World Atlas of Street Art

This truly global and visually stunning  compendium showcases some of the most breath-taking pieces of street art and graffiti from around the world. Since its genesis on the East Coast of the United States in the late 1960s, street art has travelled to nearly every corner of the globe, morphing into highly ornate and vibrant new styles. This unique atlas is the first truly geographical survey of urban art, revised and updated in 2023 to include new voices, increased female representation and cities emerging as street art hubs. Featuring specially commissioned works from major graffiti and street art practitioners, it offers you an insider’s view of the urban landscape as the artists themselves experience it. Organized geographically, by continent and by city – from New York, Los Angeles and Montreal in North America, through Mexico City and Buenos Aires in Latin America, to London, Berlin and Madrid in Europe, Sydney and Auckland in the Pacific, as well as brand new chapters covering Africa and Asia – it profiles more than 100 of today’s most important artists and features over 700 astonishing artworks. This beautifully illustrated book, produced with the help of many of the artists it features, dispels the idea of such art as a thoughtless defacement of pristine surfaces, and instead celebrates it as a contemporary and highly creative inscription upon the skin of the built environment.

Dr Rafael Schacter is an anthropologist and curator from London. He co-curated the ‘Street Art’ exhibition at Tate Modern, London, in 2008. He has written for a variety of publications and has lectured on Independent Public Art around the world. His ethnography, Ornament and Order, is based on an ongoing engagement as well as more than two years’ in-depth fieldwork with some of the world’s most important Independent Public Artists.Working across art-making and academia over three decades, Lachlan MacDowall is a scholar of graffiti, street art and digital culture, best known for pioneering research methods that mix genres, images and data. As a writer and photographer, he has pioneered new methods to register the complexity of graffiti and street art, including its rise as cultural heritage, challenges to documentation and photographic practices, the uses of bio-social paradigms, the analysis of data-rich environments and its connection to white supremacism and the alt-right.  He has published widely on the history and aesthetics of graffiti and street art, including in his most recent books Instafame: Graffiti and Street Art in the Instagram Era (2019) published by Intellect Books and the University of Chicago Press and (with Kylie Budge) Art After Instagram: Art Spaces, Audiences, Aesthetics (2022) published by Routledge. His work has been translated into French and Italian. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia and a Senior Research Fellow (Hon) in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.