Bristol: Forty Years of Graffiti Arts - Part 1/3 - Where It All Began

A three-part series of articles on Bristol street art history for the excellent New-York-based UP Magazine

- part I: https://upmag.com/bristol-history/

Bristol: Forty Years of Graffiti Arts

Melissa Chemam May 23, 2023

As the Saatchi Gallery in London celebrates four decade of Graffiti history, Melissa Chemam retraces the history of the artists who emerged from Bristol, in this three-part series.

 

Bristol: Forty Years of Graffiti Arts - Where It All Began

Being based between Paris, London and Bristol since 2014, I’ve been working at
re-tracing the evolution of graffiti into street art, through the experience of artists
from the three cities.

These include Inkie, Banksy, Nick Walker, Goldie, eL Seed, and Robert Del Naja,
aka 3D, whose work at the centre of my book on Bristol, Out of the Comfort Zone 
(Anne Carrière, 2016, and Tangent Books, 2019). He was the first graffiti artist in
Bristol and one of the first in the UK.

To me, it’s obvious that Bristol had a key role in building up a platform for street
artists and for graffiti art from the early days, in 1983.

Since, the city’s artists contributed really interestingly to the scene, up to the making
of the most famous and most anonymous street artist in the world: Banksy.

If Banksy is the most talked about, and 3D the pioneer, Bristol never stopped
providing new graffiti writers and street artists.

In this series of three articles, I’m going to retrace the journey of this scene, through
their work of artists.

 

3D – Photo by Beezer

Thanks to UP Magazine.

Melissa Chemam is a writer and journalist, author of a book on Bristol’s music
and art scene, Massive Attack – Out of the Comfort Zone, published in March 2019
by Tangent Books.

She worked as a reporter from Europe, the Americas and Africa, for the BBC World
Service, DW, CBC, RFI, Art UK, Skin Deep, and more recently the New Arab.

Instagram: @melissaontheroad

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/melissachemam