history of Grafiti

 The earliest form of graffiti came about when humans wrote on walls thousands of years ago. After that the Romans and the Greeks wrote their names and poems and protests on buildings, modern graffiti seems to have appeared in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, and by the late sixties, it had reached New York.

Then people started writing "tags" on walls and buildings all over the city, in the mid-seventies, it was hard to see out of windows of subway trains as they were covered by spray paint dubbed "masterpieces". Taggers were from gangs that were marking territory.  The term ‘graffiti’ was first used by The New York Times.

Art galleries in New York began buying graffiti in the early seventies. But at the same time that it began to be regarded as an art form, John Lindsay, the then mayor of New York, declared the first war on graffiti. By the 1980s it became much harder to write on subway trains without being caught, and instead many graffiti artists began using roofs of buildings or canvases.