The history of graffiti: when did spray paint graffiti start?

Spray paint graffiti started in the late 1960s. Aerosol spray paint itself was invented in 1949, credited to Edward Seymour of Sycamore, Illinois. About twenty years later, teenagers in Philadelphia, led by a writer called Cornbread, started writing their names across the city, and by the early 1970s the practice had exploded in New York City after a newspaper story about a writer named TAKI 183.

From there, graffiti grew from simple names into the colorful, complex letter styles you see today: bubble letters, wildstyle, 3D pieces, and the street art that now hangs in museums. Here is how it happened, decade by decade.

This page tells the story of graffiti as a culture. Painting on property without permission is illegal in most places; today’s writers practice in blackbooks, on canvas and on legal walls.

When did spray paint graffiti start?

Spray paint graffiti, as a culture of writers painting stylized names, started in Philadelphia in the late 1960s and spread to New York City by 1971. The tools came first: aerosol spray paint was on sale from 1949, and markers were already common. What was new in the late 1960s was the idea of “getting up”, writing your chosen name as many times and in as many places as possible.

Before spray paint

People have marked walls for as long as there have been walls. The word graffiti comes from Italian, where graffito means something scratched. Ancient examples survive in Pompeii, the Roman town buried in 79 AD, where people scratched names, insults, jokes and election slogans into the plaster. During World War II, “Kilroy was here”, with its little cartoon face peeking over a wall, appeared wherever American troops went. None of this was graffiti writing in the modern sense, with its focus on a stylized name, but it shows the impulse is old.

The invention of spray paint (1949)

Edward Seymour, a paint maker in Sycamore, Illinois, wanted a way to demonstrate an aluminum paint he had made for radiators. In 1949, at the suggestion of his wife, Bonnie, he loaded paint into an aerosol can, borrowing the idea from spray deodorizers. Customers wanted the can more than the radiator paint, and aerosol spray paint became a product of its own. His company, Seymour of Sycamore, still makes paint. The Chase company, also in the Chicago area, is sometimes credited as the first commercial maker instead, so “first” depends on who you ask. Either way, by the 1960s spray paint was cheap and sold in hardware stores everywhere.

Philadelphia: Cornbread and the first writers (late 1960s)

Modern graffiti writing began in Philadelphia, where Darryl McCray, known as Cornbread, started writing his name around the city in the late 1960s. He is widely described as the first modern graffiti writer. He was a master of publicity: after a newspaper wrongly reported him dead, he wrote “Cornbread Lives” on an elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo to prove he was alive.

Cornbread and his friends turned writing a name into a game of fame. Philadelphia went on to develop its own distinctive handstyles, and Philadelphia still claims, with good reason, to be the birthplace of the culture. McCray later worked with the city’s Anti-Graffiti Network and Mural Arts Program.

New York: TAKI 183 and the subway era (1970s)

On July 21, 1971, the New York Times published a story headlined “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals”. TAKI 183 was a teenager from Washington Heights who worked as a messenger and wrote his name, a short form of his Greek name plus his street number, all over the city. The article turned him into a celebrity, and hundreds of imitators followed, each with their own name and number.

That is why so many early tags carry numbers: how to make a graffiti tag explains the tradition and how tags are built.

The trains become canvases

New York’s subway carried names through every borough, so trains became the main target. Writers competed to be “all-city”, seen on every line. Names grew bigger, then turned into colorful pieces covering whole sides of cars, and eventually “top-to-bottoms” and “whole cars” that covered a train car from roof to floor.

Bubble letters and arrows (1972)

Around late 1972, a Bronx writer called Phase 2 introduced a soft, rounded lettering style that became known as “softies”, what we now call bubble letters. He is credited with dozens of variations, and with pioneering the use of arrows in letters. Bubble letters spread fast because they were quick to paint and fun to fill, and they are still the classic first style for beginners and the basis of the throw-up.

The first gallery shows (1972–1973)

Graffiti reached galleries remarkably early. In 1972 Hugo Martinez organized subway writers into United Graffiti Artists (UGA), and in September 1973 the group showed canvases at the Razor Gallery in New York, often called the first gallery show of graffiti. Writers such as Phase 2 took part.

Style wars: how wildstyle was born

Through the 1970s, New York writers competed on style as much as on volume. Letters became more twisted, interlocked and decorated with arrows, extensions and 3D, partly to show skill and partly to make pieces hard for outsiders to read. This complex lettering came to be called wildstyle.

The term was popularized by the Wild Style crew, founded in the Bronx in the mid-1970s by Tracy 168. Earlier writers including Phase 2 and Stan 153 had already been pushing interlocking “mechanical” letters. The competition between writers and crews, often called “style wars”, produced most of the letter forms graffiti still uses: the 3D block, highlights, drips, arrows and characters.

Graffiti and hip-hop

Graffiti is counted as one of the four original elements of hip-hop, with DJing, MCing and breaking. Writing names had already started by 1971, a couple of years before the famous August 11, 1973 back-to-school party in the Bronx where DJ Kool Herc extended the drum breaks of funk records, an event often called the birth of hip-hop. The two cultures grew up together in the same neighborhoods.

