MIAMI — Art takes over South Florida this week with the annual Art Basel fair and a host of satellite shows. One new exhibition chronicles the origins and development of a type of art for which the city has become known: graffiti and street art.
It's at Miami's Museum of Graffiti, which bills itself as the first museum in the world dedicated to graffiti and street art. The museum is located in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood, an art-forward community where large, colorful murals adorn the exteriors of almost every building.
Inside the museum, one of the first exhibits isn't of art, but of an artist's medium — in this case, cans of Rust-oleum spray paint. Museum founder and curator Alan Ket picks up a special can. "This is a Cascade green Rust-oleum paint," he says. "This one is from 1973."
Today, collectors will pay $1,000 for a vintage can. It's a color, Ket says, prized by graffiti artists. "This green was only made by Rust-oleum," he says. "No other brand made something so nice. So, when you paint a rusty train with this mint green, the effect is quite extraordinary."
Ket founded the Museum of Graffiti with a partner six years ago to tell the story of an art movement that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when teenagers would spray paint their names on surfaces throughout New York City.
One of those teenagers, now 61 years old, is Jon Perello, an artist who goes by the name JonOne.
His painting has covered an Air France jet and been featured on a Hennessey cognac label. He lives in France now, but began, nearly 50 years ago, as a teenager tagging buildings and subways in New York. "I didn't have no money, so I was stealing all my spray paint," he says. "That was the first grant, I would say."
JonOne says he started out tagging — putting his name on buildings — in his Washington Heights neighborhood. His paintings became more elaborate over time, and, like many of his friends, he began painting on New York subway cars. He says, "Trains for me [were] like an open gallery. All types of people can see it — tourists, business people, people going to work, poor people. It became sort of like a moving canvas, a moving museum that would come to you."
Then, as now, that type of guerrilla art was not popular with authority figures and others who consider it vandalism. But early on, some artists began moving from the subways and into the studio.
The Museum of Graffiti's exhibition features paintings from a key moment in the development of graffiti art. It was the first time that work by young street artists was featured in a New York gallery. Alan Ket says, "The Razor gallery show in 1973 was that big boom that showed these young artists that they had a lane, they had an opportunity that they could pursue."
In the decades since that show, Ket says graffiti has spread globally and won acceptance by the art world, luxury brands and even governments. Work by some artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy have sold for millions of dollars. "Now, graffiti artists are called street artists," he says. "And they are commissioned by cities around the world to create monumental public art projects."
Ket has consulted with museums on exhibitions of graffiti and street art, but says, despite its broad popular appeal, it hasn't yet received the recognition it deserves from the art establishment. That's what led him to open the Museum of Graffiti. Blue-chip institutions will host temporary exhibitions, he says, but have been slow to add street art to their permanent collections.
Even as a teenager, JonOne says he knew it was just a matter of time before the art he and others were doing on subway cars gained recognition. But street art still has a certain stigma, he says. "It's like having that girlfriend that you don't want to show your Moms, you know? You love her and everything, but you don't want to bring her home…Sometimes I feel like that."
JonOne's solo show will be at Miami's Museum of Graffiti through June. The Origins exhibition, documenting the movement's beginnings and showing work from the seminal 1973 show, will be up through the end of the year.
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