The most famous graffiti artists include pioneers like Cornbread, TAKI 183, Phase 2, Blade, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, Dondi and Seen, who built graffiti writing on the streets and trains of Philadelphia and New York; artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Futura who carried it into galleries; and street artists like Blek le Rat, Banksy, Nick Walker, Shepard Fairey and Os Gêmeos who made it a global art form.
Below are 23 graffiti and street artists, grouped by era, with what each is known for and how they influenced the lettering and styles writers still use. We have not included images of their artwork, because those works belong to the artists. The images on this page are made with our own graffiti generator.
Who were the first graffiti artists?
The first modern graffiti writers were teenagers in Philadelphia and New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s who wrote their chosen names across their cities. Their goal was fame among other writers, not art. They set the rules of the culture: a unique name, a recognizable handstyle, and getting it seen as widely as possible. Our history of graffiti tells the full story.
Cornbread (Philadelphia)
Darryl McCray, known as Cornbread, is widely called the first modern graffiti writer. He started writing his name around Philadelphia in the late 1960s and became famous for publicity stunts, including writing “Cornbread Lives” on an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo after a newspaper wrongly reported he had died. He showed that a name alone could make someone a local celebrity.
TAKI 183 (New York)
TAKI 183 was a teenager from Washington Heights who worked as a foot messenger and wrote his name everywhere his deliveries took him. “Taki” was short for his Greek name, Demetrius, and 183 was his street. A New York Times story about him on July 21, 1971 set off a citywide wave of imitators. He is the reason so many classic tags combine a name and a number; see how to make a graffiti tag.
Which graffiti artists shaped the letter styles?
In the 1970s, New York writers moved from simple signatures to designed letters, and a handful of them invented the styles that every graffiti alphabet still uses: bubble letters, block letters, wildstyle and 3D. These are the names writers study when they want to understand letter structure.
Phase 2
Phase 2, a Bronx writer, is credited with creating the rounded “softie” style in late 1972, the style we now call bubble letters. He went on to name and invent many variations and is credited with pioneering the arrows that later became central to wildstyle. He was one of the writers in the early United Graffiti Artists gallery shows. Phase 2 died in December 2019.
Blade
Steven Ogburn, known as Blade, started painting trains in the Bronx in 1972 and founded the crew TC5, The Crazy 5. He is widely credited with painting more than 5,000 subway cars between 1972 and 1984, which earned him the nickname “King of Graffiti” among his peers. His letters are known for bold, playful shapes and a strong sense of fun on whole-car pieces.
Lee Quiñones
Lee Quiñones, born in Puerto Rico and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, began painting subway cars in 1974 and was a member of the Fabulous 5 crew, known for whole-car murals. In 1978 he painted a full handball court mural, Howard the Duck, outside his junior high school, one of the most celebrated early graffiti murals. He starred as Zoro in the 1983 film Wild Style and later moved into painting on canvas. Quiñones is known for using whole cars as storytelling murals, often with social messages.
Dondi White
Dondi White (Donald White) was a Brooklyn writer who formed the CIA crew in the late 1970s. His three-part whole-car series Children of the Grave, painted between 1978 and 1980 and named after a Black Sabbath song, is one of the most famous subway works; photographer Martha Cooper documented him painting the final part in 1980. Dondi is admired for clean, readable letters with intricate fills, aimed at the public as well as other writers. He died in 1998 at age 37.
Seen
Richard Mirando, known as Seen, began painting New York subways in 1973 and painted with the UA (United Artists) crew, known for whole cars. He is often called the “Godfather of Graffiti” and is famous for bright lettering paired with cartoon characters, a combination that shaped how writers use characters beside their letters. He appeared in the 1983 documentary Style Wars and moved on to canvas, sculpture and tattooing.
Kase 2
Kase 2 was a Bronx writer who called himself the “King of Style” in Style Wars. He developed “computer rock”, a form of wildstyle in which letters are broken into boxy segments and rearranged. He painted with one arm, having lost his right arm in an accident as a child. His approach shows how far letters can be broken apart and still hold together.
