Philly the birth place of modern street art?

What started as a bunch of friends just writing there nick names on walls turned into what is known today as graffiti. The frist artisit Darryl McCray went by the name "cornbread" McCray adopted the nickname "Cornbread" when he was in a correction center as a teen. McCray complained to the cook of the institution, Mr. Swanson, that he only baked white bread, while McCray preferred his grandmother's cornbread.In 1967 he decided he was going to leave his mark and the frist piece of modern day street art was born.
Back in the late 60s and early 70s street art was way more simple people wrote in regular font and used numbers in there tags This era was way before cell phones and the internet so the kids looked at the city as one big yearbook and used graf as a way of communication. The more tags you had the more respect you had and if you had the most tags you were the king. Cornbread was the king of Philadelphia he became international famous in the early 1970s when he broke into the Philadelphia airport and wrote on the jackson 5 airplane while it was parked in a hanger during one of there shows. Following that cornbread broke into the zoo and tagged cornbread lives on a elephant as he was leaving the zoo he was arrested. After that the media and news were so intrigued by why cornbread was writing his name they were asking him for his autograph and he simply made grafitti main stream.But soon after that the city started to look at the art as something that was associated to drugs and gangs. The city shortly started a foundation that would replace graffiti with murals called mural arts. Cornbread is involved in the mural arts program to this day and dose alot of guest speaking to children in the city of Philadelphia. There are over 4000 murals throughout the city of Philadelphia some call it the mural capital of the world. Philadelphia murals portray a story of history and shows the diversity and culture of the city it's truly is a city of brotherly love. Here is some of the wonderful works of art that are displayed in the city of Philadelphia that were made by the mural arts program.











some folllow up info on the citys history of the mural arts program