Jayson Cooper's research while affiliated with Victoria University Melbourne and other places

... A broad category that encompasses and originates from graffiti and street art, urban art is on the rise more than ever before and becoming a pervasive element of many urban environments [10], though writing and painting in public spaces are not recent phenomena. In fact, from prehistoric cave paintings or Roman epigraphs to the impressive Mexican muralism movement that emerged in the 1920s, fascist propaganda, New York's urban hip-hop graffiti from the 1970s, Berlin's East Side Gallery depicting the 1989/1990 political changes or the social and political criticism present in more recent artworks, city walls have long been important channels for visually conveying personal and political messages [58][59][60][61][62]. Relevant examples of our times are the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which spurned countless urban art tributes to George Floyd, or Banksy's response to the current war in Ukraine, produced by defying the aggressors and creating several artworks in devastated buildings of Kyiv and other bombed locations. ...