Right now, street art--the higher-minded form of illegal public art, as distinct from graffiti or tagging--has a lot of things going for it. It's recession-friendly, both to make and to see; it's more popular than ever, thanks to the exploits of Banksy and Shepard Fairey; and ever since early 80s pioneers like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, its credibility within the "fine"-art world has been on the ascent. This month Deitch Projects is hosting two street-art related shows, one a mural by Brazilian identical-twin artist duo Os Gemeos and the other a memorial exhibition for Dash Snow, the 27-year-old graffiti bomber/art star who died tragically last month of an overdose. But the best way to experience this most democratic art form is to hit the pavement, so we've put together a map to help you suss out notable works--and a few of Snow's "Sacer" tags--in downtown New York, with a few off-site pieces thrown in for good measure. (Disclaimer: due to the mutable nature of street art, we can't guarantee all the pieces will still be there by the time you get to them.)

Deitch: Os Gemeos
Deitch: Dash Snow
ArtWeLove's Street Art Map

Contemporary art generates so much energy and allure that it can be easy to forget that there was great art before Picasso--way, way, way before Picasso. This month is a perfect time to remind oneself of the ancient, multi-ethnic history of art, which has not always been tied to the market, surprisingly enough (only most of the time). Below are a handful of excellent shows that will transport you from New York to Egypt, medieval Spain, Renaissance Italy, modern Iran, and beyond.

Brooklyn Museum: Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam

Brooklyn Museum: Magic in Ancient Egypt: Image, Word, and Reality

Morgan Library: Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan

Metropolitan Museum: Michelangelo's First Painting

Frick: Whistler

Asia Society: Sight Unseen: Video from Afghanistan and Iran

Street art is an umbrella term for art and acts of art in public spaces, usually illegally produced. With roots in both New York City's 1970s graffiti culture and the gently anarchic theory of France's Situationist International movement, the art form developed as a political gesture of subversion, a rejection of institutionalized art, and an aesthetic reclaiming of the streets. While it developed out of graffiti, however, it is generally understood to be distinct from territorial "tagging" and run-of-the-mill vandalism, instead encompassing a wide range of techniques that includes stencil graffiti, sticker art, wheat-pasting, and installation. Ideologically, street art seeks to bring art to the masses, countering ubiquitous corporate art and advertisements by appropriating their propagandistic methods of presentation to reflect urban culture and bring light to social and political issues.

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Dash Snow, a brightly burning star of the downtown scene, was many things: a graffiti writer who became a highly-touted and impeccably-connected gallery artist; a rebellious scion of the de Menil family, a legendary clan of art patrons; and a drug addict who overdosed at 27, leaving behind a toddler daughter and a sprawling, messy body of work, the quality of which is still being assessed. Born and raised on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Snow rebelled against his parents from a n early age, joining the city's underground graffiti community and taking refuge with his grandmother, the famed collector Christophe de Menil. At 18 he married Agathe Aparru, an artist who now has a flourishing career under the name Agathe Snow, and over the next years he became a fixture of a bohemian scene that included photographer Ryan McGinley and artist Dan Colen.

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Os Gemeos are a Brazilian street-art duo composed of two identical twin brothers, Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who are famous for their often surreal murals populated by whimsical, yellow-skinned figures. Taking their name (pronounced "ose zhe'-mee-ose") from the Brazilian for "the twins," the pair always works together, drawing inspiration from their dreams and using street-friendly mediums ranging from latex to spray paints. Stylistically Os Gemeos are heavily influenced by the cryptic art of the São Paulo-based pixação graffiti movement as well as American hip-hop, which the twins grew up with in Brazil: "We knew hip-hop culture in 1985. We live in a district where hip hop culture was very strong in its beginning.

