Brooklyn Street Art | …loves you more every day.

Memento Mori on the Block: RIP Walls in New York

March 31, 2026 Artists

Capturing and Archiving with Photos

In these recent street photos, the painted tributes read less like “artworks” in the gallery sense and more like public messages—meant to hold their place long enough for the neighborhood to recognize itself in them. The visual grammar is consistent across New York’s “Rest in Peace” walls: the portrait (often larger-than-life), the name set like a headline, the dates, the short dedication, and then the personal details—favorite colors, a car or bike, a sports logo, a prayerful phrase, a few chosen symbols—that insist on a whole life rather than a police report or a death notice. Accounts of these murals emphasize that they frequently avoid explaining the cause of death; the point is the person as they were loved, and the fact of absence as it’s felt on the block.

Rest in Peace Sisco (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Walls Provide a Place to Gather

What these memorial walls do socially is as important as what they show visually. They create a fixed location for grief that otherwise may have difficulty finding its place, standing still in a fast, loud city. Ethnographic descriptions of New York memorial walls note that the act of painting can itself function as a public event: neighbors stop, watch, and talk; family members sometimes come by to share stories with the artists; and once the image is up, the wall can become the backdrop for offerings—candles, photos, flowers—left by friends, relatives, and passersby.

Rest in Lil’ Tito & Danny. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Folklore scholarship on spontaneous shrines helps name what’s happening here. As Jack Santino writes in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, these are public forms of mourning that invite participation from those who encounter them.

There’s nothing sentimental about it when you’re standing there. It’s direct. People come, they look, they leave something, they say a name out loud. The wall holds it.

Rest in Lil’ Tito & Danny. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In Loving Memory Leandra Rosado. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

RIP Lies between Graffiti, Educational Murals, and the Ad-Saturated City

These painted “RIP” walls sit squarely in the overlap zone between illegal graffiti practice, street-art portraiture, and longer community-mural traditions. New York documentation explicitly links them to graffiti aesthetics while stressing a crucial difference: unlike name-writing for fame, the name that matters here is the deceased person’s. You can place their growth in late-1980s/1990s city life—an era marked by the AIDS crisis, crack and drugs, police and neighborhood violence, alongside the displacement of writers from trains to walls.

At the same time, community mural histories frame wall painting as civic pedagogy. As Janet Braun-Reinitz and Jane Weissman write in On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City, community murals “beautify, educate, protest, celebrate, affirm, organize, and motivate residents to action.” Memorial walls sit inside that lineage without asking permission. They are not advertising, but they push against it, taking up space in the same visual field and replacing the city’s usual sales language with something harder to ignore: remember this person. They were here.

Continued Reading

Published work on this practice now gives a clearer sense of both its visual consistency and its function. The anchor remains R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra, still one of the most direct documentations of New York’s memorial murals as a public form. More recently, I’ll See You On The Other Side by Omar Hamdoun and Michael Brewer gathers hundreds of examples across the boroughs, reinforcing how embedded the practice has become.

The longer arc—how wall painting operates as cultural memory, public pedagogy, and neighborhood record—runs through works like On the Wall. These walls fade, get painted over, disappear under redevelopment, or simply lose their surface. That fragility is part of their meaning. As Erika Doss writes, “Temporary memorials are created to be experienced: to be felt, not simply to be seen.” They do their work in the open, and then they’re gone, or nearly gone—but not before they’ve marked the place.

Further Reading
Martha Cooper & Joseph Sciorra, R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art
Omar Hamdoun & Michael Brewer, I’ll See You On The Other Side
Jack Santino, Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death
Erika Doss, The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials
Janet Braun-Reinitz & Jane Weissman, On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City

In Memory of Twitch (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In Memory of Twitch. Detail. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In Loving Memory of Frankie Santiago (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In Memory of Jose Manuel Mojica (photo © Jaime Rojo)

BSA Images Of The Week: 03.29.26

March 29, 2026 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week.

Across thousands of U.S. cities and streets yesterday, speakers at the ‘No Kings’ marches framed the protests as a mass rejection of executive overreach—calling for protection of civil rights, enforcement of limits on presidential power, and an end to aggressive anonymous immigration crackdowns. The dangerously growing war—and concerns about its escalation and its potential cost in blood and money—surfaced but appeared as one thread among several.

