Graffiti vs. Muralism vs. Street Art in Comuna 13: What Are You Actually Looking At?

Street art is the broadest useful term

Street art can include graffiti writing, figurative murals, stencils, paste-ups, installations and other work made for public-facing space. On the Comuna 13 tourist route, people often use “graffiti” to describe nearly everything painted on a wall, which hides important differences.

Graffiti writing centers names and letters

Tags, throw-ups and larger pieces are rooted in stylized names, aliases and crew identities. Lettering skill, repetition and placement matter. Medellín’s official “Somos Comuna” description is useful because it explicitly recognizes graffiti lettering as an iconic manifestation of the area rather than treating letters as mere decoration.

Muralism usually privileges image and composition

A mural can be figurative, narrative, abstract or typographic and is often planned for a specific wall. Many prominent Comuna 13 works are commissioned or collaborative murals rather than unauthorized graffiti writing.

Public art adds another layer

When a city agency, cultural organization, wall owner or community group organizes a large intervention, the work sits inside a formal process of permissions, funding and public-space goals. “Somos Comuna” is clearly documented as a collective project involving artists, residents and city entities.

Why the distinction matters

Different forms carry different assumptions about permission, authorship, lifespan and community participation. Calling all of it graffiti makes it harder to discuss why one work is preserved, another is painted over and another is illegal without permission.

Field notes and deeper context

A classification exercise on the route Try labeling five surfaces as you walk: one tag, one developed lettering piece, one figurative mural, one formal public-art commission and one mixed work that does not fit cleanly. The fifth example is important. Street culture ignores tidy academic categories, and artists borrow techniques across them constantly. Classification should sharpen observation, not become a game of declaring one label correct. Why tour marketing blurs the terms “Graffiti tour” is a powerful phrase and part of the route’s history, so operators use it even when most stops are commissioned murals, dance performances or food vendors. That is understandable commercially. Editorially, the site can do better by explaining the distinctions while acknowledging that locals may use “graffiti” broadly in everyday speech. Readers then understand both the cultural vocabulary and the tourism vocabulary.

Why people keep mixing these terms

All three practices use walls, paint and public visibility, so from a visitor’s perspective they can look like one category. The difference becomes clearer when you ask what the work is centered on: a writer’s name, a pictorial composition, an intervention in urban space, or an officially commissioned public project.

Comuna 13 is a particularly good place to learn the distinction because all of these forms can appear within a short walk. Medellín’s own urban-art programs also use several terms side by side, including graffiti, muralism, urban art and graffiti writers.

Graffiti writing begins with identity and repetition

Traditional graffiti writing is built around names. A writer develops a tag, repeats it, enlarges it, stylizes it and may work with a crew. A tag, throw-up or elaborate piece can be visually simple or extremely complex, but the writer’s identity remains central.

This is why it is misleading to call every painted wall in Comuna 13 a mural. A dense letter piece may not be trying to illustrate a community story at all. It may be a demonstration of style, technique and presence.

Graffiti also carries a long relationship with unsanctioned space, even though writers frequently work legally as well. Medellín’s recent public programs make that duality visible: writers participate in sanctioned festivals and large interventions without the culture of writing suddenly becoming identical to commissioned muralism.

Muralism starts with the wall as a composed image

A mural is generally designed as an image for a specific architectural surface. It can be a portrait, landscape, narrative scene, abstraction or typography-heavy composition. It may involve one artist or dozens.

The 370-square-meter Somos Comuna project is a useful case because it deliberately combines mural-scale composition with graffiti lettering. That hybrid form shows why rigid categories fail. The city describes lettering as central to the work while also presenting it as a collective mural produced with residents and artists.

Street art is the broad umbrella

“Street art” usually works best as the visitor-friendly umbrella for visual art encountered in public urban space. Depending on the city, it can include murals, stencils, paste-ups, stickers, wheatpaste posters, installations, mosaics and some forms of graffiti.

The term can be politically convenient because it avoids the legal stigma sometimes attached to “graffiti.” But it can also erase subcultural distinctions. A graffiti writer may not identify primarily as a street artist, and a commissioned muralist may have no connection to graffiti writing.

Public art is about the commissioning context as much as the style

Public art is usually defined by its relationship to public space and institutions rather than by one visual style. A government agency, community organization, transit system or private partner may commission a work for public display. Sculptures, monuments and installations belong here alongside some murals.

Medellín’s Agencia APP and Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana have supported urban-art interventions, including Somos Comuna and the Latidos biennial. Once public agencies are involved, questions such as surface preparation, permissions, contracts, maintenance, community consultation and preservation become part of the artwork’s life.

One wall can belong to several categories at once

Imagine a large wall painted legally by a graffiti writer whose composition is primarily elaborate lettering and was commissioned through a city program. Is it graffiti, muralism, street art or public art? The honest answer can be all four.

That is why the categories are best used as lenses rather than boxes. Ask what the artist calls the work, how it was produced, whether permission was involved, who paid for materials, whether the community participated and what visual tradition the artist is drawing from.

Why the distinction changes how you tour Comuna 13

If you treat every wall as a narrative mural, you will over-interpret letter pieces. If you treat every mural as graffiti, you may miss collective or institutional projects. If you call everything public art, you erase the unsanctioned and subcultural history that makes graffiti meaningful.

A strong guide should be able to switch vocabulary depending on the work. More importantly, they should be willing to say when a category overlaps rather than invent a clean answer that the wall itself does not support.

Five questions that usually identify what you are looking at

Ask whether the work is centered on a name, whether it was commissioned, whether it was created for that exact wall, whether the artist identifies primarily as a writer or muralist, and whether the piece is part of a public program or community project. The answers will often place the work more clearly than visual appearance alone.

A giant legal letter piece can still be graffiti writing. A small commissioned image can still be a mural. A stencil placed without permission can be street art. A collective mural funded by a city agency can be street art and public art simultaneously.

This flexible approach is especially useful in Medellín because the city’s newer formal programs intentionally bring writers, muralists, collectives and institutions into the same urban-art ecosystem. The interesting part is often the overlap.