Exploring street art and graffiti: art beyond gallery walls
- Akkta Panwar
- Sep 10
- 12 min read
Updated: Sep 14
Earlier this year, someone posted about going gallery hopping on a WhatsApp women’s group (Womensense Mumbai). The message got a lot of replies. I replied too, as the said activity is something that I have grown to love over the last few years. No sooner had I posted that I did in fact go gallery hopping every other month, did I get a flurry of DMs on my WhatsApp from around 22 strangers who wanted to accompany me on my next such outing. The optimist in me wondered if this was the beginning of another income stream for me as I wandered off into the near future, where I was now organizing these open-to-all walks bi-monthly. You cannot blame my entrepreneurial spirit that sees an opportunity and cooks up a business plan in thin air. But back to my WhatsApp for now, where I individually replied to each person saying that I did not organize walks “yet” but would be happy to share a map in case they wanted to explore it on a suitable day or could join me when I next went. The women were most excited that I even had a map (talk about being business-ready), and many wanted to begin their gallery hopping journey with me, simply because they had no idea what they needed to do to get into a gallery. “Are there tickets?”; “Is there a dress code?”; “Do I have to buy something?”; “Can I just go to a few?”; “What if I don’t understand anything?”—the questions continued all the way into the actual walk, where five women showed up, ready to step into a gallery, mostly for the first time and asked me more follow-up questions—“How did you begin?”; “How did you know where to go?”; “How did you learn to understand art?” and so on…
Until that crispy Mumbai morning, I had not even thought about most of these questions myself. “Do I understand art?”—I may have fallen into this trap early on in life, when I tried to understand art, but ever since I understood that it was meant to make me feel and not meant to be understood, I stopped trying so hard. I’ve also come to realise that anything can be art, and as far as how I began gallery hopping, well… that itself started with just hopping, from street to street and from city to city. But I’ll come to that a little later… first I want to tell you about my initial few gallery visits, that made me ask similar questions to what these women asked me.
There’s a very subtle, yet effective kind of gatekeeping that lives inside the glossy world of art galleries, at least that is the way it used to seem from my vantage point. The freshly coated white walls, the unspoken codes of how long you’re supposed to look at a particular piece, the eerie silence and dramatic lighting, and the sanitized and perfectly worded texts that seem to require a degree in art history to decipher—for many of us, it feels like stepping into a room where everyone except you, already knows the rules. And so, us common folks—the ones who might find joy, surprise, even solace in art, but maybe not the ability to invest in it anytime soon—we often stay away, building invisible walls between art and ourselves.
I remember my first few gallery visits. I thought I’d lose myself in the art and the wonderment associated with its whimsy, but instead I found myself hyperaware of everything around me. It felt as if all eyes were on me, instead of me being the watcher, I felt like the watched. Weren’t we supposed to look at the art? Then why was I feeling like being under scrutiny? My thoughts spiraled: I am not dressed like the others… I don’t even have money to buy a replica of any of these… I don’t know what this brushstroke is called. The walls that were meant to hold art suddenly felt like they were holding me at a distance.
It took me years—and many different kinds of walls—to break the discomfort that lingered between me and gallery spaces. The walls that freed me were out on the streets. They were open to anyone, waiting in the daylight or moonlight, patient enough for me to return as often as I wished. I could stand there in sneakers or sandals, in my most ordinary clothes, and feel the meaning of a wall shift with time. I could take dozens of photographs, and each would look different from the other because this was interactivity in art at its best.
I was, in many ways, art-educated by graffiti laced walls—by artists who themselves once felt they didn’t belong inside galleries. That sense of being othered has lived in the movement since its beginning, pushing artists to put their work where anyone could find it. Yet when I stand before a piece of graffiti, I don’t need to know any of this. I don’t need the history or the politics. For a few moments, the wall becomes mine. The art speaks directly to me, and in that instant, the watcher and the watched become one.
That is how my love affair with looking at art began—on the streets, moving from one wall to another, from one city to the next. And if, like me, you don’t know where to begin, start with the wall nearest to you. Somewhere, an artist who didn’t know where to begin showcasing their work either has already left something for you to pause for. All you have to do is to keep your eyes open and look sincerely.
Let me show you some of the walls that shaped this love affair...
Story from Jimmy C, about the above graffiti: "Danni used to manage the cafe on Fashion Street known as Joe’s Kid and she had asked me to paint the portrait based on a photo of herself aged 3 being held by her grandfather Joe, who had once owned a cafe around the corner back in the 1950’s. Danni eventually closed the cafe to move on to other ventures but the mural remained. I have received a lot of comments over the years regarding this mural and whenever it was tagged or damaged I would receive requests to repair it. I don’t repair all of my murals in the area and often leave them to their fate, but this one seems to have a particular significance for the locals. As I was repairing it today a local resident said to me, I have been walking down this street everyday for the last 9 years, and each time I see this painting it makes me smile. It is comments like this that encourage me to return to repair the mural."
I remember this piece being special way back in 2017 too, when my London Street Art walk host, Olivia spoke about it with so much passion and love as it defined the neighborhood in ways understood only by the local community. Thank you Olivia and Strawberry Tours. If you're in London and interested in walks around the city, do check them out, they are fabulous!
