In Wall Writers: Graffiti in its Innocence, Roger Gastman’s seminal documentary on the pioneers of 1960’s graffiti, Cornbread relates how the jail’s guards would ask for his autograph, noting with pride: “My name rang like Jesus Christ.” But even there, Cornbread claims, his reputation followed him. In a bold display that would forever cement his status as an icon of 1960’s graffiti, Cornbread snuck into the Philadelphia Zoo, hopped a fence, and painted “Cornbread Lives” on both sides of an elephant. “I knew it was up to me to bring my name back to life,” he told Philadelphia Weekly. When a local paper mistakenly reported that Cornbread had been killed in a gang shooting, the prideful young writer was determined to prove the legend was still alive. The plan worked, and Cornbread’s enigmatic tag soon inspired others, the city’s walls growing dense with various names and numbers, each writer trying to snag their share of the glory. He even used the blank brick canvases of North Philadelphia to win over his junior high crush, writing “Cornbread Loves Cynthia” all over the girl’s neighborhood and along the bus route she took to school. He took to the streets of Philadelphia, joining forces with friends (and future graffiti legends) like Cool Earl and Kool Klepto Kid to tag walls across the city. Upon his release, Cornbread doubled-down on the work he’d started in juvie. He tagged the visitor hall, chow hall, church, and bathrooms, writing “Cornbread” so obsessively that social workers thought he might be suffering from a mental disorder. ![]() Rather than take part in the drug use and violence that ran rampant at the YDC, Cornbread passed the time by adding his unique signature to the facility’s walls, which, until then, had been covered exclusively in gang names and symbols.Ĭornbread spent day and night hunting for fresh spots, scrawling his newly-acquired moniker on nearly every surface in the YDC. Instantly taken with his new name, Cornbread felt compelled to share it with the other boys. He loved it so much, in fact, that the YDC’s cooks nicknamed him “Cornbread” when he would not stop pestering them to make him the cornmeal quick bread he’d grown up eating with his grandmother. In 1965, Darryl “Cornbread” McCray, now widely considered the world’s first modern graffiti artist, was a 12-year-old troublemaker housed at Philadelphia’s Youth Development Center (YDC).Īs you may have guessed, McCray loved cornbread. Ĭornbread & The Unlikely Beginnings of Modern Graffiti Art Indeed, long before the giant murals, fashion runways, larger-than-life art shows and unlikely street art millionaires, modern graffiti art got its start in the belly of a Philadelphia juvenile corrections facility, with a single word scrawled in small caps across a cell wall: C ORN B READ. ![]() ![]() Given the monumental influence graffiti art has had on our popular culture, from music, film, and television to fine art, toys, and clothing, it’s easy to forget the form’s humble roots and remarkable evolution - how what started as a way for bored kids to pass the time grew into a movement larger than anyone could possibly have imagined.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |