Sean Corcoran and DAZE, CRASH, LADY PINK, FUTURA, and LEE : 15 For 2015

What are you celebrating this season? We’re celebrating BSA readers and fans with a holiday assorted chocolate box of 15 of the smartest and tastiest people we know. Each day until the new year we ask a guest to take a moment to reflect on 2015 and to tell us about one photograph that best captures the year for him or her. It’s our way of sharing the sweetness of the season and saying ‘thank you’ for inspiring us throughout the year.

Sean Corcoran is Curator of Prints and Photographs – a title that really undersells the cultural contribution and genius this guy brings to the Museum of the City of New York. In the last two years alone he has been responsible for important exhibitions that secure the legacy of early hip hop culture, graffiti, and their foundational relationship to the modern global Street Art scene. Witness: City As Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection, Hip-Hop Revolution: Photographs by Janette Beckman, Joe Conzo, and Martha Cooper, and the current Chris “Daze” Ellis: The City is My Muse.

Coney Island, Brooklyn, NYC

Coney Art Walls

May 2015
Photograph by Sean Corcoran

I took this photograph on May 22, 2015, just as the Coney Art Walls project was really just getting underway. Many of the artists were early in the process of painting their murals.

While I admire some of the Street Art today, my area of interest and research has always been for the train era graffiti writing, and to be there when this amazing contingent of artists got together – DAZE, CRASH, LADY PINK, FUTURA, and LEE – there seemed to be an electricity in the air. Complaints about the real estate developer who sponsored the project aside, the project combined several of my passions – Coney Island in the summer, great art and good food.

~ Sean Corcoran