Time magazine highlights the Fondation Cartier’s new graffiti show. But also look at the Fondation Cartier’s film on graffiti artists. The picture is of Alan Kett (sp?) who describes himself as a writer–“I’ve been writing on subway cars on for 20 years.”

The show recounts the art form’s inexorable spread, from the New York City tenements of the 1970s to the streets of São Paolo in 2009. Pioneers like PHASE 2 and Seen, who by the 1980s were transforming New York subway cars into traveling canvases, here reproduce their works in full scale. Pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring from the same period reveal graffiti’s impact on fine art. Rare films and headlines describe the deaths (spray-painting on busy subway lines is hazardous) and municipal cleanup efforts that ended graffiti’s golden age, at least in New York, by 1989.

Graffiti has since spread far beyond New York’s boroughs, and its cross-fertilization with other art forms and traditions around the world is highlighted through original works by seminal street artists like Dutchman Boris Tellegen, who draws on his design background to create three-dimensional, industrial landscapes, and Brazilian Vitché, whose elaborate mural paintings evoke Indian and Aztec culture.

Born in the Streets-Graffiti (Time Magazine)

Fondation Cartier