Darryl McCray, the graffiti artist known as Cornbread, is widely considered the first of the modern graffiti artists. He was born in North Philadelphia in 1953. During the late 1960s, he and a group of friends started ‘tagging’ Philadelphia, by writing their nicknames on walls across the city.
Favoring an all-caps style, his style was highly dependent on the limitations of the spray can. Curvaceous letterforms take precedent, and most letters are formed with single flowing strokes. The typography reflects the fast pace of city life.
His work is noticeably easy to read when compared to modern graffiti tags. The trend towards complexity and illegible letterforms had not taken hold yet. Illegibility has its own benefit and meaning, mainly used to reinforce dividing lines between the hip and the uninitiated.
In his day, Cornbread’s name was provocative enough on its own when written large on a public wall. The artist himself is the first to affirm that he began ‘tagging’ just to impress women. His message may not have been profound, but his work did have a significant impact by helping to create a new social game: who can write their name in the most places.
This wasn’t exactly a new concept. Writing your own name on a thing is often the only thought a vandalizer has. Especially when you turn the clock back a few hundred years to when most of the world was illiterate. Consider this collection of scratches on a marble slab in Constantinople. Halvdan the Viking wrote his name around the year 800AD. Perhaps this was simple defiance of authority, but Halvdan did accomplish one thing – notoriety beyond his years. We know two things about Halvdan: his name and the fact that he visited Turkey.
Shakespeare famously questions the real significance of names. A rose would still smell like a rose by any name, of course. Names become all the more significant when they are the only use you have for the written word. Cornbread was obviously quite literate, but his moniker is probably the most important word in his repertoire. When you are confronted with a fifty storey building or the worlds’ biggest cathedral, how can you not attempt to shout back at the power that made such a thing? If you have no other words at your command, then maybe it is enough to say “I exist, and I am here now.”