Walking throughout the streets of Providence, Rhode Island it’s not uncommon to find yourself a passerby to an enormous mural, intricate sculpture, or detailed portraiture. Art decorates this city, so there's no surprise in the city’s nickname, The Creative Capital. Looking around, it’s easy to identify numerous styles of street art, with everything from wheat pastings, murals, tags, characters, and stencils decorating the city. Interestingly enough, graffiti has existed since ancient years. The roots of the contemporary world of street art that we know today are planted in the 1960s New York, during which is came to be a component of the modern art movement. In its infancy, street art took to the streets in the form of tags and were typically done with aerosol paint. Tagging refers
to brandishing a surface with a distinct and unique handstyle. Tags were often associated with gang culture, and as such street art earned a bad rep. In reality, street art was meant to provoke intimate thoughts in their viewers, and such thoughts were often questions meant to be directed toward the society the artist lived in. The movement took off in the 70s, and was near solidified by the 80s. Today, street art can be done with a number of tools employing numerous techniques, yet street art remains a controversial subject in some cases on account of vandalism.
Sources: “Street Art.” ArtHistory.net www.arthistory.net/street-art/.