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Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960 to a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, Jean-Michel Basquiat was the quintessential 1980s graffiti-writer-turned-artist, reaching a level of international fame at 23 that was, and still is, unmatched. Basquiat’s story is essentially the narrative of his breakneck trajectory, from early stardom to his heroin overdose at 27. But even his death could not halt the meteoric rise of his reputation; indeed, his premature demise only accelerated it. Since Basquiat’s overdose in 1988, his paintings-- inspired by urban graffiti and African sculpture (as filtered through Picasso)-- have been honored with major retrospectives and monographs, and prices for his art now reach into the millions on a regular basis. Ironically, the work of the youngest and shortest–lived artist of the so-called 1980s “Neo-Expressionist” movement, which also included Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente, has proven to be the most enduring by far.

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Keith Haring was an artist and activist who often used his unique, cartoon-like vocabulary to address contemporary social issues, including the 1980s AIDS crisis and drug epidemic. The creator of an iconography that merged the secular and the spiritual, Haring was molded as an artist by his unusual childhood: a "Jesus freak" in his adolescent years, he became a hippie in his late teens, hitchhiking across the country and experimenting with drugs. Among his other major influences, Haring cited his father (an amateur cartoonist), Walt Disney, and the study of semiotics, in which signs and motifs take on symbolic meanings. Haring moved to New York in the 1970s to study at the School of Visual Arts. Unsatisfied with the approach to teaching there, he dropped out and turned to drawing in New York City subway stations with white chalk--something he thought of as a performance.

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The anonymous mascot of today's street art movement, Banksy rose to international fame as a self-proclaimed "art terrorist," creating mordant stencil-based works that have broadcast their social and political critiques from walls around the world. Because Banksy has kept his identity closely guarded, little is known about his biography other than that he was born in 1974 or 1978 in Yate, a town near Bristol, England. (There are plenty of conjectures about his background in the media, however--see below.) What is certain is that in the early 1990s Banksy's art, then freehand graffiti pieces, began turning up on train cars and city walls around Bristol. Heavily influenced by French street artist Blek Le Rat, Banksy began using stencils toward the end of that decade, depicting satirical subject matter that ranged from two policemen kissing to flower-hurling anarchists to his trademark black-and-white stenciled rats (which, as in Blek Le Rat's work, are meant to function as teasing anagrams for "art").

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A street artist who came to international renown after designing the iconic "Hope" poster for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, Shepard Fairey has become perhaps the most high-profile artist in America to regularly find himself in trouble with the law. Born in South Carolina, Shepard Fairey attended art school at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied illustration and became attracted to phenomenology, a branch of theory Heidegger described as "the process of letting things manifest themselves." Uniting these two interests, Fairey began illegally plastering economically-designed stickers of Andre the Giant's head (to which he would eventually add the word "Obey") around Providence. In a 1990 "manifesto," Fairey wrote: "The FIRST AIM OF PHENOMENOLOGY is to reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environment. The OBEY sticker attempts to stimulate curiosity and bring people to question both the sticker and their relationship with their surroundings.... The sticker has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the sticker."

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Since the 1990s, SWOON has adopted the buildings and construction sites of New York City as both her canvas and her inspiration. A street artist who specializes in life-size cutout portraits of people--some close to her, others strangers borrowed from the urban landscape--she studied painting at the Pratt Institute but was unsatisfied with conventional modes of making and exhibiting art. Instead, SWOON began working largely outside of institutions, developing a DIY form of printmaking that transferred her meticulous, realist images onto sheets of newsprint, which she then affixed to walls with wheat paste. The immediacy of SWOON’s works depends largely on their existence in the public sphere. The artist once explained: “When people find these things outside and by surprise, and they realize that they are open to the elements and will soon be destroyed, I think they feel a different connection to them, often a more personal one.”

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The anonymous Parisian street artist known as Invader has garnered attention by using traditional mosaic techniques to create pieces that mimic the appearance of early pixelated digital graphics. In the late 1990s the artist began to create blocky portraits of familiar 8-bit characters from Pac-Man and Space Invaders in the streets of Paris. Invader's approach of depicting these dated icons through age-old mosaic craft comments on the growing role of technology and digital information in contemporary culture, as well as its growing history as an integral part of the human experience. In the last ten years Invader's work has crept into the global street-art scene, appearing in 40 cities across five continents.

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