It’s important to remember that graffiti was never just one thing. Within a few short years from when scrawled tags first went up on walls and trains, graffiti became marketing, fine art, politics and more. The form evolved rapidly and spread widely, captured in an eternal tug of war between external legitimacy and internal credibility, between the outlaw fringes and solvency.

Admirably, the traveling exhibition “Beyond the Streets” tells both of those stories side by side, and sometimes all at once. Curated by Roger Gastman, it takes up two floors of a huge new development in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Less a narratively driven exhibition than a themed amusement park of all things graffiti and post-graffiti, it embraces the movement’s many tributaries — even ones that seem at odds with one another, via an epically scaled showthat takes in historical images and contemporary art, hyper-stylized abstraction and gut-level immediacy, news accounts and ephemera..."

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