural cities on the East Coast within fifteen minutes of each other. In 2016, for Newark’s 350th anniversary, the Newark Downtown District organised Gateways to Newark: Portraits, a sequence of eighteen works by local, national, and international artists running for more than 1.34 miles along the retaining wall of Route 21, McCarter Highway, and described at its unveiling as the longest mural in the country. It was restored in June 2024, eight years on, with power washing, repainting, and re-mounted printed imagery, which tells you something about how a city now treats these works: as infrastructure worth maintaining, not decoration to be replaced. Across the Hackensack, Jersey City’s Mural Arts Program, founded in 2013, has commissioned walls by Shepard Fairey and by the Brazilian muralist Eduardo Kobra alongside dozens of local artists, and runs a youth program that teaches the craft in the open. If you want to understand the difference between a mural made by a graffiti writer and one made by an illustrator, Jersey City lets you compare them on the same block.

Both programs are also the answer to the argument above, or at least an attempt at one. They pay artists, they consult residents, they commission from the neighbourhoods they paint in, and they keep records. That is what street art looks like when a city decides to take responsibility for it.

Street art in Haiti: the Grand Rue

The most original street art in the Caribbean is not painted. On the Grand Rue in downtown Port-au-Prince, in the districts of Lakou Cheri and Ghetto Leanne, the collective Atis Rezistans, led by the sculptor André Eugène, has for two decades built monumental figures out of what the street throws away: engine blocks, hubcaps, tyres, wood, wire, dolls’ heads, and human skulls recovered from the city’s overfilled cemeteries. The figures stand in the road and in the yards, they draw on Vodou iconography, and they are made and shown in the neighbourhood that produced them. In 2009 Eugène and the British artist and curator Leah Gordon founded the Ghetto Biennale, which brings international artists to the Grand Rue to make work alongside the collective, on the explicit grounds that Haitian artists are excluded from the world’s biennales by visas and money and so the biennale would come to them.

Add to this the stencilled figures of Jerry Rosembert Moïse, whose work after the 2010 earthquake we describe in our graffiti guide, and you have a street art culture that grew from its own soil. It owes almost nothing to Paris or New York, and it makes the same claim they do: that the street belongs to the people who live on it, and that they are entitled to make it speak.

Why it matters

Street art is the first art form of the past century to reach a mass audience without a gallery, a screen, or a ticket. It has changed how cities think about blank walls, it has given a generation of illustrators, sign painters, and graffiti writers a public career, and it has made the question of who owns a shared surface into a live political issue in every city that has a mural program. It is also, on its best days, simply good: a picture in the right place, seen once, remembered for years.

Where to go next

Start by walking. In New Jersey, drive or walk the length of Gateways to Newark along McCarter Highway, then take the mural map published by the Jersey City Mural Arts Program and cover the downtown on foot. In the wider region, Wynwood Walls in Miami is the form’s most visited open-air museum, and the STRAAT museum in Amsterdam is the most thorough indoor one. For the history, Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop remains the most entertaining door in, and the catalogue of the 2011 Art in the Streets exhibition remains the most serious. And whenever you find yourself in front of a stencil, look for the rat. Blek le Rat is still working, and the form still carries his signature.