We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
This one caught our eye for the merging of classic graffiti nerve, blunt style execution, sentimental velvety roses, inspirational verses, and the organic smash of an evolving community wall. Not to mention the cross-generational name “Duster” being shared and executed completely differently.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
Praise the labor of painting and painters: the technical mastery, the arduous strategic planning, the bodily toll. We usually encounter graffiti, street art, and murals only after they are complete, detached from—and largely unaware of—the conditions that produced them.
Yet for the painter, the city is often an active adversary: hostile architecture, weather, chain-link barriers, gravity, the harness dangling from a roofline. Graffiti writers and some street artists elevate their work by placing it where it should not be possible, making difficulty itself part of the statement, part of the accomplishment. Muralists, across centuries, have paid for scale with their bodies, remaining suspended for hours at a time, contorting themselves to reach a surface or achieve an effect. What we admire as an image is often a record of endurance.
This understanding of art as sustained labor is hardly new. Auguste Rodin, as recalled by Rainer Maria Rilke, reduced artistic success to a discipline of repetition and persistence: “You must work, always work” (Il faut travailler—toujours travailler).
Michelangelo, writing while painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel, was less stoic about the cost. He described a body warped by duration and strain, the romance of genius replaced by physical degradation:
I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy… My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s pointing at heaven… my brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings.
Seen this way, large-scale painting is not merely an act of vision but one of submission—to time, gravity, and repetition. The finished surface may appear effortless, but it carries within it the residue of labor, risk, and bodily negotiation.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
The splasher approach to graffiti has morphed into a kind of visceral graphic abstraction on the street, closer to Abstract Expressionism than to traditional tagging. Where the goal once might have been to weaponize a fire extinguisher for sheer scale, now it’s pure gesture—more Pollock drip, de Kooning slash, even a bit of Gutai thrown onto brick and metal.
It gives your eye a new way to read the streetscape, turning motion and emotion into something immediate and bodily. The obvious gets re-framed through force and speed rather than letters. This red splash comes out of nowhere and suddenly feels unavoidable—an unannounced painting interrupting the city, or reframing it. Catch it while you can.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
First thing on a Friday morning in the city, you might be hustling to the subway, walking a kid to school, or juggling coffee and a cranky toddler. Or, depending on the calendar, you might be lighting a small fire on the sidewalk.
On the morning before Passover, Hasidic Jews in a few Brooklyn neighborhoods complete a religious ritual called biur chametz, the final removal of leavened food, traditionally by burning it before a specific hour. Fire here isn’t ceremonial or dramatic—it’s practical, deliberate, and brief – but there is always an audience. In a place like Brooklyn, that can mean flames and smoke billowing on the concrete, neighbors pausing, kids watching from a distance, a couple of cops standing by, and a whiff of smoke cutting across the usual mix of languages, routines, and lives—an ancient practice carried out calmly in the middle of a very modern city.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
This Lincoln’s Sparrow by Peter Daverington is wise and approachable, its portrait framed by radiating action beams in a Manhattan micro-park. The site itself is barely 5,000 square feet—a triangulated scrap wedged between crisscrossing streets, a byproduct of chaotic city “planning” and rapacious real estate self-interest. Still, through care and intention, this public patch has been shaped into a small oasis. Daverington has spoken about broad painterly interests coalescing in his work, along with an awareness of cycles of collapse and renewal, class struggle, and the evolution of species. Here, one of his wise, enigmatic heads is rendered in portrait language—an intelligent presence meeting your gaze on a grey, cold winter’s day.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Selected by our readers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
As the year comes to a close, this image calls to mind many trips—across the country and abroad—that allowed us to report the stories that connected with us and with you. Street art is alive and part of the visual experience of cities around the world, shaped by culture, a multitude of histories and the exigencies of daily life. We’re fortunate to document it firsthand and share those encounters with you.
Nearing two decades of this annual list, BSA has changed as the local and global street art/graffiti/fine art scenes have. Less interested in the celebrity and more interested in the people and passions that drive the need to express yourself creatively in public space, BSA has gone through whatever doors opened and a few that were slammed shut. Our shortlist for 2025 reflects a diversity within the street art, graffiti, and fine art worlds that many once assumed would become centralized and homogenized.