According to what’s often called the ‘3.5% rule,’ drawn from the research of Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, nonviolent movements that mobilize roughly 3.5% of a population at their peak have historically been difficult to ignore—and often capable of forcing major political change, although that is not a guaranteed tipping point. Current estimates put the recent ‘No Kings’ marches at about 7 million people nationwide, or roughly 2.1% of the U.S. population, organized through a decentralized web of grassroots groups including Indivisible. Impressive—and it’s being read as a signal in many quarters, but it’s hard to see how it is moving the needle. For now, it’s clearly a swelling, emotionally charged expression of public will; whether it hardens into something with leverage will depend on its ability to sharpen its focus, its demands, and its impact on policy.

Meanwhile, in some street art-related news, Trump has large banners of himself on the Department of Justice and Department of Labor buildings. History is full of examples of leaders blowing up large images of themselves and filling public space with them. Not usually in the US, though.

The president also wants his signature on US paper dollars—while their value is under increasing pressure.

Insisting he has leverage in negotiations that Iran says aren’t planned or happening, nevertheless the bombs keep falling, and thousands of soldiers are mobilized and the 82nd Airborne is on alert—if not yet airborne.

On the streets, we are seeing some of these themes pop up, if tangentially. You’ll see many doves of peace, figures twisted with anxiety, expressions of anger and suspicion, and bewilderment among the more pleasant and palatable prettiness that much of the current generation gravitates toward. Local pride, tribute walls, romance, pop culture affiliations, and conciliatory sentiments still rule the scene, but amongst the bursting crocuses and daffodils, you definitely discern descent dancing with diffidence.

You have read it here for a decade, but finally larger media outlets are confirming that New York is measurably inhospitable to its artists, chasing them from one neighborhood to the next at a rapacious clip. Gentrification feels like a formula now traced with exactitude by developers and private equity, not an organic pot-smoking beast with stylistic panache that evolves over time. Now, the artists population in this creative capital is verifiably going backwards for the first time in anyone’s memory; it is as if living without health insurance in an overcrowded apartment with 5 of your best friends well into your 30s or 40s is somehow, not exactly the New York dream you had imagined.

For street artists, most galleries have discovered that it’s hard to sell much of it, and with these high rents, they have closed or “diversified” their offerings to include Mickey Mouse with paint drips in eye-popping color. Even the venerable and much-loved publication Juxtapoz, at a moment of transition as The Unibrow opens on Substack, has experimented with different formulas—blending street with contemporary, eye-catching scintillation or a measure of self-aware irony—to keep things viable over the last decades. Striking the right balance for a fickle art audience and a K-shaped economy is nearly unicornary.

Street artists thought they could cut out the middleman by taking their art to Instagram, but many have discovered that it is a lot more work to market themselves than they thought, or that they lack the business acumen or Social savvy needed to make it a profitable model. Also, followers do not pay the rent. Despite promising developments in street art’s growing recognition by some institutions a decade ago, it looks like major museums and auction houses steadfastly omit all but a handful of recurring big names in graffiti and street art – a position of safety, if you will. While outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian have only begun to touch on it, the patterns are already well established, if you know where to look.

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring CAMI, CRKSHNK, Goldloxe, Hi Bye, LISA, RATCHI, Skulz, Abe Lincoln Jr, Mr. Moustachio, El Toro, and Stikman.

Abe Lincoln Jr. and Mr. Moustachio tribute to El Toro. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Forsythia. Spring 2026. NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

From Mine to Mural: MurMurs Transforms Decazeville, France 2020 – 2026

March 26, 2026 Artists

Out in the former mining basin of Aveyron in southern France, the Decazeville Communauté Street Art / “MurMurs” Festival has been rewriting the script on what a mural program can be. Not a quick-hit weekend of lifts and ladders, it has been a slow-build, six-year accumulation of images, ideas, and relationships spread across a cluster of towns that still carry the weight of coal, labor, and collective memory. Here, organizers say that walls aren’t simply blank canvases waiting to be decorated—they’re already loaded with meaning, culture, and history. When artists arrive, they find that they are stepping into a conversation that started long before the first spray can was shaken.

Wild Drawing (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Across these half dozen years, a strong roster of international and European names has passed through—Saype, Astro, Isaac Cordal, Oakoak, Bom.K, Ememem, Pantonio, Hera (Herakut), WD (Wild Drawing), and Hopare among them—each bringing a distinct visual language to a place that doesn’t flatten difference. The appeal is in the vast range and scales: optical abstraction, miniature interventions, sculptural installation, figurative critique, and nature-respecting land art. The through-line isn’t style; it’s responsiveness. The better pieces feel less “placed” than absorbed, shaped by the terrain, the architecture, and the stories still circulating among residents who remember what this region once was—and still is.

