The Aerosol Age: Martha Cooper, Dondi, Zephyr, and the Roots of an Art Movement

It starts with a sound: the metallic click-clack of a ball bearing inside a rattling spraycan. In the dead of night in 1970s New York City, that sound wasn't just noise. It was the anthem of an art form being born.

The city was broke, gritty, and crumbling. But for a new generation of kids, its thousands of elevated subway trains weren't a sign of urban decay. They were 10-car-long, blank, steel canvases.

This environment, combined with a cheap, portable, and fast new tool, the aerosol spraycan, gave birth to graffiti. It was a raw, competitive, and vibrant movement that would eventually take over the world. This wasn't just vandalism; it was a generation claiming public space, forging its own identity, and screaming to the world: "I exist."

The Very Beginning: Getting Up

Before the massive, colorful "pieces" that covered entire cars, there was the "tag." It was just a name, a signature. Pioneers like TAKI 183 and JULIO 204 became urban legends, their names appearing in all five boroughs. The goal was simple: "all-city" fame.

The spraycan was the key. It allowed for a visual language impossible with a brush—flares, fades, and sharp lines. It was the perfect tool for a culture built on speed and style.

The Kings of the Line:

The Style Masters

This is where simple tags exploded into complex art. A new generation of artists, or "writers," emerged from the train yards, competing not just for how many cars they could hit, but how well they could do it.

Dondi (Dondi White) was the undisputed "Style Master." He was a true innovator, taking lettering to an architectural level. He created complex, interlocking 3D letters and "wildstyle" that was a masterpiece to other writers, even if it was unreadable to outsiders. Dondi was a bridge, dominating the subways while also being one of the first to be taken seriously by the downtown art galleries.

Alongside him was Zephyr, another major style-setter. Known for his clean, flowing, and dynamic letterforms, Zephyr (part of the famed "Rolling Thunder Writers" crew) was also instrumental in the graffiti-to-gallery movement. He helped prove to a skeptical art world that what was happening on the trains had a place on canvas.

And then there was Seen, "The Godfather of Graffiti." Seen was the master of the full-car. His work was prolific, bold, and loud, often featuring vibrant colors and cartoon characters that took over the entire train. His pieces were a moving spectacle for millions of New Yorkers, forcing the city to look.

The Documentarian:

How the World Saw It

There was one problem: this art was temporary. Trains were cleaned (or "buffed"), and pieces were painted over. The movement could have been lost to history.

Enter Martha Cooper. Her role was crucial. She didn't just take pictures of the art; she captured the culture. She climbed fences, hung out at the "writers' bench," and photographed the artists, like Dondi, in action.

Her 1984 book Subway Art (co-authored with Henry Chalfant) became the "Bible of Graffiti." It was this book that spread the New York subway style globally. A kid in Berlin, London, or Sydney could open its pages, study the styles of Dondi and Seen, and start painting. Cooper’s work is the single biggest reason for graffiti's worldwide influence.

The Bridge: From Street to SoHo

As the subway writers were perfecting their craft uptown, a different kind of street art was brewing in the downtown art district of SoHo.

Jean-Michel Basquiat didn't come from the subway "style-writing" tradition. His graffiti, as SAMO© (for "Same Old Shit"), was conceptual. It was poetry and sharp social commentary phrases like "SAMO© AS AN END TO BLAH BLAH BLAH" scrawled on gallery-district walls.

Basquiat took the raw energy and immediacy of the street and combined it with a neo-expressionist style. He proved that the generation "raised" by graffiti had a voice the high-art world couldn't ignore. He took the "vandal" label and turned it into "genius," becoming one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century.

The Legacy in a Can

The spraycan was more than a tool; it was a megaphone for a generation with no other platform.

It started as a fight for fame on a subway car. It was captured and amplified by a dedicated photographer (Cooper). And its raw, untamed energy was translated onto canvas, Basquiat crashed the gates of the high-art world.

This was just the beginning. That "vandalism" from the 70s created the DNA for the global street art, fashion, and design that we see everywhere today. The revolution was, and still is, in the can.