49 Fun Facts About Graffiti

The word graffiti comes from an Italian word meaning what?

Scratched. Ancient graffiti were cut into walls with a sharp point, and archaeologists still use the rare singular, graffito, for a single inscription.

Some of the world's earliest erotic graffiti, carved about 2,500 years ago, were found on an island of which country?

Greece. The racy inscriptions were cut into rock on remote Astypalaia, showing that ordinary islanders could write before the Parthenon was built.

The Alexamenos graffito, made in Rome around AD 200, shows a crucified figure with which animal's head?

A donkey. The caption beside it reads 'Alexamenos worships his god', a jibe at a Christian found on a wall on the Palatine Hill.

Ancient visitors wrote hundreds of poems on the 'mirror wall' of Sigiriya, a rock fortress in which country?

Sri Lanka. Most of the verses date from the 8th to 10th centuries, and many are addressed to the women painted in the frescoes on the rock above.

The word graffiti entered English in 1851 to describe ancient wall scribbles found in the ruins of which city?

Pompeii. Volcanic ash sealed its walls in AD 79, so the scribbles survive as a rare record of the everyday Latin its people actually spoke.

The 'Kilroy was here' doodle spread worldwide in World War II through its use by whom?

American troops. They chalked it wherever they landed, and one popular legend has Stalin stepping out of a bathroom at the Potsdam Conference asking who Kilroy was.

James J. Kilroy, often credited with 'Kilroy was here', worked as what in a wartime shipyard?

A rivet inspector. He said he marked the phrase on ship sections he had checked, and shipyard officials backed his claim when a 1946 contest went looking for the real Kilroy.

The British version of the Kilroy doodle, a bald head peering over a wall, was known as what?

Mr Chad. He appeared beside captions such as 'Wot, no sugar?', a running grumble about wartime shortages and rationing.

Modern graffiti writing took root in New York City and which other US city?

Philadelphia. Its writers were bombing walls with their names in the mid-to-late 1960s, before New York's painted trains carried the style to the world.

Which writer, born Darryl McCray, is widely considered the world's first modern graffiti artist?

Cornbread. He wrote 'Cornbread Loves Cynthia' all along a classmate's route to school to win her over, and later even tagged an elephant at the zoo.

The number in the tag TAKI 183 came from what?

His street address. Taki, a diminutive of Demetrius, lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights and wrote the two together everywhere he went.

Which newspaper's 1971 profile, 'Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals', made the teenage tagger famous?

The New York Times. It reported that the 17-year-old, who wrote his name everywhere he went, had already inspired hundreds of imitators across the city.

What is a large, elaborate, letter-based graffiti work done with spray paint or rollers called?

A piece. Short for masterpiece, it takes far longer to paint than a tag, so pulling one off in a risky spot earns a writer more respect.

Which American novelist championed New York's teenage graffiti writers as artists in his 1974 essay The Faith of Graffiti?

Norman Mailer. A publisher showed him Jon Naar's photographs of painted walls and trains, and he answered with an essay arguing that their work was real art.

Which New York mayor, seen in the 1983 documentary Style Wars, attacked subway graffiti as a public blight?

Ed Koch. A sworn foe of the writers, he ringed the train yards with barbed-wire fences patrolled by guard dogs.

The 1983 documentary Style Wars, directed by Tony Silver, first aired on which network?

PBS. Shot for public television, it became the defining record of early hip hop, catching writers, breakdancers and rappers before the wider world had noticed.

Which photographer co-created the 1984 graffiti book Subway Art with Henry Chalfant?

Martha Cooper. Their book caught the painted trains before the city scrubbed them clean, and it became known as the graffiti movement's 'bible'.

Which 1982 Charlie Ahearn film about a Bronx graffiti writer is regarded as the first hip hop movie?

Wild Style. Ahearn cast real writers, rappers and breakdancers rather than actors, with train-painting legend Lee Quiñones as a celebrated but anonymous graffiti star.

Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quiñones famously covered a New York subway train with giant cans of what?

Campbell's Soup. It was Freddy's homage to Andy Warhol's soup-can paintings, planned for months and sprayed across an entire train.

Fab 5 Freddy is name-checked by Debbie Harry in which 1981 Blondie number one?

Rapture. Freddy had taken Debbie Harry and Chris Stein to see the Bronx rap scene, and the song they wrote about it became the first US number one to feature rapping.

Under which tag, shared with Al Diaz, did a young Jean-Michel Basquiat write cryptic epigrams around Manhattan?

SAMO. Short for 'same old', it started as a stoned private joke between the two schoolfriends and grew into slogans sprayed across SoHo and the East Village.

Basquiat's Untitled (1982), which sold for $110.5 million in 2017, is dominated by which image?

A skull. A collector had paid $19,000 for it in 1984; Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa's 2017 bid was then the most ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist.

Keith Haring first drew attention with white chalk drawings on unused black ad panels where?

Subway stations. Haring called the subway his 'laboratory', and commuters who caught him at work would stop to talk about the drawings.

Which image did Keith Haring use as a tag until it became his most recognised symbol?

Radiant Baby. Haring drew the crawling infant ringed with rays of light so often, beside his barking dogs and dancing figures, that New Yorkers came to know his work on sight.

Keith Haring's 1986 mural visible from New York's FDR Drive carried what anti-drug slogan?

Crack Is Wack. Haring painted it without permission and was fined for it, but after a vandal reworded the mural the parks commissioner invited him back to repaint it.

Which Ecuador-born woman made her name painting New York subway trains as a teenager?

