City as canvas New York City graffiti from the Martin Wong collection

in 1994, the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn went to see his friend Martin Wong the day before that artist and collector gave away his life's work. Wong had recently received a diagnosis of H.I.V. and had decided to bestow his collection on the Museum of the City of New York, then head home to San Francisco to be with family. Ahearn describes the moment as a visit to "Ali Baba's cave of secret art treasures," where "Chinese ceramics, Christmas ornaments, gold frames and antiques, fireman jackets and hats, stacks of canvases and art hung to the ceiling." Dwelling in the resplendent squalor of Wong's apartment is precisely the experience the curators Sean Corcoran and Carlo McCormick recreate in "City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti From the Martin Wong Collection," an accounting of Wong's huge personal trove and its place in history, with reflections on the man by his artist friends. The early graffiti "writers" in "City as Canvas" worked in a New York everyone thought was dead. They begged to differ. Street art, a symbol of the disaffection felt among young men (and a few women) of color, attempted to reclaim streets and communities from systemic neglect, if only until the city scrubbed the walls clean the next morning. "City as Canvas" begins with Wong, but the man is quickly overshadowed by the artists whose careers he supported while they rejuvenated the city. Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat are just a few of the boldface-name artists who landed in Wong's collection and who would owe their future renown, in part, to his attention. "The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti" is broader in scale and scope. Gathering the work of 113 artists from 25 countries, it shuns a narrow definition of street art in favor of the catchall "Independent Public Art." Pretentious capitalization shouldn't scare you off. Rafael Schacter, a British curator and anthropologist, has bundled into the book's 400 pages a range of styles and modes offering a rare and pleasant encounter with art in which the critic stays (mostly) out of the way. The navigation metaphor turns out to be a handy one, despite its patness. "The World Atlas" reminds us of the obvious: Public art is as much about local identity as it is about artistic accomplishment. Incorporating histories of graffiti in cities like São Paulo and Tokyo, the book shows us a medium exceptional in its grasping for an essence of place and time. Oh, and it's beautiful, too. But as easy as both books are to look at, they're occasionally hard to read. The difficulty of the prose is self-defeating; if the point is to contextualize street art as it seeps into mainstream popular culture, why load up the text with phrases like "maligned popular culture baroques whose forms had been given emotive precedence over function"? This sort of thing may get an art history graduate student hot and bothered, but the combination of bright colors and plodding abstractions is a migraine in waiting. Still, even if the text is clotted with academese, you'll learn something if you take the time to work through the tangle. There's a vast history to street art and graffiti, one that's obscured when rock stars like Banksy become synonymous with the genre. I'll bet you didn't know that street art's first modern incarnation arose in early-20th-century Latin America, or that in the early 70s, some of New York's most prolific graffiti artists were a gang of high-schoolers from Brooklyn. It's in their capacity as reference works that "City as Canvas" and "The World Atlas" succeed best. Their thorough histories and biographies make them important contributions to the scholarship of public art. Here lies the profound paradox at the heart of the contemporary art world's embrace of graffiti: These are books about street art by art historians, for art historians - not for the people on the street. Luckily, there's a natural remedy. Go outside. Walk the city. Plenty of art waits to be found. RAILLAN BROOKS covers art and local politics for The Village Voice.