Sure, there is a lot of derivative drippy “street art” dreck at art fairs and on particular walls. Still, we suggest the scene is no longer best described as a single movement traveling toward institutional acceptance. We would also argue that it was never the goal, regardless of the Street Art hype of the 2010s. In an interconnected artist’s life, this ‘scene’ is a network of practices that share tools (reproduction, scale, public encounter), ethics (authorship vs anonymity, permission vs necessity), and stakes (who gets to speak in public, and how).
The common threads aren’t style, or even medium—they are circulation, context, and the social life of images. In that sense, this group of books doesn’t just document a year; it maps a portion of the expanded field where street culture, publishing culture, and contemporary art culture now overlap—sometimes comfortably, sometimes in productive friction.
Books in the MCL: John P. Jacob (ed.). “Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection”
Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection. John P. Jacob (ed.). 2012
From BSA:
“Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection“, edited by John P. Jacob with essays by Alison Nordström and Nancy M. West, provides an in-depth examination of Kodak’s influential marketing campaign centered around the iconic Kodak Girl. With a riveting collection of photographs and related ephemera, the book dives into the intersection of technology, culture, and the role of gender in the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries. It offers readers a comprehensive look at how Kodak not only transformed photography into a widely accessible hobby but also significantly influenced societal perceptions of women.
Sofort alle Fenster und Türen schliessen! (Immediately Close All Windows and Doors)
Poster campaign in Basel (Switzerland), 1986, by anonymous artists to highlight the Sandoz fire disaster in Schweizerhalle. Zine photographed and printed anonymously, Basel 1986. Self-published. No longer available for purchase.
From BSA:
On the night of November 1, 1986, Basel was told to “immediately close all windows and doors.” A fire ripped through a Sandoz chemical warehouse, and the Rhine River ran red with toxic runoff. Thousands of fish floated belly-up, and citizens were left in fear and fury, just months after the trauma of Chernobyl【1】.
When the authorities stumbled and minimized the danger, Basel’s artists and students seized the opportunity to express themselves on the walls. Within days, in the middle of the night, activists from the School of Design plastered the city’s billboards and poster kiosks with their furious responses【2】. They worked fast, stayed anonymous, and left the streets covered with raw, hand-painted images and biting slogans.
Interpreting Warmia’s Hidden Patterns from Above and Within
Bartek Swiatecki’s latest book, Warmioptikum, is a striking fusion of abstract painting and aerial photography, capturing the landscapes of Warmia, Poland, from a new perspective. Featuring Swiatecki’s expressive, in-the-moment paintings set against Arek Stankiewicz’s breathtaking drone photography, the book transforms familiar rural scenes into an evolving conversation between art and nature.
Swiatecki, known for his roots in graffiti and urban abstraction, takes his practice beyond the cityscape and into open fields, painting directly within the environment. Stankiewicz’s aerial lens frames these artistic moments, emphasizing their relationship with the land’s patterns, textures, and rhythms. As noted in the book’s foreword by Mateusz Swiatecki, Warmioptikum is a documentation and an exploration of how we perceive and engage with landscape, helping the reader see Warmia through “extraordinary perspectives and new, nonobvious contexts.”
Addison Karl. KULLI. A Natural Spring of Artwork, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, Public Art, and Inspiration. Self-published. Monee, IL. 2024.
From BSA:
Over the last two decades of covering the street art movement and its many tributaries, one of the deepest satisfactions has been watching artists take real risks, learn in public, and mature—treating “greatness” as a path rather than a finish line. Working at BSA, we’ve interviewed, observed, and collaborated with scores of artists, authors, curators, institutions, and academics; it’s been a privilege to see where they go next.
