July 2019

BSA Film Friday: 07.19.19

BSA Film Friday: 07.19.19

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. WK Interact in NYC by Fifth Wall
2. Rub Kandy & Biancoshock: “All the Lights”
3. Not Rented To Humans: Grip Face
4. Elrow’art: Kaos Garden with Okuda San Miguel and Paco Osuna

BSA Special Feature: WK Interact in NYC by Fifth Wall

“It was some sort of freedom,” says WK in this retrospective of NYC locations that he tries to recall with original photo in hand overlaying the original city spot. For some of us, the memories of all of these spots are sufficient, as the city was different then – perhaps more wild and dirty. For WK, the stories and the memories continue to evolve.

Well shot and edited, its a mature way to let the artist speak and evocative of his current manner.

Rub Kandy & Biancoshock: “All the Lights”

In the face of sexy new machine-learning and Artificial Intelligence – and the auxiliary tales related to art-making, perhaps this video is a way of preserving the authentic feeling of human discovery in its unglamorous basicness. Not to overplay this, but this conceptual piece is a meditation on the underwhelming mechanized aspects of industry, a blatant taunt of banality in the midst of high gloss unrealness.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conceptual mundanity of the Italian urban artists Rub Kandy and Biancoshock, who here demonstrate how to create electricity with a generator in an abandoned industrial space. It’s a marvelously underwhelming demonstration of the means of production. To “jazz” things up they throw in intermittent blasts of pop-star banality as well, sprinkled with blinky graphics.

…Turn up the lights in here baby
Extra bright, I want y’all to see this
Turn up the lights in here, baby
You know what I need
Want you to see everything

Not Rented To Humans: Grip Face

First, they look like run down sheds, these new wooden structures in high weeds – possibly stopped mid-construction, perhaps during the last economic downturn. Here the missed opportunity of housing, suddenly coupled with the found opportunity of art exhibition!

“There’s something both bizarre and magical in abandoned places,” writes Grip Face in the description of this video. “The course of time invades them, colonizes them, makes it into its own. The invisible imprints impregnate the walls and the experiential trace of past inhabitants slips through the cracks like winter would through a badly insulated window.”

Elrow’art: Kaos Garden with Okuda San Miguel and Paco Osuna

A warmup video for multi-disciplinary artist Okuda San Miguel and dj/producer Paco Osuna and their creative intermingling of avant-garde aesthetics with electronic music to create their vision of ‘The Garden of Delights’. The premiere of the artistic partnership of Ink and Movement and elrow will be on September 28 at Amnesia Ibiza. Here’s a taste of things to come! 

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ZMOGK has “Butterflies” in Lieusaint: Wall Street Art Festival

ZMOGK has “Butterflies” in Lieusaint: Wall Street Art Festival

Moscovite graffiti artist/muralist Konstantin Danilov, aka ZMOGK, is our third in a row from the French “Wall Street Art Festival” this summer. A late 90s graffiti artist working primarily with the letter form, ZMOGK has deconstructed it and pushed it through a prism or two, now nearly entirely abstract. Look closely at the finished walls below and you may see why he has titled this one, “Butterflies”

ZMOGK. Butterflie. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. SLieusaint, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

One of the few Russian graffiti/Street Artists that you hear of outside of his mother country, he has participated in a number of Street Art festivals and jams in the last few years. On this commercially owned housing complex in this relatively small town of 13,000 named Lieusaint, the artist channeled his emotions, organizers say, bringing vibrant dynamic colors in a rather chaotic composition.

ZMOGK. “Butterflies”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. SLieusaint, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

A press release says that his “first approach is based on intuition and the subconscious mind. This corresponds to the initial phase of working on a radically free canvas, when he closes the logical and rational mind and lets his hand draw the lines while focusing on his feelings.”

ZMOGK. “Butterflies”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Lieusaint, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)
ZMOGK. “Butterflies”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. SLieusaint, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

The Wall Street Art festival is organized by Grand Paris Sud, Gautier Jourdain, and Galerie Mathgoth in Paris.