Hera of Herakut (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Just as important, the program isn’t running on imported names alone. There’s a visible effort to root the work locally, to keep a thread tied to the region through artists like Ratur, Bault, and Vinie, along with others from Aveyron and nearby, folding their perspectives into the broader mix. That balance—between recognized figures and regional voices—gives the project a different rhythm. It’s less about parachuting in and more about building a layered, evolving route where the global and the local sit side by side without one erasing the other.

What sets Decazeville apart is the way it gives time and space for artists to engage deeply with the place and its people. Artists stay, meet residents, walk the terrain, and often collaborate with schools, associations, and local groups, creating work that reflects shared experience as much as individual vision. The result is a body of work rich with narrative, context, and connection, where each piece carries a sense of dialogue with the territory.

BSA spoke to the project manager and cultural mediator for the Street Art ‘MurMurs Festival’, Nicolas Viala, about the festival:

BSA: Why is this project so important for Decazeville Communauté, and what has it generated?
Nicolas Viala: Located in southwestern France, far from the saturated circuits of major art capitals, Decazeville Communauté has established itself as one of the most distinctive destinations for contemporary urban art in Europe. Over the past six years, this initiative has evolved into a powerful artistic, cultural, social, and territorial project—at the crossroads of mining heritage and the current pulse of the global art scene.

A former territory shaped by social struggles, labor, diversity, and solidarity, Decazeville Communauté carries a strong collective memory. That history, still very much alive, is now expressed on its walls. Here, street art does not decorate—it reveals the soul of the territory. Like the miners of the past, urban artists capture society, its hopes, and the contradictions of our time.

Pantonio-I (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Designed to democratize access to culture, the project offers artistic programming that is free, accessible, and long-lasting. The results are tangible: a poetic reinterpretation of the territory, expanded access to culture, national and European visibility, and renewed local appeal. Over six editions, more than 240,000 visitors have been welcomed, while numerous school groups and students take part in educational visits each year.

Today, the project stands as a true driver of transformation, generating economic impact, tourism momentum, and a strong sense of local and regional pride.

Pantonio-II (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Pantonio-III (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

BSA: What has your experience been in organizing this project?
NV: Our approach has always been guided by a strong conviction: urban art is not decorative. It is a unique cultural movement—narrative, demanding, meaningful, and deeply human. Organizing the festival involves a long-term commitment combining artistic rigor, curatorial coherence, and strong territorial grounding. The goal is to build connections between international, national, and local artists, residents, and local history. The mining past, rooted in social engagement, resonates directly with the practices of contemporary artists, who are often socially engaged themselves.

Within this project, mediation plays a central role. It allows the artworks to be sustainably embedded in the territory and gives them a dimension that is at once artistic, social, and human.

Veks Van Hillik (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

BSA: How has the community responded to the murals, and what kind of support have they provided?
NV: Community involvement has been essential from the very beginning. While there were initial questions, they quickly gave way to genuine support.

Residents have gradually changed the way they view their environment, shifting from an industrial legacy to a vibrant cultural territory. Today, the murals have become a source of local pride.

Support from the community takes many forms: exchanges with artists, active participation, and a strong sense of ownership of the artworks. The walls have become shared surfaces, carrying identity and collective memory. This human dimension is one of the foundations of the festival’s success.

Arnaud de Jesus Gonçalves (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

BSA: How did the artists experience their stay in the village while painting?
NV: The artists’ experience in Decazeville Communauté is unanimously described as intense, immersive, and deeply human.

Unlike major urban centers, the creative timeframe here allows for true immersion. Artists meet residents, discover the territory’s history, and absorb its atmosphere and natural surroundings. This proximity directly influences their work, often resulting in more sensitive and engaged pieces.

Drawn by the authenticity of the territory, the quality of the walls, and the uniqueness of the project, more than sixty artists from twelve different nationalities have already taken part in the festival. Their presence creates a strong dialogue between artistic practices and local identity.

BSA: A project recognized beyond the territory
NV: The festival’s singularity has been widely recognized by European media specializing in contemporary art (Italy, Deutschland, England). This recognition confirms that innovation in urban art and culture does not depend on a city’s size but rather on vision, coherence, and commitment.

