Street Art

Sommer argues that street art's significance lies in its production process rather than its aesthetic qualities. A review in the ARLIS/NA Newsletter notes that he treats 'the political implications of the statements that are made and the vast opportunities that await the street artist' . But the book's most sustained claim, excerpted in AIA Journal, is that 'the most political aspect of most ethnic murals is the involvement of the local community in overcoming bureaucratic red tape, finding a suitable wall, organizing, deciding on content and painting the wall' . Art-historical approaches typically analyze style, iconography, or artist biography; Sommer's environmental psychology lens focuses on the community organizing that makes the work possible.

Street Art extends the concern with user modification of environments that runs through Sommer's Personal Space (1969) and Tight Spaces (1974). Where those books critiqued institutional architecture that constrained behavior, Street Art documents what people do when they take control of shared surfaces—construction fences, tunnel walls, parking lot boundaries. The AIA Journal excerpt frames the opportunity in explicitly environmental terms: 'Cities are a better potential for art work than rural areas' because human-made ugliness can be deliberately improved . The book treats painting a wall as a behavioral intervention in the built environment, continuous with his earlier analyses of seating arrangements, study spaces, and institutional design.

The book covers mural art in the United States and Canada, with the ARLIS/NA review noting that the phenomenon 'has spread within the past five years to major and minor cities' while the literature lagged behind . Sommer addresses how to find and photograph the art, the political implications of the statements made, and the opportunities available to street artists. The illustrations—color and black and white plates comprising roughly half the volume—document a range of surfaces including construction fences, highway bridge supports, sewage treatment plants, parking lot walls, and private homes . The AIA Journal excerpt shows attention to the Chicano mural movement, anti-drug murals, and the Detroit and Chicago contexts.

Street Art is a slim volume: 66 pages of text followed by 42 unnumbered leaves of plates, published in 1975 by Links Books . The text-to-image ratio signals the book's evidentiary strategy. Sommer is not building a theoretical argument from empirical data; he is documenting a movement through photographs and excerpts from newspaper articles, with a bibliography at the end . The format positions the book between scholarly monograph and documentary album. This is consistent with Sommer's broader practice of writing accessible books about environmental psychology for general and professional audiences rather than restricting himself to journal publication.

Sommer's 1975 book predates the commercial street art boom by nearly a decade and engages with a different phenomenon. The murals he documents are community-organized and often explicitly political or ethnic-identity-based—Chicano murals, anti-drug murals, local centennial projects . The 1980s street art literature, by contrast, focused on individual artists like Basquiat and Haring, and on the relationship between graffiti writing and gallery art . Sommer's framework is closer to urban planning and community organizing than to art market analysis. His concern is with who gets to paint public surfaces and under what conditions, not with the aesthetic development of a genre.

The AIA Journal excerpt lays out Sommer's practical analysis. Opportunities are abundant: construction fences, tunnels, parking lots, factories, cylindrical storage tanks, and refineries all provide surfaces. But Sommer insists that 'there is no single embellishment that is suitable for all places and all times' and that 'it is the task of those who care about art in the city to ask if anything can be done to brighten up an alleyway or a sewage treatment plant' . Constraints include the need to negotiate with property owners, local communities, and sometimes multiple stakeholders. He notes that painted construction fences began when 'a project supervisor had the sense to allow an art class to paint all on the fence boards'—an example of bureaucratic permission enabling grassroots expression.