Addison Karl’s self-published 2024 monograph, “KULLI: A Natural Spring of Artwork, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, Public Art, and Inspiration,” reads as a first-person chronicle from an artist who moved from the wall to the plaza to the foundry without losing the intimacy of drawing. Dedicated to his son—whose name titles the book—KULLI threads words, process images, and finished works across media: murals, cast-metal and glass sculptures, drawings, and studio paintings, all guided by a sensibility that treats color and material as vessels for memory and place.
Rafael Schacter. Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in The City. MIT Press. 2024
From BSA:
Graffiti is a living monument—an act of doing rather than keeping.
Rafael Schacter has been offering an alternative to institutional monumentality in his latest book Monumental Graffiti (2024). He buttressed his alternative view during his keynote speech for the New York 2025 Tag Conference (BSA is a sponsor). To a packed audience at the Museum of the City of New York, Schacter talked about a monumentality that is grounded in community, embodiment and the acceptance of transience as truth.
In his talk and his book, the London-based art historian argues that monuments and graffiti can illuminate each other: monuments don’t need to be grand or permanent, but can be understood—as their Latin root monere suggests—as acts that remind, advise, or warn. Drawing on counter-monuments and non-Western traditions, he would like to redefine monuments as socially and emotionally engaging public artifacts that may be ephemeral, community-driven, and conceptually monumental rather than physically imposing.
SETH on Walls. Editions de La Martiniere. 2022. Distributed by Abrams. An imprint of ABRAMS, 2023.
From BSA:
“In a world where the system alienates the most vulnerable, imposing a cynical or pessimistic outlook seems impossible to me,” says French street artist Seth. “Walls remain the space of resilience. Unlike cartoons, which leave no room for ambiguity, the choice to interpret a mural is essential. The curious are free to discover the hidden meaning.”
His new book “Seth On Walls” candidly offers these insights and opinions, helping the reader better understand his motivations and decisions when depicting the singular figures that recur on large walls, broken walls, and canvasses. A collection that covers his last decade of work in solo shows, group shows, festivals, and individual initiatives, you get the central messages of disconnection, connection, and honoring the people who live where his work appears.
Sonny Gall. 99 of NY, released by King Koala Press with text by Mila Tenaglia. 2025.
From BSA:
Described by the publisher as “a compositional and documentary endeavor that unfolded naturally over the course of a decade,” 99 of NY gathers 99 photographs across 110 pages, printed in both color and black and white, in a durable hardcover, album-sized format. True to King Koala’s limited-edition tradition, it’s a finely produced object — modest in scale and rich in substance — that rewards slow looking and quiet reading.
Gall’s images vibrate and render when leaning toward the overlooked: empty lots in Queens, warehouse walls, families at home, scattered pigeons, playgrounds under scaffolding. They are fragments of a living city seen with patience and affection, moments that feel at once offhand and deliberate. Tenaglia’s accompanying texts deepen those impressions without overexplaining, their language as sharp and unadorned as the photographs themselves, yet evocative of the unseen – with a poetic wandering appropriate for the attitude of discovery. Together they capture what it means to move through New York — not as spectacle, but as encounter.
As we move through the holidays and look back on the year, it’s a pleasure to reconnect with photographer Fer Alcalá—one of the earliest photographers to work with us and a deeply knowledgeable chronicler of street art. Once again, he’s on the ground in Spain, working closely with artists and organizers, this time in Barcelona, and we’re pleased to share his photographs with BSA readers.
Barcelona’s urban art scene is again finding some footing at Nau Bostik, a former adhesive factory in the La Sagrera neighborhood that is one of the city’s most persistent sites for contemporary muralism. Last month B-Murals unveiled 13 new murals across the complex, marking the 10th anniversary of Nau Bostik as a community-managed cultural space. In a city where legal and informal street painting has been a subject of rowdy debate, and many would say has been in steady decline over the last 15 years, the scale and ambition of this project feels notable.
For context, Barcelona once played a central role in the European street art conversation, and enthusiastically so – giving the stage to many names that later grew in the popular imagination. By the late 2000s, however, stricter regulations, enforcement, and accelerating gentrification dramatically reduced opportunities for unsanctioned work in public space. Many artists left, adapted to studio practice, and shifted toward newly popped-up festivals elsewhere. Against that backdrop, Nau Bostik stands out as an exception—an artist-run and neighborhood-supported site where murals are not treated as decoration, but as a cultural practice worth protecting.