Today, Decazeville Communauté asserts a unique model, without seeking to imitate major metropolitan areas. Across its seven municipalities, urban art in Decazeville Communauté is a continuation of history, a reflection of the present, and a projection into the future.

Isaac Cordal (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Philippe Echaroux. *Pense à rêver – Think about dreaming*. (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Monkeybird (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Hopare (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Koga One (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Ememem (photo courtesy of Nicolas Viala)

Built to Burn: PichiAvo Takes Street Logic to Valencia’s Firey Stage

March 24, 2026 Artists

Street artists are rarely content to stay in one lane. The same instinct that pushes a writer to scale a fence at 2 a.m. or negotiate a sanctioned wall at noon—the need to test limits, materials, audience, and self—also drives them toward unfamiliar formats where the rules shift under their feet. These side quests, whether sculpture, installation, or civic commission, are less detours than recalibrations; they sharpen the hand and reset the eye.

It’s a mindset born in the street, where time is short, surfaces are unpredictable, and every mark is a negotiation with risk, visibility, and consequence. That pressure breeds a kind of ingenuity that doesn’t disappear in the studio—it expands. When artists return to the wall, they bring back new strategies, new muscle memory, and a deeper sense of purpose.

PichiAvo. *From Temple to Ashes Falla*. Fallas de Valencia 2026. Valencia, Spain. (photo courtesy of Maximus Communications)

For Valencia-born duo PichiAvo, who have been writing and painting since the early 2000s, that expansion takes form this year at Las Fallas de València in Valencia, Spain, where their monumental work “Per ofrenar” appears in the festival’s Experimental Fallas category. Known for fusing classical Greco-Roman imagery with graffiti, they translate their language into a temporary public structure built to exist—and then to burn—within a centuries-old civic ritual .

It’s a move that echoes earlier crossings by artists like Okuda San Miguel and Escif, who have likewise tested how street sensibilities translate into a collective, temporarily ceremonial space. PichiAvo themselves are not new to the festival; in 2019, they designed “Procés Creatiu,” the official municipal falla installed in Valencia’s Plaza del Ayuntamiento. Closer to the imagery that you see in many of their murals and canvases, this was a towering, classically inspired composition fused with graffiti language and romantic adulation of the human form.

This new work, however, pushes further into conceptual territory and invites direct public participation: rather than a fixed monument, it incorporates gestures from the crowd itself, with visitors adding marks, offerings, or inscriptions that become part of the piece before it is consumed by fire. Here, the audience isn’t just passersby or collectors—it’s the city itself, participating, inscribing, and watching it all go up in flames, a somehow familiar ending for writers who understand that nothing in the street is meant to last.

BSA Images Of The Week: 03.22.26

March 22, 2026 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!

In New York, the New Museum has reopened with its expansion by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, pulling in steady lines of architecture watchers and contemporary art pilgrims. The opening exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” sets out to parse what it means to be human as technology redraws the terms, gathering more than 200 contributors across art, science, and film—an experience that is by turns enthralling, overwhelming, poetic, and brutal.

Now four weeks into the war he started—and with little support from allies and low backing among U.S. voters, President Trump says he’s thinking about “Winding Down”. At the same time, the United States is deploying about 2,500 Marines and additional naval forces to the region and Trump is reportedly gearing up to ask Congress for 200 billion dollars more for the war. Estimated deaths so far: approximately 3,000 people.

In a display of the classic New York tension between preservation and redevelopment, a canonical piece of early street culture history—a 1987 mural by Keith Haring—is at risk. The City says it will preserve it, but many remain unclear how—and are openly skeptical.

At the mural festival called The Crystal Ship 2026 in Ostend, Belgium, a cleverly named exhibition “Subway Art”—curated by Alice Gallery—revisits the origins of graffiti culture, tracing its roots in the subway systems of New York and other early writing scenes. Presented alongside the festival’s citywide program, it anchors the broader theme of Curiosity by grounding it in the movement’s unsanctioned beginnings and writer-driven history.

Coming up in April, “Martha Cooper: A Retrospective” opens at the Bronx Documentary Center Annex in the Bronx, New York, offering a comprehensive survey of her five-decade career documenting urban life and creative expression. On view from April 9 through June 14, 2026, the exhibition brings together decades of work that helped define the visual record of graffiti and street culture.