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James Reka at French “Wall Street Art Festival”

James Reka at French “Wall Street Art Festival”

Second in the summer series of walls from the south Paris “Wall Street Festival” is this decorative design work by the English-Australian-Berlinian James REKA. Completed during the recent brutal heat wave you can see some mind melting taking place on the exterior of a city media library in Savigny-Le-Temple.

REKA. “Mother Nature”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Savigny-Le-Temple, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

Structured, animated, and entirely with cans, this treatment has become the expected output from the now Berlin-based artist, bubbly waves of energy that regale the façade. A former graffiti writer Reka and commercial graphic designer of logos and corporate branding, the artist now shows canvasses with galleries and brings his organically inspired forms from outside inside.

REKA. “Mother Nature”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Savigny-Le-Temple, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)
REKA. “Mother Nature”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Savigny-Le-Temple, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)
REKA. “Mother Nature”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Savigny-Le-Temple, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

The Wall Street Art festival is organized by Grand Paris Sud, Gautier Jourdain, and Galerie Mathgoth in Paris.


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Belin and “Laurita” in Évry-Courcouronnes for the Wall Street Art Festival

Belin and “Laurita” in Évry-Courcouronnes for the Wall Street Art Festival

The 2019 edition of Gautier Jourdain’s “Wall Street Festival” across 24 cities of Grand Paris Sud has begun this summer with 3 frescoes that will go up before the fabulous European summer holiday period.

Belin. “Laurita”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Evry-Courcouronnes, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)
Belin. “Laurita”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Evry-Courcouronnes, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

Spanish Artist BELIN is the first to start the festivities, with his curious re-proportioning of the human form that looks oddly normal. The features are accurate, even hyper realistic. But BELIN consults his own photography, forces the perspectives, and skillfully juxtaposes a truly new form on this wall in Évry-Courcouronnes with surreally fun results.

He’s calling her “Laurita”.

Belin. “Laurita”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Evry-Courcouronnes, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)
Belin. “Laurita”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Evry-Courcouronnes, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)
Belin. “Laurita”. Wall Street Art Festival of Grand Paris Sud 2019. Evry-Courcouronnes, France. (photo © Mathgoth Gallery)

The Wall Street Art festival is organized by Grand Paris Sud, Gautier Jourdain, and Galerie Mathgoth in Paris. Upcoming autumn artists include L7m (Brazil), Andrea Ravo Mattoni (Italy), and Jace (France).

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Icy & Sot: Giving Plants and New Life to Refugees in Greece

Icy & Sot: Giving Plants and New Life to Refugees in Greece

Street Art brothers Icy and Sot once again lead by example with their latest act of artivism at a refugee camp in Greece.

Icy & Sot. Giving Flowers. Lesbos Greece. June 2019. (photo © Icy & Sot)

People chased from their homes by wars in places like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are now part of a larger conversation in Europe as countries struggle to accept the massive numbers of refugees in the last decade. On the Greek island of Lesbos, the overcrowding of a camp named Moria has produced Olive Grove, a temporary place full of tents, but little nature.

Icy & Sot. Giving Flowers. Lesbos Greece. June 2019. (photo © Icy & Sot)

With a goal of softening the hardship for people living here, Icy and Sot raised money through a print sale online and with the proceeds purchased fresh flowering plants to give away. “It was wonderful to see that actually put a smile on peoples’ faces for a moment,” they say in a press release.

Icy & Sot. Giving Flowers. Lesbos Greece. June 2019. (photo © Icy & Sot)

While they have traveled around many international cities in the last five years creating site-specific interventions that contemplate issues of immigration, environmental degradation, and endangered species, the artists felt that the gravity of this place merited something more than just an art installation.

Working with a group called Movement on the Ground and with Doug Gillen of Fifth Wall TV in tow, the two helped build raised gardens and planted vegetables, in addition to handing out many potted plants. Today we have images of persons in the camp from Icy & Sot along with the new video, one of Doug’s best.

