Graffiti Trivia
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49 free Graffiti trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Graffiti is older than the alphabet in some places and younger than the spray can in others, and this quiz runs the whole length of it. It starts with the ancient stuff: the word's Italian root, the oldest known graffito on a Greek island, the boasts and Sator squares of Pompeii, the donkey-headed crucifixion mocking a Christian named Alexamenos, the runes of Viking tourists and the mirror wall at Sigiriya. Then Kilroy, the shipyard inspector whose chalk mark went round the world. The core of the quiz is the modern movement: Cornbread in Philadelphia, TAKI 183 in the New York Times, tags, throw-ups, pieces and wildstyle, whole cars on the subway, Style Wars and Subway Art, Fab 5 Freddy's Campbell's soup train, Lee Quinones, Dondi, Lady Pink, and the downtown crossover of Basquiat and Keith Haring. Then it crosses the Atlantic to Blek le Rat's stencilled rats, Banksy's shredded auction lot, Dismaland and Exit Through the Gift Shop, the East Side Gallery, Shepard Fairey's Obey and Hope, and finishes with 5Pointz, Michael Fay's caning, IBM's penguin fine and the Illinois man who put paint in a spray can in 1949. Easy questions suit anyone who has noticed a tag on a wall; the expert tier is for writers and street-art historians. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on graffiti, street art and the artists involved, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word graffiti comes from an Italian word meaning what?
Scratched
Scratched. Ancient graffiti were cut into walls with a sharp point, and archaeologists still use the rare singular, graffito, for a single inscription.
Q 02Some of the world's earliest erotic graffiti, carved about 2,500 years ago, were found on an island of which country?
Greece
Greece. The racy inscriptions were cut into rock on remote Astypalaia, showing that ordinary islanders could write before the Parthenon was built.
Q 03The Alexamenos graffito, made in Rome around AD 200, shows a crucified figure with which animal's head?
A donkey
A donkey. The caption beside it reads 'Alexamenos worships his god', a jibe at a Christian found on a wall on the Palatine Hill.
Q 04Ancient visitors wrote hundreds of poems on the 'mirror wall' of Sigiriya, a rock fortress in which country?
Sri Lanka
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.
Q 05The word graffiti entered English in 1851 to describe ancient wall scribbles found in the ruins of which city?
Pompeii
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.
Q 06The 'Kilroy was here' doodle spread worldwide in World War II through its use by whom?
American troops
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.
Q 07James J. Kilroy, often credited with 'Kilroy was here', worked as what in a wartime shipyard?
A rivet inspector
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.
Q 08The British version of the Kilroy doodle, a bald head peering over a wall, was known as what?
Mr Chad
Mr Chad. He appeared beside captions such as 'Wot, no sugar?', a running grumble about wartime shortages and rationing.
Q 09Modern graffiti writing took root in New York City and which other US city?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 10Which writer, born Darryl McCray, is widely considered the world's first modern graffiti artist?
Cornbread
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.
Q 11The number in the tag TAKI 183 came from what?
His street address
His street address. Taki, a diminutive of Demetrius, lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights and wrote the two together everywhere he went.
Q 12Which newspaper's 1971 profile, 'Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals', made the teenage tagger famous?
The New York Times
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.
Q 13What is a large, elaborate, letter-based graffiti work done with spray paint or rollers called?
A piece
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.
Q 21Under which tag, shared with Al Diaz, did a young Jean-Michel Basquiat write cryptic epigrams around Manhattan?
SAMO
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.
Q 22Basquiat's Untitled (1982), which sold for $110.5 million in 2017, is dominated by which image?
A skull
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.
Q 23Keith Haring first drew attention with white chalk drawings on unused black ad panels where?
Subway stations
Q 14Which American novelist championed New York's teenage graffiti writers as artists in his 1974 essay The Faith of Graffiti?
Norman Mailer
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.
Q 15Which New York mayor, seen in the 1983 documentary Style Wars, attacked subway graffiti as a public blight?
Ed Koch
Ed Koch. A sworn foe of the writers, he ringed the train yards with barbed-wire fences patrolled by guard dogs.
Q 16The 1983 documentary Style Wars, directed by Tony Silver, first aired on which network?
PBS
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.
Q 17Which photographer co-created the 1984 graffiti book Subway Art with Henry Chalfant?
Martha Cooper
Martha Cooper. Their book caught the painted trains before the city scrubbed them clean, and it became known as the graffiti movement's 'bible'.
Q 18Which 1982 Charlie Ahearn film about a Bronx graffiti writer is regarded as the first hip hop movie?
Wild Style
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.
Q 19Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quiñones famously covered a New York subway train with giant cans of what?
Campbell's Soup
Campbell's Soup. It was Freddy's homage to Andy Warhol's soup-can paintings, planned for months and sprayed across an entire train.
Q 20Fab 5 Freddy is name-checked by Debbie Harry in which 1981 Blondie number one?
Rapture
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.
Subway stations. Haring called the subway his 'laboratory', and commuters who caught him at work would stop to talk about the drawings.
Q 24Which image did Keith Haring use as a tag until it became his most recognised symbol?
Radiant Baby
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.
Q 25Keith Haring's 1986 mural visible from New York's FDR Drive carried what anti-drug slogan?
Crack Is Wack
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.
Q 26Which Ecuador-born woman made her name painting New York subway trains as a teenager?
Lady Pink
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.
Q 27Dondi White's most famous work, Children of the Grave Parts 1 to 3, was painted on what?
Whole subway cars
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.
Q 28Xavier Prou, the Parisian 'father of stencil graffiti', began in 1981 by stencilling which animal on city walls?
Rats
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'.
Q 29After his 1991 arrest, Paris stencil pioneer Xavier Prou switched from spraying walls to what?
Pasting up posters
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.
Q 30Banksy's work grew out of the underground scene of which English city?
Bristol
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.