The Best Urban Street Art and Graffiti Images: Examples and Collections

Graffiti and signature 'tags' are only a small part of a growing and evolving set of amazing urban street art forms. This article will guide you to great places to start leaning about and seeing amazing street art online. For starters, here is one of the best sites to get a window into an amazing and diverse collection of street art. Alternatively, you could begin by looking into one of the most famous currently active street artists. Either way, it is important to keep an open mind - street art means more than just spray paint on a wall.

Certainly, some compelling street art images involve graffiti and spray paint. Still, the more successful of these do more than simply show the tag of the person who wrote them or a pop-cultural image. Some of these quite skillfully (if subtly) play with the boundaries of the street art form. These, in turn, suggest that the rules of street art - like any good art form - are related to context and materiality. At the same time, though, the most successful examples of street art break the boundaries of time and place and cause people to rethink their circumstances.

Good street art can also play with architectural forms and perspective. There are some incredible intances of sidewalk chalk art that creates illusions of depth and complexity on a two-dimensional public surface. There are also examples of similar street art applied to exterior walls, again creating a three-dimensional illusion on a flat surface. It seems very clear that these examples in particular rely on and respond to their context, and wouldn't work as anything but street art.

Still, all of these examples so far are easily categorized as 'street art'. Other examples push even that seemingly straightforward categorization. For example, some street art has an overtly social message. Other street artists have made an art of actually cleaning public surfaces rather than adding a layer of graffiti. So, street art is definitely not just limited to graffiti - it can even be just the opposite!

Of course, there are other forms of street art and other urban modes of expression that could be considered street art. For a list of frequently updated and related resources it is worth looking at community-based sits like Wikipedia or the open-source DMOZ. Of course, as this article demostrates, the internet has breathed new life into street art - making it globally accessible to a broad audience of both street artists and interested 'patrons'.