César Chávez, long honored as a leader of the farmworker movement, has also been the subject of grave allegations reported in recent accounts, including statements by Dolores Huerta, who said publicly that he raped her twice in the 1960s and that she bore two children as a result. In recognition of the labor, sacrifice, and leadership of women in the movement, we call for Huerta’s name to replace his on parades, holidays, streets, schools, libraries, parks, post offices, vessels, monuments, murals, and other public institutions or commemorations that now bear his name.

¡Viva Dolores Huerta!

Here is our weekly photographic interview with the street, this time featuring: Carlos Alberto, City Kitty, Hanimal, Homesick, IMK, Le Crue, Mickalene Thomas, Queen Andrea, and Vesod.

Camaleon remixes Charlie Chaplin from the 1940 movie “The Great Dictator”. In it he plays the dictator Hynkel, who literally tosses and caresses the world like a balloon, a visual satire of totalitarian ambition and ego. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Unidentified artist (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. Manhattan, NYC. March 2026. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

At LuzMadrid, Gonzalo Borondo’s “Redentora” Spins a Mechanical Ritual into Public Space

March 18, 2026 Artists

Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo, from Valladolid, arrives at LuzMadrid Festival with Redentora, a site-specific installation that continues his steady movement from the street into more complex, immersive environments. Early on, Borondo was working directly on walls, glass, and found surfaces—scratching, layering, and revealing figures that appear to surface from within the material itself. That sensitivity to place and surface has stayed with him – and expanded. Whether in abandoned buildings, museum settings, or public squares, his eyes read the space and lets the work grow out of it.

Gonzalo Borondo. *Redentora*. LuzMadrid International Festival. Madrid, Spain. (photo © Sergio Pradana)

Here, in the Glorieta de San Víctor in Madrid’s Pico del Pañuelo neighborhood, context is specific; and it carries weight. The housing was built in 1927 for workers in the city’s former slaughterhouse, and he engages with that history. For Redentora, Borondo builds a large-scale zoetrope—a rotating, pre-cinematic device that produces the illusion of movement—and places it within a domed structure that visitors can enter. Developed in concert with a soundscape by El Niño de Elche, the installation turns on repetition, rhythm, and physical presence. It links the square, the mechanism, and the memory embedded in the site.

Borondo describes it without embellishment: “a kind of automated, mechanical ritual… that plays with the dimension between the sacred and the idea of sacrifice… and at the same time the industrial side, the machine.” That balance has been present in his work for years—an interest in ritual without doctrine, belief without instruction. The work is often carried by the material and the setting rather than by explanation. Here, the rotating figures, sounds, and enclosure work together to create an environment that is felt before it is interpreted.

Redentora reads as a situation to be in, rather than a statement. It is a place within a place—a temporary, constructed, and open place. Visitors are meant to experience movement, image, and memory looping back upon themselves. As with much of Borondo’s work, the effect is cumulative: you enter, you adjust, and gradually the space begins to register, somewhere between the mechanical and the symbolic, the street and something very close to the stage.

Gonzalo Borondo. *Redentora*. LuzMadrid International Festival. Madrid, Spain. (photo © Raimundo Perez Messina)

The Show Must Go On! No, Stop. Says Elfo

March 17, 2026 Artists

“The show must go on”—a line that neatly captures a certain myth of winning through force of will. For a century, the West has exported that self-image alongside its markets and its currency: adversity as performance, persistence as virtue.

From Singin’ in the Rain to Moulin Rouge! to Black Swan, and from Ethel Merman to Freddie Mercury to Lupe Fiasco, the refrain repeats: carry on, whatever the cost.

Elfo. Somewhere in Italy. (photo © Elfo)

Today, that script appears to be breaking. As Trump pushes toward a broader war in the Middle East and on the world stage, allies everywhere decline to follow—materially or symbolically. This is an unprecedented twist in the story for anyone under 100 years old.

Italian street artist Elfo, finger on the pulse as usual, answers with a simple reversal: ‘The Show Must Stop.’ Says the artist, “I’ve been looking for a phrase that captures this absurd present.”

World news links:

European countries reject Trump’s call for help to reopen Strait of Hormuz
Germany “ruled out participation in any military activity,”

France will never take part in operations to unblock Hormuz Strait amid hostilities, says Macron
Macron rejected Trump’s claims of support and stated France “will not participate”.

US allies rebuff Trump’s request for support in Strait of Hormuz
Multiple allies said they had “no immediate plans” to send ships, with Germany’s defense minister adding: “This is not our war.”

