Where does street art begin and graffiti end?

By Zanoah Plummer

Graffiti lives on the underpasses of bridges, on train cars and between alleyways of aging buildings. While it is an often overlooked form of urban life, it has turned Toronto’s streets into a canvas. Beneath coats of paint are more than just weathered bricks and lichen. There are stories, expressions and protest woven into every paint stroke.

Graffiti’s early history is hard to tag, as humans have embellished surfaces with art since we lived in caves. The modern art form of graffiti can be attributed to tags by the American artist Cornbread, who tagged his name along the bus route of his love interest. This fascinated people at the time and led him to achieve local notoriety for his public exhibitions of love.

By the mid ’60s, this practice reached artists in New York, many of whom were children. They made games of writing their names on trains and walls, which grew to become a competition over who could paint their name most visibly. As the popularity of what was called ‘writing’ at the time grew, the letters became larger, more lavish and popped with shadows and colour, giving birth to the typography seen around the city today.

Graffiti, like many other American cultural imports, took time before arriving in Canada. It is said to have been popularized in Toronto in the early ’80s. While the scene flourished, its persecution quickly followed.

Graffiti differs from other art forms in that it is inherently criminalized and artists can be charged with mischief for their practice. Graffitists may face fines of up to $5000 or up to 10 years in prison for using the city as a canvas. The same anti-authority allure that draws people to graffiti has been a point of contention as forms of street art gain more institutional recognition within fine arts spaces.

Colloquially, graffiti and street artists often tread a line between the two mediums based on legality. Graffiti is defined by its persecution, while street art & muralism is defined by institutional permission.

It was an early frosty winter evening when I made my way to the Worth Gallery to meet with Toronto artist Adrian Hayles. Murals lined the alleyways, demarcating homes with paintings of flowers and bees. Broken payphones lined the sides and bus stops were tagged by various graffiti artists. Every corner of that stretch of Dundas West had been used as a canvas.

“When StreetART Toronto came into being, I was one of the first artists on with them. The first major project that we had done together was the Riverdale Hub over at Greenwood and Gerrard in the East End,” said Hayles.

StreetART Toronto (StART) is a suite of street art & mural programs created by the City of Toronto. Formed in 2012, StART’s objectives are to nurture Toronto’s local artists, add colour to neighbourhoods and replace graffiti with street art. Hayles has worked with StART to produce some of Toronto’s most iconic murals, including Little Jamaica’s Reggae Lane mural.

“They’ve allowed me the opportunity to create my own granting system — a granting program called Just Us. I wrote the program for artists of colour or of Indigenous backgrounds, who are specifically looking for opportunities to do murals that have a just meaning behind them,” said Hayles, who operates the Worth Gallery in conjunction with his street artwork. “We’ve done over 30 murals over the past four or five years. We’ve also done shows here. So every year they’ll pump out like 10 to 15 murals and then we do a photo exhibition of those murals here at the gallery.

Walls, garages and concrete barriers are among the surfaces that StART’s artists have painted over. StART was formed as a part of the City of Toronto’s Graffiti Management Plan. The city has painted murals over known graffiti hotspots to curb its spread, as well as put up murals where graffiti is anticipated. The city reports that street art and murals, in conjunction with graffiti removal programs, has reduced graffiti city-wide.

While artists and municipalities have drawn lines around definitions of street art, stigma remains around art that is considered graffiti. Some onlookers see more artistic value in what is deemed ‘street art’ over graffiti. On their website, the RCMP states that “graffiti creates an impression that a neighbourhood is uncared for and unsafe which in turn can invite more vandalism and crime,” a claim often used to justify its persecution.

“Street art is something that’s more accepted straight out the gate.”

The criminalization of graffiti has been critiqued for being rooted in anti-Black and anti-Indigenous ideology. Black and Indigenous artists have used graffiti and public art as a way to call attention to injustices, such as in the case of “Paint the City Black,” a public art project in Toronto’s Graffiti Alley that called Toronto Police Service’s practices into question. It has also been an outlet for the queer community to express their anger with discriminatory bills and beliefs.

The way municipalities paint over and erase graffiti mirrors the historical attempts institutions have made to erase marginalized people from public spaces. Graffiti isn’t always done by vagrants looking to dress down a neighbourhood. Sometimes, it is a podium for voices that have been historically silenced.

“There’s some unwritten rules that you should follow, but that’s something most people would never understand or know,” said Philip Saunders, a street artist who found his footing doing graffiti in his youth. “In graffiti, the rules are you’re not supposed to paint buildings, like businesses that are open, or paint on the glass. So the vandalism that we see like a guy tagging a mom-and-pop shop, that’s not part of the culture. We call those guys toys. They’re kind of like free radicals, like cancer cells.”

Toronto’s own Art Gallery of Ontario has held exhibitions showcasing street art and graffiti, a stark change in setting from the urban gallery it’s typically displayed in.

Artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat are often credited among the first artists to bridge the gap between street art and the gallery. Both artists began their artistic practice with graffiti. Their art was highly political; Haring candidly depicted the reality of gay life during the AIDS crisis and Afrofuturism was a persistent theme in Basquiat’s art.

The line between street art and graffiti can sometimes blur. While the works that Haring and Basquiat did were not legal and would be considered graffiti otherwise, the fine arts world often labels their early work as street art to reinforce their cultural value.

As a result, the political meaning behind the works of institutionally recognized street artists is often lost. In modern times, the allure of Banksy’s artwork lies less within his intended meaning or protest, but rather the technicality of his art and his once shrouded identity. By all definitions Banksy would be considered a graffiti artist, but his work is often categorized as street art instead, due to the cultural value the fine arts world has placed on his work.

“Street art is something that’s more accepted straight out the gate,” said Saunders. “It doesn’t have to deal with all of the stigmas of graffiti. It’s something that people look at and they’re like, oh, that’s so great.”

Of course, not all graffiti is meaningful and not all street art is purely aesthetic. Leyland Adams’ Nelson Mandela mural was commissioned under StART and honours the South African civil rights leader, which carries political weight to some. Regardless of intent, StART’s street artists are often commissioned to create work that is expressly meaningful and conveys a positive message, like in the case of Saunders’ recent mural series “Love is Here.”

“’Love is Here’ is essentially about the connectivity between human beings and given that I’m a Black artist, it lives in that universe of Blackness,” said Saunders. “And if there’s any fractures within the Black community concerning love, the works kind of attack that at its core. It kind of shows the opposite side, like what love looks like and Black unification.”

All forms of street art, whether legal or not, have had a slow introduction into the fine arts world, likely due to their working class origins and continued criminalization. The schism between graffiti and street art is relatively new as street art begins to gain more respect in traditional gallery spaces. As the definition of meaningful art broadens, graffiti may have a chance to win over onlookers.