Graffiti: Born in the Streets

Graffiti is moving off the walls and onto your clothing. The heart of urban art, graffiti is most commonly seen on the sides of buildings, city sidewalks and bathroom walls. But more and more, designers are using this boundless combination of images and lettering to decorate their lines.

Born in the Streets, a new exhibition showcasing the history of Graffiti, is being hosted by Fondation Cartier and will be on view from July 7 to November 29, 2009.

Occupying the entire Parisian gallery space of the Fondation Cartier, as well as the building’s façade and surrounding garden, the exhibition brings to light the extraordinary development of an artistic movement that was born in the streets of New York in the early 1970s to rapidly become a worldwide phenomenon.

Today, graffiti has entered the cultural mainstream, crossing over to the realms of fashion, design and advertising. Yet, despite its immense popularity, this essentially illegal activity continues to evolve at the periphery of the contemporary art world, its origins and history little-known to the general public.

This exhibition attempts to sketch the general contours of a subject that is vast and complex, a form of expression that has come to embrace many different techniques, ideas and styles. The exhibition traces the origins of the graffiti movement while offering a panorama of the diversity of contemporary writing. It provides the public with the opportunity to rediscover an art both ubiquitous and continually evolving, and thus relate to the city in a new way.