Biggest Nato allies reject Trump’s Hormuz armada demand
Britain, France, and Germany all refused to join a U.S.-led naval mission

Trump demands others help secure Strait of Hormuz, Japan, Australia say no plans
Key U.S. partners in Asia indicated they had no plans to send ships

Middle East crisis live: Italy, Luxemburg, wider Europe countries resist Trump’s request to help clear the strait of Hormuz
Italy declined to expand missions; Luxembourg rejected U.S. pressure as “blackmail”

Japan not planning Hormuz escort mission, PM Takaichi says
Japan’s prime minister said there are no plans to send ships

Reactions to Trump’s call for help to secure Strait of Hormuz
Australia stated plainly: it will not send naval ships to the Strait.

Trump warns NATO, presses China to help reopen Strait of Hormuz, FT reports
China was directly pressed to contribute but has not committed forces

BSA Images Of The Week: 03.15.26

March 15, 2026 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Spring is arriving, but conversations around the city keep circling back to the war—bombings, deaths, oil prices, and the prospect of boots on the ground. At bars, clubs, and bagel shops, the mood turns serious quickly. There’s little joking in today’s daily discourse. Mostly, people wonder how this war began when so few seem to support it; recent polls put approval around 29%. People don’t feel like they were consulted, or considered.

Across news agencies as days pile up, the stories grow of governments in more than 50 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas have calling for a ceasefire, de-escalation, or a return to diplomacy. It is a widening conflict involving the United States, Israel, Iran, and every contry in the region- with threats to Turkey and Europe. In New York—home to neighborhoods and communities from many of those same countries—the conversations are personal, and the tension is easy to notice.

The famous yet anonymous Banksy has finally been revealed—at least according to a lengthy new piece in Reuters. Over the years, the elusive street artist has weighed in on the plight of Palestinians, Ukrainians, and African and Syrian refugees, and has often returned to the images of children as a symbol of hope, innocence, and loss. At the moment, as events around the world turn darker by the day, few seem to be talking about his wry interventions.

In Washington public space, a satirical sculpture that appeared on the National Mall has been drawing laughs—and, for some, feelings of nausea. The piece depicts Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in a Titanic-style pose and is titled “King of the World.” Reuters reports that the installation was created by the anonymous collective called Secret Handshake. The Epstein scandal has been mentioned in some circles as a possible motive for distraction in launching the war, though others argue the drivers are more likely rooted in geopolitics—namely oil, and the petrodollar that runs through it.

Elsewhere on the Mall in February, near the Lincoln Memorial and the steps where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, a troupe of dancers staged a choreographed public performance. In stark, coordinated movements, the piece portrayed what organizers described as an erosion of civil rights and the violence of the state, referencing masked ICE raids in communities across the country. Part protest and part memorial, the performance used the site’s symbolism to connect today’s immigration-enforcement debates with the unfinished legacy of the civil rights movement. (video below)

Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Alice Mizrachi, Calicho Art, City Kitty, Clark, Crash, Fun Quest, Humble, IMK, Inphiltrate, Manuel Alejando, Must Art, OSK, Outer Source, Rats, REPO, REVOLT, and TOWER.

Fun Quest. Biggie is in Da House! (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Humble. Manuel Alejandro. Must Art. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

TOWER…of 9 ¢ Dreams… (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Untitled. The last Amarillys of the season. Winter 2026. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Finding the Frequency: Shepard Fairey’s New Modular Works Radiate at Subliminal Projects

March 12, 2026 Artists

In Modular Frequency, Shepard Fairey returns to Subliminal Projects with a body of work that feels less like a recap than a sharpened presentation of where his language has landed—and where it’s still mutating. The show gathers new mixed-media pieces into a single, intentional atmosphere: street-born immediacy retooled for the gallery wall, where pattern, portraiture, and typography can stack up, scrape back, and reveal their own archaeology.

To quote ourselves from a few weeks back, the exhibition showcases “three decades of modular geometry … into a tight visual rhythm.” That rhythm is the point of entry here: a pulse built from Constructivist angles, propaganda-era clarity, new ventures into the color palette, and the saturated pressure of pop culture, all reorganized into compositions that you can scan quickly—then return to slowly, detail by detail.

Shepard Fairey. “MKL Modular”. *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Fairey’s own framing is rooted in the experience of living inside a constant feed. “I’m confronted with an overwhelming number of images and messages daily,” he says, and these works feel like a mature and practiced response to that condition: taking the barrage and compressing it into symbols you can hold in your mind—icons and archetypes that keep circling back to peace, justice, and environmental responsibility. Hung in salon-style groupings that orbit shared themes, the installation lets the pieces talk laterally, collectively radiating like planets in the darkness—separate bodies, shared gravity.

