Much of what can now be defined as modern street art has well-documented origins dating from New York City's graffiti boom, with its infancy in the 1960s, maturation in the 1970s, and peaking with the spraypainted full-car subway train murals of the 1980s centered in the Bronx.
As the 1980s progressed, a shift occurred from text-based works of early in the decade to visually conceptual street art such as Richard Hambleton's shadow figures (pictured above).[12] These years coincide with Keith Haring's subway advertisement subversions and Jean-Michel Basquiat's SAMO tags. What is now recognized as "street art" had yet to become a realistic career consideration, and offshoots such as stencil graffiti were in their infancy. Wheatpasted poster art used to promote bands and the clubs where they performed evolved into actual artwork or copy-art and became a common sight during the 1980s in cities worldwide.[citation needed] The group working collectively as AVANT were also active in New York during this period.[13] Punk rock music's subversive ideologies were also instrumental to street art's evolution as an art form during the 1980s.