Welcome to BSA’s Images of the Week! It’s Superbowl day! Bad Bunny at half-time!

This week in NYC art news, vandalism of a politically charged mural is causing “debate“, an exhibition at the Noguchi Museum reimagines the city through unrealized designs, and the School of Visual Arts saw their chair of MFA Art Practice program resign after it was revealed that he featured several times in the latest release of the Epstein files. According to ArtReview, “Ross was formerly director of the Boston ICA, the Whitney and SFMoMA, and had been chair of the MFA Art Practice program at the SVA since 2009”.

The Year of the Horse is going to be celebrated in the city soon with Lunar New Year performances and public celebrations animating a lot of neighborhoods, Black History Month programming brings talks and performances across the city, and museums and cultural institutions participate in protest actions tied to ICE raids across the country.

Also, Tony from down the block is trying to figure out how to get a dozen roses for your sister Chambray before Valentine’s Day without blowing his entire paycheck from the funeral home, and the pressure is on for couples to make some cinematic gesture this week. But honestly, an afternoon wandering a museum together, followed by a pizza slice and a soda under fluorescent lights, still does the job better than any prix-fixe romance package ever could. These are not times to break the bank. Don’t stress; as a certain Chicago street artist used to say, “Don’t Fret.”

Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring ANSO, Ben Keller, CP Won, Frank Ape, Hoax, Homesick, Jose Scott13, Loose, Salami Doffy, Tyxna, Vnice World, Noeli, and Xara Thustra.

Murals like this new one in Manhattan, and an earlier example in Bushwick, have been appearing in cities including Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago, depicting Iryna Zarutska, a victim of violence in Charlotte last summer. The campaign positions her death as a reductionist symbol within a broader, loosely defined narrative that unrestrained “street” crime has overtaken American cities. Her image — carefully selected and conventionally appealing to a certain segment — functions as a cherry-picked face for that message, which some critics view as echoing earlier eras of racially coded fear-based rhetoric that is on display again. Members of Chicago’s Ukrainian community have also pushed back, describing the murals as a cynical tactic and noting, according to local reporting, that the victim’s family was not consulted. The Guardian says the funders have ties to the MAGA movement and billionaire Elon Musk, and it asks, “Are they weaponizing her memory?” The accused attacker’s mom told the local newspaper that her son suffered from severe mental health problems. Whatever the case is, some on the street have decided the whole thing is sus, as the gamer kids say, and have been vandalizing the murals.

MC5 – Kick Out The Jams