From rooftop murals to hand-cut stickers decorating stop signs, the diverse forms of noncommissioned public art constantly lurk in the peripheries of Bay Area streets. On certain walls, new illicit artworks creep up as quickly as they are erased into oblivion, swallowed by smears of beige or silver and resurrected as blank canvases for the next user’s disposal. But before street art grew to encompass various subcultures and techniques, early graffiti writers pioneered their art form on train tracks and in alleys when it wasn’t yet a collector’s commodity, let alone a term in anyone’s vocabulary.
Commemorating the originators of Bay Area street art and its surrounding b-boy culture, the San Francisco urban art gallery, 1:AM, currently offers an extensive interdisciplinary group show featuring some of our region’s foremost graffiti greats. Aptly titled “The Classics,” the exhibit samples contemporary paintings and mixed-media works, vintage drawings and documentary photography by artists active between 1983 and 1990. Curated by Nate1, an artist and entrepreneur who got his start during the discipline’s West Coast golden age, the exhibit honors the not-too-distant past of an art form still not universally recognized.
In addition to exemplifying the ’80s West Coast graffiti aesthetic, many of the works in “The Classics” testify to their creators’ devotion to their discipline. Spray cans regularly appear as the subject matter of some pieces and the medium of others. Kasper WCF’s painting, “Madcap Spraytown,” features a cartoonish cityscape with spray can skyscrapers emitting puffs of white clouds from their nozzles, the whole scene distorted as if by a fish-eye lens. Meanwhile, Robz opted for a panel made up of spray cans rather than a canvas; his “Risk Now Rob” renders a concrete wall bearing the work’s title in shining, interlocked letters.
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