Lady Pink
Sandra Fabara, known as Lady Pink, was born in Ecuador in 1964 and grew up in Queens. She started painting subway trains in 1979, at 15, when very few women were active in the scene, and became one of its most enduring figures. She starred as Rose in Wild Style and moved into canvas painting in the early 1980s; her work has entered museum collections, with the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum among those cited. She is known for figurative, often feminist imagery alongside her lettering, and for mentoring younger artists through mural work.
Which graffiti artists made it into the art world?
From around 1980, New York galleries and European museums began showing graffiti, and some artists from the streets became major names in contemporary art. These artists showed that aerosol and street-born styles could hold their own on canvas. Some came from writing culture; others worked alongside it.
Futura (Futura 2000)
Leonard McGurr, known as Futura or Futura 2000, became famous for a 1980 whole car called Break, which used abstract shapes and color fields instead of focusing on letters. That approach set him apart from almost every writer of his time. In the early 1980s he toured with the British band The Clash, painting backdrops live on stage. He later became a major figure in streetwear and design.
Crash
John Matos, known as Crash, is a Bronx writer who organized a graffiti show at the South Bronx art space Fashion Moda in 1980, one of the events that brought writers into the art world. He was included in early European museum shows of New York graffiti, such as the 1983 exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (SAMO)
Before he was a painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat co-created SAMO©, a tag he and his friend Al Diaz wrote around Lower Manhattan from 1978. Instead of a stylized name, SAMO left short poetic and sarcastic phrases. The Village Voice wrote about the tag in December 1978, and Basquiat eventually ended it by writing “SAMO© IS DEAD” on walls. He went on to become one of the most celebrated painters of the 1980s, and words and crossed-out text remained central to his canvases.
Keith Haring
Keith Haring drew chalk figures on the empty black paper panels that covered unused advertising spaces in New York subway stations, starting around 1980. The drawings were quick, simple and public, and they stayed up only until a new ad was pasted over them. Haring was arrested several times for them. He never called himself a graffiti writer, but his subway drawings made him one of the best-known artists to come out of the street, and his bold outlined figures influenced countless street artists.
Who are the most famous street artists?
The most famous street artists include Blek le Rat, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Nick Walker, JR and KAWS. Unlike graffiti writers, who focus on letters and names, street artists mostly work with images, stencils, posters and stickers aimed at the general public. Many started as graffiti writers before moving to stencils and pictures. Our guide to what graffiti is explains the difference.
Blek le Rat
Xavier Prou, known as Blek le Rat, began spraying stencils of rats on the walls of Paris in 1981 and is often called the “father of stencil graffiti”. He chose the rat partly because, as he put it, it was the only free animal in the city, and because “rat” is an anagram of “art”. Banksy has acknowledged him as an influence. His work shows how stencils let an artist repeat sharp images quickly.
Banksy
Banksy is an anonymous artist from Bristol, England, who started as a freehand graffiti writer in the early 1990s and switched mainly to stencils later in the decade. His political and satirical images made him the best-known street artist in the world. He directed the 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and opened Dismaland, a dark pop-up “theme park”, in Weston-super-Mare in 2015. In October 2018, his Girl with Balloon partly shredded itself in its frame right after selling at Sotheby’s in London; renamed Love Is in the Bin, it resold in 2021 for about £18.6 million.
Nick Walker
Nick Walker, born in 1969, is a graffiti and stencil artist from Bristol who came out of the city’s 1980s stencil scene, the same scene that influenced Banksy. He is best known for a bowler-hatted gentleman, often called the Vandal, who appears in his work leaving paint drips and splashes on cityscapes. In 2006 his Moona Lisa, a spray-painted Mona Lisa seen from behind, reportedly sold for £54,000 at Bonhams in London. He recreated graffiti-covered New York streets for Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. Walker mixes stencils with freehand spray paint, which gives his work a cleaner, more graphic look than most street pieces.