Let's get the technicalities out of the way:
A single street wall can hold many identities. A tag—bold letters, urgent, often illegal—speaks to other writers, a handshake across asphalt. A mural—vast, sanctioned, nestled into community identity—invites everyone to stop and feel. Street art sits somewhere in between: image-based work, often public-facing, commissioned or guerrilla, but always conversational. These distinctions matter not for strict definitions, but because they remind us of the choices made—who’s speaking, to whom, and why. It’s the difference between writing for your crew and painting for the crowd. If you see a full artist name on a wall, it’s often a sign the work was done with permission — though not always, since some writers claim space boldly regardless.
Where it all began:
The graffiti we know today really took shape in the late 1960s in Philadelphia. A teenager named Cornbread made himself famous by writing his name everywhere, even on the side of an elephant in the zoo. From there, the movement spread to New York, where young people, often shut out of traditional avenues of expression, turned subway cars into moving galleries. It was rebellion, but also a declaration of existence.
By the 1980s, graffiti had jumped continents. The Berlin Wall became a canvas for protest art, and Europe’s cities were suddenly alive with tags, stencils, and murals. What began as an act of defiance became, paradoxically, both criminalized and celebrated—condemned as vandalism while simultaneously being ushered into galleries and auction houses.
Today, graffiti and street art live everywhere. Banksy’s elusive stencils in London garner a 13.3Mn following for just 150 posts on Instagram; Blu’s sprawling murals in Italy are striking but even more striking is the social media description that says that they are not represented by any art gallery or art dealer; and I am sure you would have seen, if not heard of Lady Pink’s bold subway pieces in New York; or the political walls of São Paulo; Today graffiti and street art have grown into a global language. At its core, though, it remains the same: an act of claiming space, of transforming walls into conversation.
Representation in street art and graffiti:
These walls often speak of representation because graffiti has a way of putting up faces on the street that sometimes might not make it to a gallery frames. The dabbawallahs of Mumbai, the Black men in Harlem, the woman selling flowers at a street corner—they appear larger than life on walls because in real life they are almost invisible. For the under-represented, street art becomes a kind of stage, a place where they don’t just exist in the margins but take up the whole canvas. Out there, in public view, they get direct face time with the world—no ticket, no gallery pass, no gatekeeping. Just their presence as you do a grocery run or an actual 4K. Which is also perhaps why I still find it the most effortless way to interact with art and have been documenting it for years, and still go out for art walks, with or without any company.
Every wall creates a world within itself:
Another interesting aspect of a wall covered with graffiti and street art is that it ceases to be just a wall. The wall shape-shifts with the light, with the people walking by, with the chaos or quiet of the street it belongs to. In street photography, this mis-en-scène becomes everything—a single frame can hold the art, a vehicle against the wall, people sipping chai below it, a cloudy sky above and even how the trees and creepers interact with it. Come back the next day and it will be completely different. Even when the mural itself hasn’t changed, the city around it has—and with it, your image, your gaze, your memory of it. That is the thrill of looking at street art: it never stays still long enough to be only one thing. And that is why I sometimes keep going back to the same spot, to feel the change, and ask myself if I changed a little too from the last time I was there. Street art and the spaces it creates is my most favourite subject to photograph while I am strolling streets. And I do it strictly for myself, so there are no rules and no labels to honour, just vibes to follow. I now dedicate a little time in each city I visit, for just documenting the street, the art and the my own vibe on that trip.
Don't you also agree that the murals and street art look so much more defined and tell a story more evocatively when you see them against a foreground like in all the images above?
And I cannot not mention the BAP Project (Bollywood Art Project) by Ranjit Dahiya on the streets of Bandra, Mumbai; So here are some of the pieces that I have captured that keep popping up around the city. A thematic tribute to a city obsessed with cinema.
The legitimacy of street art and graffiti:
But my romanticism with street art aside, I often find myself arguing with a friend about the legitimacy of graffiti and street art. He calls it vandalism, a nuisance on the walls of cities already fighting to stay clean, while I clearly devour it as art. I hate to admit it, but he’s right in a way too. Graffiti has always been accused of trespassing, of writing where one isn’t invited. But maybe that’s the point. When you are denied a seat at the table, sometimes the only option is to build one for yourself.
History has shown us this over and over. In New York of the 1970s, young people from marginalized communities turned subway cars into moving galleries, their names and messages riding across boroughs that would otherwise never see them. On the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, graffiti became an international language of protest, a visible reminder that concrete cannot silence dissent. In São Paulo and Mexico City, sprawling murals blurred the line between art and activism, insisting that the street itself could be a canvas for democracy. And closer home, in my own city Mumbai, there are walls on the Lokhandwala backroad and in Versova where I see the frustration, pent up rage or the soul of a worn out artist/ would-be artist, sometimes with a discarded bathtub as an apt foreground. Each time, what began as “vandalism” revealed itself to be a mirror of society’s fractures—and its imagination.
Today, in 2025, the sentiment around graffiti still flickers between nuisance and necessity. Cities commission street art festivals while simultaneously fining young writers with spray cans. A Banksy can fetch millions in an auction house or be covered up by the local police, while the kid tagging a train car might be arrested that same night. For me, though, it remains what it has always been: a reminder that art is not always polite, nor contained, nor waiting behind gallery walls. Sometimes it is messy, insistent, and impossible to ignore—because someone, somewhere, decided the wall itself was the only place left to speak. And as long as there is street art, I will never be alone on the streets of any city I walk on.
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