Coinciding with the opening, the project spills into print in a way that echoes the show’s punch and cadence: the two new screenprints Modular Sound & Vision and Dreams of Peace translate the series into collectible form, alongside a letterpress print titled Modular Frequency. And in the wider wake of the exhibition, collaborations extend the conversation—most concretely, the co-signed “Frequency” print with ADD FUEL, which ties Fairey’s modular iconography to a tile-pattern sensibility that feels both ornamental and insurgent.

Shepard Fairey. “Mujer Fatal Modular”. *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Shepard Fairey. “Basquiat Modular”. *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Shepard Fairey. “Bowie Modular”. *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Shepard Fairey. “Rise Above Rebel Modular”. *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Shepard Fairey. “Art Is Fore Everybody Modular”. *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Shepard at work in the studio for *Modular Frequency*. (photo courtesy of the gallery)

Opening night for Shepard’s *Modular Frequency* at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, CA. (photo Instagram)

Shepard Fairey’s Modular Frequency is now open to the general public. Click SUBLIMINAL PROJECTS for hours, scheduled events, directions and other details.

Hyuro: Beauty Of A Tragedy. 2009-2019

March 10, 2026 Art Book Review, Artists, Street Art Book Review

Beauty of a Tragedy gathers the work of the late Argentine muralist Hyuro (Tamara Djurovic), who died in 2020 at only forty-six, leaving behind one of the most thoughtful and quietly disruptive bodies of work to emerge from the street-art movement in the 2010s. The book, designed by Ângela Almeida and Maria Gómez-Senent, compiles murals, paintings, drawings, sketches, and Hyuro’s own texts. Also included are reflections from figures, including photographer Martha Cooper, street art festival curator Monica Campana, publisher/editor/curator Evan Pricco, and street artist Escif. Rather than presenting a conventional “street art monograph,” the publication reads more like a reflective archive of a mind at work—an artist trying to understand how individuals move through systems of power, vulnerability, and care.

Hyuro: Beauty Of A Tragedy. 2009-2019. Independently published. Valencia, 2022. Texts in English and Spanish.

Across its pages, Hyuro’s central concerns appear with clarity: the social conditions imposed on women, the quiet violence embedded in political systems, and the fragile dignity of ordinary lives. With descriptive texts and personal observations, the writing make these motivations explicit. A mural in Fortaleza, Brazil examines the criminalization of abortion and the way the female body becomes “usurped territory” by the state; another, in Monteleone di Puglia, recalls a wartime uprising led by women protesting food restrictions under fascism. Elsewhere she turns to children affected by war, neighborhood life shaped by urban development pressures, or the internal contradictions that shape our identities. These are not decorative murals but acts of witness—images that look closely at, plainly reflect through metaphor and allusion—injustice without theatrical exaggeration.

You knew it then, but it becomes especially clear in the book just how dramatically Hyuro’s work diverged from the prevailing mood of the global street-art boom of the 2010s. While festivals multiplied and the movement embraced spectacle, branding, and easily digestible imagery, Hyuro worked in a different register. Her figures are often partially obscured, cropped, or faceless; gestures are restrained; color is quiet. Instead of offering instant visual gratification, her murals ask viewers to slow down and reflect. In her observations, Martha Cooper notes the deceptive simplicity of her approach—images drawn from everyday life but infused with the artist’s personal observations. Monica Campana, reflecting on Hyuro’s practice, sees a commitment to making the street feel more like a home, a space where vulnerability and resistance can coexist.

In that sense, the book reveals an artist who stood slightly apart from the parade of the street-art moment while still using its platforms and the energy spinning around it. Hyuro accepted the walls, the festivals, the global circulation of murals—but she used that visibility to amplify questions rather than spectacle. Her paintings became quiet interruptions in the visual noise of the city: reflections on women’s autonomy, memory, displacement, and the overlooked labor of care. They were large enough to attract attention, yet conceptually they resisted the simplifications and saccharine belly-button gazing that pulled street art off its rails.

Seen together in Beauty of a Tragedy, the works form something like a moral atlas of a decade—one that traces the pressures placed on bodies, communities, minds and histories. The title itself hints at Hyuro’s sensibility: beauty not as decoration but as a fragile human capacity to endure and to observe. In an era when the global street-art scene often celebrated brightness, scale, and spectacle, Hyuro offered something rarer—a form of muralism grounded in empathy, reflection, and the persistent demand that we look more carefully at the world we have made.