Icy & Sot. Giving Flowers. Lesbos Greece. June 2019. (photo © Icy & Sot)

It’s a simple act full of symbolism and invokes the power of the natural world in healing our many wounds. “We know this project didn’t really change anything for those people,” the say, “They come to Europe to be far from the dangers of war, far from hearing bomb explosions, for a better future for their kids. They have had an exhausting journey and they deserve better. They deserve our support.”

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BSA Images Of The Week: 07.14.19 / Selections From Welling Court 2019

BSA Images Of The Week: 07.14.19 / Selections From Welling Court 2019

It’s an annual event in Street Art and mural programs in New York for the last decade, The Welling Court Festival – now poised to be a victim of its own success. The original concept by a couple who ran Ad Hoc gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the neighborhood was full of working class and economically struggling families in a part of the city that had fallen into the margins. Suddenly it was full of color and imagination thanks to Garrison and Alison Buxton and their eclectic and widely dispersed cadre of local and international graffiti and Street Artists who spent one weekend out of the summer smashing walls side by side with community members in a cacophonous untamed way.

This year was no different, with families and children getting into the action, and relationships renewed between artists and admirers on a gorgeous New York summer weekend in June. But what is also evident is the invasion of developers and higher-rent homes and businesses being built. You’ve seen this movie before, and you know how it ends. Owners cash in, renters are priced out, and these walls will be commercial shortly – used to sell shampoo.

The connection between murals and gentrification? That debate continues, but for some, it’s a settled causational relationship. The question about what to do about it, if anything, is unsettled – and unsettling.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street (or boardwalk), this time featuring Caleb Neelon, Cey Adams, Depoe, Rene Gagnon, JCorp, Kimyon333, NYC Hooker, Peat Wolleager, Pinky Weber, Sara Erenthal, Caryn Cast, Joe Iurato, John Fekner, Never, Praxis, Queen Andrea, Hellbent, Bella Pharma, Color Eyes, and Hiss.

This is summer y’all. Caryn Cast knows better. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Joe Iurato: Art Is For Everybody. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Peat Wollaeger added his portrait of Keith Haring on the asphalt to complete Joe’s tribute to the artist. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
John Fekner & Don Leicht with a tribute to Elaine de Kooning (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Never (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Praxis (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Queen Andrea (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Imagine876 (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hellbent (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Bella Phame (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Color Eyes (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Rene Gagnon (photo © Jaime Rojo) (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Cey Adams (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Hiss (photo © Jaime Rojo)
JCorp (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Caleb Neelon . Lena McCarthy (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Sara Erenthal (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Pinky Weber . NYC Hooker (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Depoe (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Kimyon333 (photo © Jaime Rojo)
A call out from #keepinitstreet (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Elfo: The Negation of the Image in the Age of Images

Elfo: The Negation of the Image in the Age of Images

The last time we talked about the Italian artist Elfo he was playing with Duchamp and ranting about fake news – in his lo-fi anti-style text rolled across a wall. As is his style, the Italian text maker likes to leave cryptic witticisms on public and private property as he wends his way through the urban cityscape.

ELFO (photo © Nicolo Taglia)

Looks like he found another wall to treat in a contemporary context, leaving one of his insider quips where few are likely to see it. Good thing we have a photo. Then again he’s negated the photo in this age of instaconsta– photo making. What is one to do – not post it?

ELFO (photo © Nicolo Taglia)
ELFO (photo © Nicolo Taglia)
ELFO (photo © Nicolo Taglia)
ELFO (photo © Nicolo Taglia)

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BSA Film Friday: 07.12.19

BSA Film Friday: 07.12.19

Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. “Melania”, Directed by Brad Downey
2. Said Dokins. “Runaway Writings” Solo Show
3. “Who’s the Daddy?” A film by Wong Ping

BSA Special Feature: “Melania”, Directed by Brad Downey

Street Artist/Interventionist Brad Downey widens his oeuvre with a documentary, and his exquisite critiques of hypocrisy – and his appreciation of life’s beautiful ironies are still fully intact.

