Street Art is hot and beautiful in New York this week, and we are cheered by the proliferation of styles and style- and some simply brilliant ideas.

West Side Highway was blocked this weekend by lines of people sitting with arms locked to protest the ICE arrests of poor, powerless, immigrants working menial jobs in the US this week and their treatment in jails set up for them.

Of course, the lines are probably still longer to get into the various rooftop pools that have popped up in New York this summer.

Also this weekend the child sex ring king Jeffrey Epstein was reported to have committed suicide in his jail cell. Also, a herd of unicorns just ran through Central Park. Please read the long list of world leaders he was alleged to have as clients. Check back with us in five years and tell us which of those men are in jail.

For some humorous summer reading ; the white-gloved New York Times took their semi-annual trip on the subway – just to stay in touch with the commoners – and was scandalized by the tawdry state of advertising in the subways, with suggestive phallic shapes and ladies posing in underwear and what not. NYT was not however scandalized by the chronically destitute conditions of subway infrastructure like the enormous pieces of peeling ceiling poised to drop on people at the Chambers station for example. Or the rats. Or the lack of garbage cans, police officers, newsstands, air conditioning or the the $2.75 fare that has outpaced inflation – meaning that the equivalent of a 1987 fare would be about $2.03 if it had stayed with inflation, for example.  That’s hardship on New York’s poor families – but New York Times is not talking about that.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Almost Over Keep Smiling, Appleton Pictures, Banksy, City Kitty, Dr. SCO, Early Riser, FAUST, Gianni Lee, Heck Tad, Lambros, M*Code, Neon Savage, Shepard Fairey, and The Postman Art.

Top banner is a photo of a framed Banksy note in a high-end frame shop in Soho. Actually a Banksy? Who knows. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Shepard Fairey’s portrait of actor and activist Rosario Dawson on the water tank of a Manhattan building called “Power & Equality. The image celebrates this Lower East Side original who has been a champion activist for girls and women and who stays true to her roots.

We have been documenting this artist’s work for years now. His message is about diabetes/diabetic awareness and its causes, our addiction with sugar and the food industry relentless habit of adding sugary ingredients on almost all prepared foods…that and the innordinate sugar amounts on soft drinks of course. So it was a big surprise to have caught the artist in action while putting work on his usual spot on the magnet wall in Chelsea.