Takin' It To The Streets

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At its best, street art repositions the public space around it, making it a place where cryptic little messages are offered to those who care to see them. Even an image that might not resonate much on its own--a flower, a cartoon bunny--sends out a different frequency when it shows up on a banged-up city block. Although it sometimes appears in the suburbs, street art is mostly a city format, borrowing its images from the primordial ooze of video games, advertising, science fiction, skateboard decals, porn and politics. Masked gunmen, spacemen and George W. Bush are all major motifs.

Street art is also in part an outgrowth of earlier developments in the wider art world, among them conceptual art, performance art and even earthworks, all of which took art out of the galleries and museums and, not incidentally, validated perishable artistic gestures--the performance preserved only on video, the leaf sculpture that crumbles in the breeze. A lot of street art lasts only a few months before it succumbs to the elements, is covered over by other works or is taken away ("buffed" is the term). "I've had dogs s___ on my work," says Leon Reid, a.k.a. Darius Jones, 26, who makes tiny anthropomorphic figures out of bricks that he mostly places at ground level. "I've had people lock their bikes to pieces I've made. But I guess that's part of what this is all about."

Street artists see their imagery as a counterforce to the ubiquitous world of outdoor advertising. But with its canny repetition of images, it's not so different. A handful of street artists has even parlayed the popularity of their images into design or merchandising businesses. Fifteen years ago, pioneer Shepard Fairey, 35, hit upon what may be the best known of all street-art images, a black-and-white face of the late professional wrestler Andre the Giant with OBEY printed beneath. In a world in which we all feel subordinate to something, it was the ultimate generic image of creepy domination. It's now on T shirts, bags and a belt buckle that has been spotted on Ashton Kutcher. Today Fairey has a graphic-design firm, a gallery space and a licensing deal for Obey clothing, posters and stickers.

He's not the only one moving into galleries. Swoon, 27, makes intricate figurative images that she wheat-pastes to walls. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art acquired six of her pieces this past summer. "We were astounded," says Deborah Wye, chief curator of MOMA's department of prints. "She was using very traditional printmaking techniques--woodcut and linoleum--that she had infused with this contemporary spirit." It's a spirit she takes from the street. And one she leaves behind there.

For more images of street art from the U.S. and Europe, visit time.com/streetart