Two 1983 films tied them together for audiences everywhere. Wild Style, directed by Charlie Ahearn, is widely regarded as the first hip-hop film and starred writers Lee Quiñones and Lady Pink alongside DJs, rappers and breakers. Style Wars, made by Tony Silver with photographer Henry Chalfant and shown on PBS, documented writers such as Dondi, Kase 2 and Skeme, and won a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 1984, Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper published Subway Art, a book of their photographs of painted trains. No American publisher would take it, so it came out with Thames & Hudson. It went on to sell around half a million copies and is still called the bible of graffiti by many writers.

Galleries and the art world (1980s)

Around 1980, the New York art world took a serious interest in graffiti. In June 1980 the Times Square Show put writers alongside downtown artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat (then writing as SAMO©) and Keith Haring. That October, the South Bronx space Fashion Moda hosted a graffiti show organized by the writer Crash. In 1981, Patti Astor opened the Fun Gallery in the East Village, inviting writers to paint on canvas.

Europe followed. Graffiti appeared at documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, in 1982, and in 1983 the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam held what is often described as the first European museum exhibition devoted to New York graffiti, with work by writers including Blade, Dondi, Seen, Zephyr, Futura 2000, Crash, Quik and Rammellzee.

The 1980s crackdown and the end of painted trains

While galleries embraced graffiti, New York’s transit system fought it hard. Train yards got fences and razor wire, and cleaning became a priority. In 1984, the new transit president David Gunn launched the Clean Car Program: any car that got painted was cleaned or pulled from service, so painted trains no longer ran for anyone to see. On May 12, 1989, the city ceremonially retired its last graffiti-covered subway car.

The subway era was over, but the culture did not end. Writers moved to walls, freight trains, canvases and sketchbooks. The blackbook, where writers had always planned their pieces, became even more important as the place where style lived on paper.

How graffiti spread around the world

Thanks to Style Wars, Wild Style, Subway Art and the 1984 film Beat Street, young people across Europe, Latin America, Australia and Asia saw New York graffiti for the first time in the mid-1980s and started their own scenes. Each city mixed the New York letter styles with its own influences, which is why graffiti in Paris, São Paulo, Berlin or Sydney now looks different from New York.

The tools changed too. For decades writers used hardware-store paint and swapped caps from other aerosol products. In 1994, Montana Colors was founded in Barcelona, one of the first companies to build its spray paint specifically for graffiti writers. Today there are dedicated graffiti paints, caps and markers; our spray paint for beginners guide explains them.

Street art: stickers, stencils and Banksy

In the late 1980s and 1990s, a related movement grew alongside letter-based graffiti: street art. Instead of stylized names, street artists put up images, stickers, posters and stencils. In 1989, Shepard Fairey, then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, made the “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker, which grew into the OBEY campaign. In Bristol, England, Banksy started as a freehand graffiti writer in the early 1990s and moved to stencils later that decade, becoming the best-known street artist in the world.

Graffiti writers and street artists overlap but are not the same: writers focus on letters and names, street artists mostly on images and messages. Our graffiti styles page compares the main types.

Graffiti today

Today graffiti lives in many places at once. Legal walls, festivals and commissioned murals give writers space to paint big pieces with permission. Museums and auction houses collect graffiti and street art, and there is even a Museum of Graffiti in Miami. Social media lets a piece painted in one city be seen around the world within hours, the same thing the subway did for New York writers in the 1970s.

Courts have started to treat some aerosol art as serious art. At 5Pointz, a Queens warehouse where the owner had let writers paint for years, the walls were whitewashed in 2013, and in 2018 a federal court awarded the artists $6.75 million under the Visual Artists Rights Act. Our guide to whether graffiti is illegal covers the case and what it does and does not mean.

Painting without permission is still illegal and is treated as vandalism. But the letters invented on 1970s trains are now everywhere: in fashion, logos, video games, and in tools like our graffiti generator, which draws the same tag, throw-up, bubble and wildstyle letters writers developed over fifty years.

Graffiti history timeline

Where to start if you want to learn

The best way to understand graffiti history is to draw the letters yourself. Start with the graffiti alphabet, learn the classic bubble letters Phase 2 made famous, then work toward wildstyle using our how to draw graffiti guide. Keep everything in a sketchbook and paint only on legal walls, as today’s writers do.

Sources

• Archaeological Park of Pompeii (official site)
• Seymour of Sycamore: company history (aerosol spray paint, 1949)
• WHYY: Cornbread, the first graffiti artist, shows new work at Philadelphia gallery
• The New York Times: “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals”, 21 July 1971 (scan of the original article, PDF)
• Montana Colors: about the company (founded in Barcelona in 1994)
• SCOTUSblog: G&M Realty L.P. v. Castillo case file (5Pointz, $6.75 million VARA award)