Painting and writing on walls is nothing new. In prehistoric times, people in Africa and Europe painted pictures of animals and people in caves. Graffiti has been found at ancient sites in Greece, Italy, Syria and Iraq. In the Roman town of Pompeii in Italy, archaeologists found a lot of graffiti written in Latin, including political and romantic messages, and even some magic spells!
In the 1970s, young people in New York used pens to write their names, or "tags", on walls around the city. One of the first "taggers" was Demetrius, a teenager from a Greek family. He wrote his tag on walls in his neighborhood on the way to school. Other teenagers saw Demetrius's tag and started writing their own tags on walls, buses and subway trains all over New York. Then, some teenagers stopped using pens and started using paints. Their tags were bigger and more colorful and appeared on trains, buses and walls around the city. In the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of graffiti artists started to draw pictures on buildings in public places.
In many countries, it is a crime to paint on public walls and street artists can have problems with the police. In some other countries, street art is permitted in certain places. Nowadays, street art is more popular with the public. In some cities, there are street art festivals. In Bristol in the UK, there is a street art festival in August every year. Artists paint all the buildings in a street. Lots of people come to watch the artists and take photos. Street art can be seen in galleries too. There have been exhibitions of street art in galleries in Paris, London and Los Angeles.
Most street artists are young people who paint in their neighborhood or home city. Many of them use the Internet to communicate and share photos of their pictures with other street artists around the world. Although we don't know what will happen to street art in the future, we can be sure that it is here to stay!