BSA Images Of The Week: 03.08.26

March 8, 2026 Artists, BSA Images Of The Week

Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Many street artists and graffiti writers have stayed away from painting new works these last few months because winter has been so brutal and relentless in New York. Grey has been the predominant color so far this year.

So you have to expand your vision to discover something new if you are trekking through our dirty old town. Travel to new parts of the city, and consider how space is occupied by creativity in other ways, like the community murals full of historical heroes of the culture, and like the ‘casitas’ our photographer, Jaime Rojo, shot in Harlem this week. This city never stops surprising you, and art on the street is sometimes not what you might narrowly define it as.

We start the collection with a shot of CALDE’s piece from Caldetenes, Spain, during the FACC festival. Thanks, Calde! Perhaps this is our first sign of spring.

Here is our weekly interview with the street, including Andre Trenier, Calde, Caryn Cast, D30, Delude, Dzel, El Cekis, Garuma, Jaurelio, Living Relic, Mena Cereza, Outer Source, Peak, Qzar, Rams, and Zwon.

CALDE. FACC 2025. Calldetenes, Spain. (photo courtesy of the artist)

Living Relic. Garuma (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Andre Trenier, Sidney “Omen” Brown (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Caryn Cast talks on Instagram Grandscale Mural Project this past week in Harlem.

“This year I chose to paint Rose Meta Morgan. A little about her legacy:

Rose Morgan was the owner of The Rose Meta House of Beauty, the largest black beauty parlor in the world at that time, in 1946 in Harlem. She created a safe space for black women, creating elegance and calm, while overcoming many hurdles opening up her salon inside an old mansion on 147th street. Aside from being a hair and nail salon, Rose expanded her house of beauty to include a dressmaking department, a charm school, she started a makeup line, opened a wig salon, held fashion shows, and later went on to open a bank!” (photo © Jaime Rojo)

DZEL. QZAR. ZWON. PEAK. EXR. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Casitas. East Harlem, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

In New York, casitas are small, Puerto Rican-style structures built inside community gardens—part porch, part clubhouse, part cultural anchor—created by residents who reclaimed vacant lots and remade them as places for music, meals, dominoes, gardening, and neighborhood life. They also belong to the world of folk and vernacular art: handmade, improvised, often built with recycled materials, and carrying memory, pride, and everyday aesthetics rather than formal architectural polish; that is one reason photographers such as Martha Cooper have been drawn to them for decades.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime set tapped into the same visual language by placing a brightly colored “casita,” modeled on traditional Puerto Rican homes, at the center of a mass-media spectacle, turning a humble form of domestic architecture into a symbol of cultural identity and belonging. Some are protected here in New York, but not all: Casita Rincón Criollo in the Bronx became nationally recognized through historic preservation efforts, while many other casitas remain vulnerable unless they have specific legal or community-based protections.

Untitled. Winter 2026. Brooklyn, NYC. (photo © Jaime Rojo)

Books in The MCL: Chris “Daze” Ellis. Dazeworld.

March 5, 2026 Art Book Review, Artists

Dazeworld. The Artwork of Chris “Daze” Ellis. Chris “Daze” Ellis. 2016

Reprinted from the original review.

Daze’s world has always been kinetic—its energy drawn from the tracks, tunnels, and streets that once defined New York City’s pulse. Dazeworld: The Artwork of Chris “Daze” Ellis captures that charge across four decades of work, documenting his evolution from teenage train writer to established painter and mentor. Published by Schiffer, the 168-page monograph gathers over 250 photographs—many previously unseen—that chart an artist moving between public space and private reflection.

In these pages, Daze’s early graffiti runs again across the MTA’s rolling stock, documented by Martha Cooper and others who witnessed the golden age firsthand. Those images, raw and archival, sit beside luminous canvases and murals that reveal a mature painter unafraid of introspection. As Daze writes in his introduction, this is not an autobiography in the literal sense but a guided journey through formative moments – “the seminal points that shaped my art and allowed me to continue to evolve as an artist.”

Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Fotos Eveline Wilson

Title: Dazeworld. The Artwork of Chris “Daze” Ellis.
Published: Schiffer Publishing LTD, 2016
Author: Chris “DAZE” Ellis
Language: English

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

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