Shepard Fairey
Shepard Fairey created the “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker in 1989 as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, which grew into the OBEY campaign and clothing brand. His 2008 Barack Obama “Hope” portrait, made in his poster and stencil style, became one of the best-known political images of its time, and a version is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. His bold, limited-color propaganda style influenced a generation of poster and sticker artists.
Os Gêmeos
Os Gêmeos (“the twins” in Portuguese) are identical twin brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, born in 1974 in São Paulo, Brazil, who started painting graffiti in 1987. They are known for dreamlike scenes and yellow-skinned characters in patterned clothing. In 2008 they painted the facade of Tate Modern in London for its Street Art exhibition, alongside artists including Blek le Rat and JR. They helped put Brazilian graffiti on the world map.
JR
JR is a French artist who pastes huge black-and-white photographic portraits in public places, calling himself a “photograffeur”. He won the TED Prize in 2011 and used it to launch the Inside Out Project, in which people around the world submit portraits that are printed as posters and pasted in their own communities.
KAWS
Brian Donnelly, known as KAWS, was born in Jersey City in 1974 and began as a graffiti writer there in the early 1990s. After moving to New York, he became known for opening bus shelter and phone booth advertising panels, painting his characters over the ads and putting them back. In 1999 he released his first Companion vinyl toy, a skull-headed figure with X-ed out eyes that grew into a global art and collectibles brand.
Which modern graffiti artists are known for lettering?
Several contemporary artists are known above all for pushing letters into new forms, from photorealistic 3D to invented scripts and giant typography. They are worth studying if your main interest is graffiti lettering, because each one solved letter design in a different way.
DAIM
Mirko Reisser, known as DAIM, is a German artist based in Hamburg who made his first works in 1989 and developed a 3D style in the 1990s. He is widely credited as a pioneer of pushing graffiti letters into a full three-dimensional illusion, with letters that look like solid sculptures floating off the wall. If you like 3D graffiti letters, DAIM is the name to study.
Retna
Marquis Lewis, known as Retna, is a Los Angeles artist born in 1979 who took his name from a Wu-Tang Clan lyric. He invented his own script, which draws on Egyptian hieroglyphs, Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy, Gothic blackletter and Los Angeles graffiti lettering. His walls and canvases are covered in tall, rhythmic characters that look like a language of their own. His work connects to the Old English letters of Chicano lettering.
Ben Eine
Ben Eine is a London street artist known for painting large, colorful single letters and words on shop shutters and walls. In 2010 he painted a full alphabet across the shutters of Middlesex Street in East London, which locals nicknamed Alphabet Street. That same year, Prime Minister David Cameron gave President Barack Obama Eine’s painting Twenty First Century City as an official gift.
What can you learn from famous graffiti artists?
The biggest lesson from famous graffiti artists is that each one is remembered for one clear idea: Phase 2 for bubble letters, Dondi for clean readable letters, Kase 2 for broken-apart wildstyle, Futura for abstraction, Blek le Rat for stencils, DAIM for 3D. None of them copied a style; they built their own from the basics.
You can follow the same path:
- Learn the basic letters first. Start with simple block and bubble letters from our graffiti alphabet.
- Fill a sketchbook. Every artist above worked out ideas on paper before painting. A blackbook is where your style grows.
- Pick a name that draws well. Try options in our graffiti name generator and look at which letters you enjoy drawing.
- Study styles, not copies. Compare the main graffiti styles and work out why each one looks the way it does, then add your own twist.
- Paint legally. Today’s famous writers build careers on murals, legal walls, festivals and canvas. Our guide to whether graffiti is illegal covers the legal ways to paint.
Our step-by-step how to draw graffiti guide is a good place to start.
Sources
- The New York Times: “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals”, 21 July 1971 (scan of the original article, PDF)
- WHYY: Cornbread, the first graffiti artist, shows new work at Philadelphia gallery
- Keith Haring Foundation: biography (subway drawings, 1980–1985)
- Inside Out Project: about (JR and the 2011 TED Prize)
- OBEY Giant: Shepard Fairey’s manifesto on the OBEY sticker campaign