I’ve been interested in street art for as long as I can remember. Everywhere I go I find myself drawn to – and taking photographs of – stickers, murals, slogans, poetry, and other markers of human expression that adorn our public spaces.

Of course, street art is difficult to define. Some commentators are quick to separate street art from graffiti; the former is defined as spontaneous or unsanctioned public-facing art form with a particular message meant for a public audience, while the latter is primarily text-based, using stylized lettering in ways which may be intended to communicate primarily to “insider” communities (Carmen Cowick, “Preserving Street Art: Uncovering the Challenges and Obstacles,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America Vol 34: 1 [2015], p. 30). For the purposes of this short piece, however, I’d like to keep it simple; I invoke street art in its largest tent sense to include any or all of the above, because street art in its variety of mediums - stenciling, stickers, murals, and more - often exists in tandem with graffiti in the built environment and because these different forms of public expression may appear alongside each other in digital archives and institutional collections.

Why should we archive street art? To begin with, these are important historical records of their own sort, invoking acts of storytelling and creativity, protest and resistance, joy and vulnerability and celebration of people, places, communities. Street art is inherently political; unsanctioned (or illegal) and publicly visible, its very presence in time and space, no matter how fleeting, offers opportunities for voices to speak in ways which they might not otherwise be able to without risking harm upon themselves and their communities. And because these records are spontaneous and can be anonymized, they can play an important role in documenting a community’s complex array of responses to contemporary events. Street art can play a significant role in galvanizing and communicating about contemporary social justice movements, and reflects the concerns, current events, or civic and cultural pride of particular geographically and historically situated communities. And as street art accumulates in particular spaces (such as memorial sites), you can literally see  layers of conversation and human expression over time, as murals are painted over, graffiti is added on top of other graffiti, and the aesthetic and messages of the street change. Capturing this dynamism is an interesting archival problem, and speaks to the need to reconsider what kinds of description and collecting strategies work best for records that, while specifically geographically constituted, refuse to stay fixed for too long.

Clockwise from top left: Exterior wall of building in Dresden, Germany, covered in street art and graffiti. Street art in Lyon, France. “Madriz” in Madrid, Spain. “We All Wanna Change the Channel” at the John Lennon Wall in Prague, Czechia. Artists unknown. Photographs by Marissa Friedman.

There are long standing digital, crowdsourced, community-driven projects to document graffiti and street art both in the United States and all over the world (Michael DeNotto, “Street art and graffiti: Resources for online study,” 2014), attesting to the deeply entrenched communities of practitioners and enthusiasts that have operated outside the orbits of traditional collecting institutions to help preserve hist significant facet of our cultural heritage. For example, the International Graffiti Archive, which seeks to preserve “aspects of a culture compromised by the debate of its legality,” holds over 25,000 images of illegal graffiti from 13 countries. The Wooster Collective and Street Art Utopia highlight and curate online content and offline programming related to ephemeral art from all over the world. Some of these efforts, such as Art Crimes and Fatcap, have been around since the early 1990s; Art Crimes even partnered with the Internet Archive and others to create a preservation web archive of their material back in 2015. Descriptive practices and the quality of metadata in these crowdsourced collections varies widely. On one hand, the International Graffiti Archive offers relatively little description other than an artist name (if known) and broad geographic location, including country and city. Other collections are extensively curated; Fatcap, for example, includes many different filtering options for artist based on name, career stage, specialty, or even “diversity” (i.e. female artists and underrepresented artists), or for artwork by technique, style, content, medium, or category (i.e. mural, graffiti, installation, abstract). 

As it stands, documentation of street art in mainstream archival institutions is sort of hit-or-miss. For example, a cursory search in ArchivesGrid using a variety of terms, from “street art” to “graffiti” to "protest art", reveals a hodgepodge of records scattered throughout disparate institutions and collections, but many of these materials either aren’t digitized (potentially due to legal or copyright concerns) or are not easily discernible from available finding aids and description. I suspect that this latter issue could be in part due to a lack of consensus over terminology and inadequate or inconsistent levels of description across varying institutions.

Although institutions have been collecting street art in its more portable formats for years now (especially with collections of protest posters and stickers), it was of course camera technology that allowed documentarians to engage in large-scale documentation of street-based artworks and graffiti. The difficulty of conserving large-scale physical artworks, the risk of severing creative expression from its context within the built landscape, and the creator’s potential resistance to the removal of their work from the street itself makes collecting street art a rather complex endeavor. In April 2014, Carmen Cowick administered a survey for cultural heritage practitioners to better grasp the extent of street art documentation practices in institutional archives, libraries, and museums. Her research illuminated four central obstacles that prevented more widespread collecting of ephemeral art. First, the fleeting and ephemeral nature of these records; second, insufficient metadata due to the anonymous nature of much street art expression; third, concerns about how to document a form of expression that is considered to be illegal in many circles; and finally, concerns about how to capture the unique “in-situ” context of street art, which more than other types of records are very much contextualized by the physical space and place of its appearance (Cowick, “Preserving Street Art: Uncovering the Challenges and Obstacles,” pgs 41-42). I would add to this list issues surrounding copyright and the ever-present question of resources allotted by library budgets to carry out this kind of work.

Challenges notwithstanding, it is possible to find street art in the archives. Sometimes these records are embedded within larger existing collections. For example, the Cornell Hip Hop Collection contains over 250,000 items documenting the origins of Hip Hop culture, including the International Graffiti Times archive; Cornell also has a sticker collection featuring a number of prominent New York City street and sticker artists. In other collections, street art comprises the bulk of, if not the entirety, of a collection, such as in the East Bay Graffiti Photograph Collection housed at my home institution, University of California, Berkeley. Some universities house collections of graffiti and other street art found on campus buildings or in their surrounding communities. A personal favorite collection of mine is St. Lawrence University’s Street Art Graphics Collection. This collection celebrates that which is “ubiquitous in urban centers around the world…grace[s] every imaginable surface of the built environment…[and] address[es] both the personal and the political” (St. Lawrence University: Street Art Graphics, ARTSTOR). Curated by Catherine Tedford, the director of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University, the collection features materials from over forty different countries and demonstrates the evolution of urban art from graffiti into another democratic, accessible, and publicly engaging art form offering alternative points of view: the humble graphic sticker. Detailed descriptions for each sticker appear in the online catalog, which help to contextualize the work and/or artist. 

A collection that movingly illustrates the connection between street art and social/political project movements is the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database, part of the Urban Art Mapping Project based at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Wide ranging and international in scope, this crowdsourced collection includes images of protest graffiti, signs, street murals, stickers, and other graphics related to the police murder of George Floyd as well as other instances of police violence; collection materials are searchable on a map and also thematically divided into categories such as “Anti-Racism & Social Justice,” “Hope, Unity, and Community,” and “Policing,” and “Political Statements and Structural Critique.” The use of descriptive tags is, as with other street art collections, an important way of organizing and finding related materials. 

Above: Geoffrey Krawczyk. 2011-2014. Occupy Everywhere -- United States Covered In Blood. Sticker. Below: 2011. العدالة الاجتماعية - Social Justice. Political sticker. Courtesy of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery.

Reno Street Art Stories - Andres "Vaka" Martinez. University of Nevada, Reno, University Libraries.

Marissa Friedman is Digital Project Archivist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her background includes archival processing, metadata and digitization projects, oral history, and exhibition development, and she holds both an MLIS from San Jose State University and a M.A. in History from the University of California, Riverside.