Since the Golden Age of Graf in NYC, when full trains careened through The City as mobile murals in the moving museum of Manhattan and across the elevated tracks of The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, The City has, at turns, suppressed and sought to recapture the grit and glory of its graffiti’d past.Nowadays, graf crews still stalk city streets, troop through the trainyards, and climb ‘cross crevasses of concrete to claim new canvas for their spray cans. And yet, for the rest of us, graffiti has receded from the high tide of the early eighties to subsist as little more than background noise among all the other claimants of urban space — the corporate advertising clutter, the bawdy billboards, the flashing lights. Graffiti and graffiti culture in NYC is on life support — tended to by the loyalists, legends, and true heads who will die — and sometimes even kill — before they let graf go to the graveyard.Some 1200 miles south of the City, however, graffiti is alive and well, thriving in a new urban playground soaked in sunshine and splashed in color. The murals of Miami challenge the boundaries of graffiti and street art to give the art crowd a run for its money.In many ways, the art that decorates the city walls of Miami may be called graffiti only because it exists in public space and spray paint is the dominant medium. Sometimes, artists paint pieces with brushes as well. Miami has achieved what Manhattan and NYC did some thirty years ago — the City as Museum.The Wynwood Walls, in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, have become the New Mecca of murals and envelope-pushing Graf Art. Conceived in 2009 by community revitalizer Tony Goldman, the walls at Wynwood have transformed a neighborhood from a forgotten stretch of foreboding warehouses into a dynamic vanguard on the cutting edge of avant garde graffiti work. Goldman may have succeeded in not only revitalizing a neighborhood, but in recharging graffiti culture itself. An air of freedom and possibility pervade the scene here, as commissioned murals lie within blocks of seemingly abandoned stretches and slabs of untouched concrete. Get a marker and get up, while there’s still space.
Story By Zachary Curtis
