MIAMI — As Art Basel and its satellite shows bring art to South Florida, Miami’s Museum of Graffiti is spotlighting a movement the city is famous for: graffiti and street art. The museum, in Wynwood — a neighborhood famous for its bold outdoor murals — bills itself as the world’s first museum devoted exclusively to graffiti and street art.
One early display inside the museum highlights an artist’s tool rather than finished work: vintage Rust-Oleum spray cans. Founder and curator Alan Ket lifts a can and notes its year: “This is a Cascade green Rust-Oleum paint… from 1973.” Collectors today may pay around $1,000 for such a can; Ket explains the shade’s appeal to graffiti artists and how a specific color could transform a rusty train car into something striking.
Ket opened the museum six years ago to chronicle the movement that began in the 1960s and 1970s, when teenagers in New York first began spray-painting their names on city surfaces. One of those teenagers is Jon Perello, known as JonOne, now 61. JonOne lives in France and has painted everything from an Air France jet to a Hennessy cognac label, but he started nearly 50 years ago tagging buildings and subway cars. “I didn’t have no money, so I was stealing all my spray paint,” he says, calling those early cans his first “grant.”
JonOne recalls beginning in Washington Heights and gradually making more elaborate pieces, especially on subway cars. For him, trains were “like an open gallery” — mobile canvases seen by commuters, tourists and people across the city. That public exposure made the work visible beyond neighborhood corners, even as authorities and many others labeled it vandalism. Over time, some artists moved their practice from trains and walls into studios and galleries.
The museum’s current Origins exhibition features works from a turning point in graffiti’s history: the 1973 Razor Gallery show, the first New York gallery exhibition to showcase these young artists. Ket calls that show the catalyst that gave street artists a viable path into the formal art world. In the decades since, graffiti has spread globally and earned attention from galleries, luxury brands, and municipal commissions. Artists once dismissed as vandals now attract prices once reserved for traditional fine art — figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy have reached multimillion-dollar sales — and graffiti artists are increasingly commissioned for large public projects.
Despite its popular appeal, Ket says street art still lacks full institutional recognition; major museums often mount temporary displays but are slower to incorporate it into permanent collections. The Museum of Graffiti aims to fill that gap by documenting the movement’s origins and evolution.
JonOne’s solo show runs at the Museum of Graffiti through June. The Origins exhibition, tracing the movement’s early days and featuring work from the seminal 1973 show, remains on view through the end of the year.