Miami’s Museum of Graffiti traces the appeal of street art : NPR

JonOne with one of the paintings featured in his solo exhibition at the Museum of Graffiti in Miami.

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MIAMI — Art is taking over South Florida this week with the annual Art Basel fair and a host of satellite exhibitions. A new exhibition traces the origins and development of a type of art for which the city has become known: graffiti and street art.

It’s at the Museum of Graffiti in Miami, which bills itself as the world’s first museum dedicated to graffiti and street art. The museum is located in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, a fashion-forward community where large, colorful murals adorn the exterior of almost every building.

Inside the museum, one of the first exhibits is not about art, but about an artist’s medium — in this case, cans of Rust-oleum spray paint. Museum founder and curator Alan Ket collects a special can. “It’s 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, says Ket, popular with graffiti artists. “This green was only made by Rust-oleum,” he says. “No other brand has done something as beautiful. So when you paint a rusty train with this mint green, the effect is quite extraordinary.”

The Museum of Graffiti is located in an area of ​​Miami where almost every building is covered in large, colorful murals.

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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 ’70s, when teenagers spray-painted their names on surfaces across New York City.

One of those teenagers, now 61, is Jon Perello, an artist who goes by the name JonOne.

His painting covered an Air France jet and was featured on a Hennessey cognac label. He now lives in France, but began tagging buildings and subways in New York almost 50 years ago, when he was a teenager. “I had 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 branding — 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 City subway cars. He said: “Trains for me [were] like an open gallery. All types of people can see it: tourists, businessmen, people going to work, the poor. It became a sort of moving canvas, a moving museum that came to you. »

Then as now, this type of guerrilla art was not popular with authority figures and others who view it as vandalism. But very early on, some artists began to leave the metro to go to the studio.

The Graffiti Museum exhibition features paintings from a key moment in the development of graffiti art. It was the first time that works by young street artists were presented in a New York gallery. Alan Ket says: “The Razor Gallery exhibition in 1973 was this big boom that showed these young artists that they had a path forward, that they had an opportunity to seize. »

In the decades since that exhibition, Ket says graffiti has spread globally and been accepted by the art world, luxury brands and even governments. Works 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 cities around the world commission monumental public art projects from them.”

Alan Ket co-founded the Museum of Graffiti six years ago to document the origins and development of the street art movement.

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Ket has consulted with museums on exhibitions of graffiti and street art, but says that, despite its broad popular appeal, it has yet to receive the recognition it deserves from the art establishment. This is what led him to open the Graffiti Museum. Top-tier 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 only a matter of time before the art he and others made on subway cars would be recognized. But street art still has a certain stigma, he says. “It’s like having that girlfriend you don’t want to show your mom, you know? You love her and everything, but you don’t want to bring her home… Sometimes I feel like that.”

JonOne’s solo exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Graffiti in Miami until June. The Origins exhibition, documenting the movement’s beginnings and showcasing works from the seminal 1973 exhibition, will continue through the end of the year.