There’s an iconic line from the movie Molly’s Game, where an art collector confides that “the art world is controlled by a few major dealers. These statistics highlight the high-brow art world as just another example of the White and wealthy excluding those who do not “fit in” with them. The next most common ethnicity (Hispanic White) clocks in at a mere 5%. According to a recent Data USA study, 85.4% of archivists, curators, and museum technicians are White. The system hasn’t changed since the ‘70s the present-day continuation of excluding non-male and non-White artists from museums and the wealth associated with high-end art is no coincidence. The unions eroded as a consequence of this system, with infighting and poorly hidden resentment eating away at their core. They opened up the high-end art world selectively, incentivizing the creation of street art for the sole purpose of earning money within the curated spaces set up by the elite. Taken aback, the wealthy responded by carefully choosing only certain graffiti artists to amplify. In the 1970s, graffiti artists in America successfully unionized for the first time. George Floyd’s name covers the columns of the Pergola at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. Black Lives Matter and Justice for Breonna Taylor mural drawn on College Avenue in Berkeley, California. Their freeing and colorful art combats the virulent systems of oppression that white supremacy has entrenched in our society, those same systems which mark their craft as illegal under the guise of vandalism. Bay Area activists are taking part by weaponizing street art to unite the masses and reclaim their communities’ stolen narratives, re-imagining better futures alongside comrades across the nation.
Most recently, following the murder of George Floyd and other Black community members, cities have broken into protests and are driving crucial momentum for the Black Lives Matter movement. Over time, as an influx of White upper-class residents displaced low-income households, the anger of local Bay Areans fueled a movement to take back the streets via spray paint, video projections, wheatpasting, and stenciling - any street art medium requiring some degree of guerrilla operations. The use of this avant-garde art style for political activism has spread to the extent of my home in the Bay Area, California. Vibrant images of love and desire colored one side of the wall, while the other stood grey and silent. One of the most iconic examples of political street art is the Berlin Wall’s one-sided graffiti, a public and tangible fight of expression versus totalitarianism. Since then, the rise of street art around the world has mirrored multiple waves of political unrest. Yet, it wasn’t until the French Revolution’s iconoclasm era, when rebels defaced high-end art to stage a protest against French society’s toxic hierarchy, that graffiti took on the “vandalism” label it holds today. when Roman citizens scribbled messages to each other on the dry brick walls. Historians have traced its roots back to the 1st century B.C.E.
The origin of street art is as mysterious and obscured as the people who create it.
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