Lady Pink. Sandra Fabara began tagging at 15 to get over losing a boyfriend, then spent 1979 to 1985 painting New York's subway trains.

Dondi White's most famous work, Children of the Grave Parts 1 to 3, was painted on what?

Whole subway cars. Each painting in the series ran top to bottom across an entire car, at a time when most rivals were settling for quick throw-ups.

Xavier Prou, the Parisian 'father of stencil graffiti', began in 1981 by stencilling which animal on city walls?

Rats. Prou, who works as Blek le Rat, called the rat the one free animal living in every city, and liked that 'rat' is an anagram of 'art'.

After his 1991 arrest, Paris stencil pioneer Xavier Prou switched from spraying walls to what?

Pasting up posters. Stencilling them beforehand makes the work quicker to put up and brings a lighter penalty; police had caught him copying a Caravaggio Madonna onto a wall.

Banksy's work grew out of the underground scene of which English city?

Bristol. He started there as a freehand graffiti writer in the early 1990s and moved to stencils around 2000 because they let him work faster.

Banksy says he switched to stencils after spotting stencilled lettering while hiding from police under what?

A truck. Lying under it for over an hour with engine oil dripping on him, he decided he had to halve his painting time, then noticed the stencilled plate above his face.

Which Banksy canvas began shredding itself moments after selling at Sotheby's in 2018?

Girl with Balloon. A shredder hidden in the frame cut half of it to ribbons, and the remains, renamed Love Is in the Bin, resold in 2021 for more than £18 million.

Banksy's 2015 'bemusement park' in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare was called what?

Dismaland. A dark send-up of Disneyland billed as 'unsuitable for children', it ran for five weeks before its timber was sent to build refugee shelters in Calais.

In 2017 Banksy financed the Walled Off Hotel, which stands beside the separation barrier in which city?

Bethlehem. Every bedroom faces the barrier, and Banksy billed it as having 'the worst view of any hotel in the world'.

Banksy's Devolved Parliament, sold at Sotheby's in 2019, shows MPs in the Commons as what?

Chimpanzees. The four-metre canvas went for nearly five times its estimate, and Banksy posted that it was a 'shame I didn't still own it'.

In Banksy's film Exit Through the Gift Shop, obsessive cameraman Thierry Guetta reinvents himself as which street artist?

Mr. Brainwash. His first Los Angeles show made him an instant success, with art selling for six figures, and left viewers wondering whether Banksy had staged the whole thing.

A famous Berlin Wall mural shows which Soviet leader kissing Erich Honecker?

Leonid Brezhnev. Dmitri Vrubel copied a 1979 press photograph of the two leaders' socialist fraternal kiss onto a surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall in 1990.

Shepard Fairey's 1989 sticker campaign, which grew into the OBEY brand, featured which wrestler?

Andre the Giant. The sticker read 'Andre the Giant Has a Posse', and skateboarders and graffiti writers carried it from city to city.

Shepard Fairey's first 2008 Obama posters carried which word in place of the famous HOPE?

PROGRESS. The first few hundred posters carried it, then word came that the campaign wanted to push 'hope', so Fairey switched and that version became the icon.

The 5 Pointz aerosol art centre, a warehouse complex covered in graffiti until 2013, stood in which New York borough?

Queens. The owner had let writers cover the Long Island City warehouses since the 1990s, creating what their lawyer called 'the world's largest open-air aerosol museum'.

What did 5 Pointz's owner do to its graffiti in 2013 that cost him $6.7 million?

Whitewashed it overnight. A jury found he had broken the Visual Artists Rights Act, and in 2018 a judge awarded 21 artists the maximum damages for 45 destroyed murals.

American student Michael Fay was caned in 1994 for spray-painting cars in which country?

Singapore. After President Clinton appealed for leniency, the sentence was cut from six strokes of the cane to four.

IBM's 2001 guerrilla campaign spray-painted a peace sign, a heart and which software mascot on city sidewalks?

Tux the Linux penguin. The stencilled trio stood for 'Peace, Love and Linux', and IBM ended up paying Chicago and San Francisco more than $120,000 in fines and clean-up costs.

Reverse graffiti artists such as Britain's 'Moose' make their images on city walls by doing what?

Cleaning away the dirt. Paul 'Moose' Curtis scrubs his designs into grimy walls and tunnels, and when a Leeds councillor called it vandalism he replied that all he was doing was cleaning.

Hosier Lane, an alley whose walls are covered in ever-changing street art, is a tourist draw in which Australian city?

Melbourne. The city's laneways became known worldwide for stencil art in the early 2000s, and Hosier Lane's painted walls are now a favourite backdrop for wedding photos.

Which Romantic poet's carved name survives on a column of the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion?

Lord Byron. He visited Sounion twice in 1810–11 and later wrote of 'Sunium's marbled steep', though nothing proves he carved the name himself.

Pichação, a protest graffiti style of tall cryptic characters, comes from which country?

Brazil. São Paulo's most daring pichadores scale high-rise facades at night to paint their rune-like letters at the very top, and some have fallen to their deaths.

In 2005, which company paid building owners in US cities to carry graffiti-style ads for its new games console?

Sony. Its spray-painted PSP ads of dizzy-eyed kids never named the product, and locals answered by scrawling 'Fony' and 'Get out of my city' over them.

After John Lennon's death in 1980, which communist-ruled city gained a 'Lennon Wall' of graffiti tributes and protest slogans?

Prague. Fans painted Lennon's face and lines from his songs on a wall by the Maltese Gardens, and slogans attacking the totalitarian regime soon joined them.