Here in a grassy area between a dirt service road and the Sava River Mr. Maxi Z creates his ode to Melania, a girl born in the same hospital and year as he. Using his chainsaw to coax the immigrant/model/First Lady Melania from this tree whose roots go deep into her Slovenian homeland, the sculptor creates a painted tribute and a direct connection between art and life for all to see publicly. Hearing him describe his work is important, as is appreciating the struggle and sacrifice he speaks of. Hearing a traditional song and reading its lyrics, well crafted with nostalgia and heartache, buttresses the storytelling with context.

For us Mr. Downey’s brilliance is his examination of the assumed, his breakdown of folly, his ability to see. Here he shares his view with us, with warmth and satire. Among his targets, implied at least, may be the art world, the Street Art world, social anachronisms, international power structures, craven corruption. Among his tributes are the creative spirit, individual ingenuity, and the will to overcome. Long live Melania.

“Melania” 2019, Sevenica, Slovenia
A film by Brad Downey Featuring Maxi Z. Production Miha Erjavec Camera Aljaž Celarc Editing Eva Pavlič Seifert Song pevski zbor Bunkarji Sound Editing Simon Kavsek Translation Ana Bohte Assitance Jaka Erjavec Thanks to Son of Maxi Z, wife Jožica, Graveks d.o.o


Said Dokins. “Runaway Writings” Solo Show

Graffiti artist, contemporary artist, calligrapher and curator Said Dokins organizes images, objects and personal questions in his new exhibition at Centro Nacional de las Artes in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. 

With works on paper, on canvas, video, light, and photograph, the show speaks of conflict, community, the empire to the north, and his expansive practice with calligraphy. With each letter, each word, Said Dokins’ strokes free the steps of those who lived between these walls.

“Who’s the Daddy?” A film by Wong Ping

Hong Kong film director/animator/artist Wong Ping creates with the excesses and superficiality of non-stop consumer culture – humorously mixed and mingled with a young man’s insecurities, search for identity, and desire to get laid. His social, racial, cultural, political observations resonate beneath the eye candy. His sense of humor makes the formerly difficult easier to contemplate, the questions now tempered with the colorful absurdity of the world. Consider here, his ruminations on the length and curvature of the penis, among other things one might write in an online public diary.

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“Beautifully Destroyed” : RISK Rocks in Cleveland

“Beautifully Destroyed” : RISK Rocks in Cleveland

West Coast graffiti superstar RISK, bomber of freeway overpasses, designer of graffiti-inspired clothing, regaler of rap and rock videos; a self-aware sage-like lion-maned merging of Rick Rubins, Greg Allman, and a Norse Yggdrasil, now brings you the psychedelic slaughter of a Cleveland façade.

RISK in collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)

“We had crowds come every day to watch us paint,” he says of the technicolor splashfest he did along with Nashville artist Chris Zidek. The mural wraps the entire venue, a nonprofit that raises money to provide educational scholarships to youth who can use them – among other missions. With his distinctive style of saturated striped washes flooding the entire block Risk foregoes the letterform on the outside, but ventured in to catch a wild styled tag.

About this new full-spectrum piece that ties together his nearly forty years of graffiti practice along with his contemporary art practice, the muralist says, “I call it beautifully destroyed.”

RISK in collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)
RISK in collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)
RISK leaves his mark inside the building. In collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)
RISK leaves his mark inside the building. In collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)
RISK in collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)
RISK in collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Deshon Jones)
RISK in collaboration with Graffiti HeArt. Cleveland, Ohio. July 2019. (photo © Graffiti HeArt)

This project is sponsored by Graffiti HeArt. Our thanks to gallerist/collector Brian Greif for images and on-the-ground information.

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Conor Harrington Soars and Parries Above NYC Streets

Conor Harrington Soars and Parries Above NYC Streets

UK based Irish painter and muralist Conor Harrington was in New York City for the last month with stirring new works inside the gallery space and outside on the street. His signature forms and flying garments were there: indistinctly heroic, Bacon-blurred men in an epic struggle, each wearing richly hued militaristic finery. His dramatic heroes and saboteurs race now across two canvasses on display at the massive Beyond The Streets exhibition in Brooklyn as well as across one daunting five-story walkup on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The bigger one was probably harder.

Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Set aside the mercurial, blasting sun and drenching rains and otherwise sticky conditions in Gotham’s gritty summer, Harrington may not have realized that the wall was so huge. Done in concert with the L.I.S.A. Project NYC and the BTS exhibition, Conor crushed it with so much color and dramatic action across the surface (his first mural in NYC in a decade or so) that observers will be stultified by its scale and the mysterious storyline that animates it for a long time to come. The subject of the painting might be of an officer with the British army during the American Revolutionary War. If one were to imagine the piece of art differently by changing the garments and closing our eyes the figure as it is in action could very well be of a matador in a bullring confronting and taunting the bull with his cape. With a background in graffiti and a truly painterly command of the cans, you can imagine the feeling of revelation observers felt as Conor daily revealed this gripping piece in this city of immigrants, of struggle, of dreams.

Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Conor Harrington in collaboration with The L.I.S.A. Project NYC & Beyond The Streets. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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Mr. Fijodor at “Without Frontiers” in Mantua, Italy

Mr. Fijodor at “Without Frontiers” in Mantua, Italy

It’s the fourth edition of “Without Frontiers”, a festival of urban art in Mantova Italy, organized by Simona Gavioli and Giulia Giliberti. This is the first mural we’ve seen from the 2019 edition, a hail of man-made products falling from the sky called “Plastic Rain” by Street Artist Mr. Fijodor. Here Mr. Fijodor is helping to continue a recently begun public painting tradition in this city with his illustrative scene of humans repairing a robot amid destruction, a storm of plastic bottles falling all around them.

Mr. Fijodor. “Plastic Rain” in collaboration with Without Frontiers Festival 2019. Mantova, Italy. (photo © Corn79)

Since 2016 the festival has tried to balance the new muralism of the moment with the history of Mantova (or Mantua in Emilian dialect) sometimes referred to as “the cradle of Renaissance culture”. Truthfully it’s a city known perhaps more for its Gonzaga tapestries than it’s Street Art culture but since 2016 “Without Frontiers” has hosted artists including Bianco-Valente, Boogie Ead, Corn79, Elbi Elem, Ericailcane and Bastardilla, Etnik, Fabio Petani, Mach505, Made514, Molis, Panem and Circenses, Perino and Vele, Peeta, Sebas Velasco, Vesod, Zedz, Joan Aguilò and Joys.

Mr. Fijodor. “Plastic Rain” in collaboration with Without Frontiers Festival 2019. Mantova, Italy. (photo © Corn79)
Mr. Fijodor. “Plastic Rain” in collaboration with Without Frontiers Festival 2019. Mantova, Italy. (photo © Corn79)

Without Borders Festival

Mr. Fijodor on Instagram

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Jake Genen: Urban Zoology

Jake Genen: Urban Zoology

New York is a Zoo.

How many times have you heard that? The animal kingdom has nothing on our subways, which can present a parade of species at all hours, from the scaley to the furry to the creatures covered with multi-colored feathers.

Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

As anthropomorphic art became a trend in the 2000’s we began to see animals and humans merge in street art. The artist named Vinz Feel Free certainly comes to mind for his sexualized birds. Even early Gaia (circa late 2000s) used pigs, horses, roosters heads on human bodies, and a handful of other artists combined features cleverly on the street as well.

So it is again exciting to find that artist Jake Genen has recently postered his own curious campaign of surrealistic images that look like something from a mad scientist’s laboratory of the late 1800s perhaps. Posed as serious studio photos in period costume, your imagination is set aflame, imagining a world where full-size human-rabbits might sit for a formal shot. Although George Bush spoke of humananimal hybrids in 2006 at his State of the Union speech, we still haven’t seen evidence of such dastardly commingling of species. But keep your eyes open in the subway, bro.

Enjoy these wheat-pasted posters of Mr. Genen’s campaign at this years’ Welling Court community Street Art event in Queens.

Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
Jake Genen. Welling Court Mural Project 2019. Queens, NY. June 2019. (photo © Jaime Rojo)
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