Street Art Today

And Yesterday

- Martyn Reed

MARTYN REED IS THE FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF the annual Nuart Festival, one of the most forward-thinking, progressive street art festivals in the world. Juxtapoz has invited Martyn to pen a column each month about the historical lineage and origins of contemporary street art, examining its nuances and the major figures who have intervened to make the art movement one of the most enduring in modern times. —Juxtapoz

My personal relationship to art, and, in particular, street art, is a typical story of “from rags to polyester”—an artless childhood steeped in poverty, deprivation, bad schooling, domestic violence and urban blight. For most of us, the light at the end of the tunnel is nothing more than a miner’s lamp at the local colliery, as mining is the predominant industry in the north of England. For the younger ones, of which I was one, raised on dilapidated trailer trash council estates, it was a life of vandalism, violence, shoplifting and petty crime. Graffiti was to come a short time later, and anyone too young for punk, with more than a passing interest in drawing, other than on their schoolbag, would be swept along in this revolutionary new youth culture.

Most communities ravaged by government neglect and a poverty of public and domestic attention contain the seeds of hope that constitute subcultures. They just need adequate water, and ironically, the water that nurtured the seed of my own engagement with art, was fire.