The most visible new interventions came from Emilio Cerezo and Martí SAWE, who each took on large exterior surfaces. Cerezo refreshed Nau Bostik’s main façade with a color-driven abstract composition developed through a participatory process with local residents, reinforcing the site’s collective identity. SAWE’s mural on the nearby Treball Digne bridge uses figurative and graphic elements to explore creative pressure, self-doubt, and momentum, drawing directly from his background in graffiti, illustration, and animation.
Cerezo also presented La Rutina del Sueño, an immersive installation inside the B-Murals gallery. The project extends his painted language into a spatial environment shaped by movement, light, and sound, with music by Ilia Mayer. Together, the exterior mural and interior installation add to the dialogue between public visibility and interior thoughts.
Each artist contributed a distinct piece, turning Nau Bostik’s courtyard into a microcosm of global street art – artists from Poland to Japan to Colombia and Madrid all contributed to the potpurri. Walking through, one can see the veteran spray-can styles of Werens and Chylo on one wall, versus the playful paste-ups of Rockaxson and Vantees on another. Laura Merayo’s contribution stands out with rustic, nature-inspired imagery that quietly pushes against the surrounding industrial architecture, while newer voices introduce illustration, abstraction, and narrative approaches that reflect how muralism continues to expand beyond its graffiti roots.
B-Murals describes the project as an ongoing act of cultural resistance, say organizers of the event, emphasizing that Nau Bostik survives not through institutional permanence but through active use, collaboration, and renewal. In a city that once defined street art and later restricted it, the walls here suggest a different model—one grounded in community stewardship rather than spectacle.
Artists this year included: Emilio Cerezo (Totana, Spain), Martí SAWE (Barcelona, Spain), Andrea Devia Nuño (Colombia), Bunker (Spain), Chylo (Poland), Dan Bonssai (Madrid, Spain), Dana Alessi (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Laura Merayo (Zamora, Spain), NSN997 (Naples, Italy), Vantees (Brazil), Werens (Sabadell, Spain), Rockaxson (Chile), Schoko Tanaka (Japan).
About B-MURALS ART CENTER
“B-Murals is a specialized urban art center based in Barcelona. It is a singular and pioneering project for its comprehensive approach, which combines supporting creation through mural interventions, residencies, and exhibitions, with community work, education, reflection, and dissemination of this discipline, aiming to promote its growth and make it accessible to the broader public.”
‘La Rutina del Sueño’: Emilio Cerezo’s Immersive Exhibition
“In parallel with his monumental exterior work, Emilio Cerezo inaugurated the installation exhibition ‘La” Rutina del Sueño’ in the B-Murals gallery, within the WCUB3 series. In this show, the artist expands his pictorial universe into a three-dimensional realm, converting the room into an immersive space where constantly moving forms explore the sensory limits between wakefulness and dream imagery, all enveloped by the hypnotic frequencies of Ilia Mayer.”
It’s our first snowy December day with swirling clouds of the white snowflakes swirling around you with cigarette butts and potato chip bags and pine snippings from the Christmas tree salesman name Pierre on you block. The First night of Hanukkah is tonight — best wishes to our Jewish friends and families across the city. Menorah lightings and Festival of Lights gatherings are popping off in Brooklyn at Grand Army Plaza, down at the South Street Seaport, and over on Pier 17, where a LEGO menorah is doing what LEGO does best: being quietly indestructible. Expect music, food, treats, face painting — the whole megillah.
The holiday hum (and humbug) carries through the month with holiday markets at Union Square, Columbus Circle, and Bryant Park. For all your ice capades, New York offers Bryant Park (Midtown), Wollman Rink (Central Park South), LeFrak Center at Lakeside (Prospect Park), World Ice Arena (Flushing Meadows–Corona Park), and the FDR Drive (Lower East Side) after it floods, weather permitting. Yes, that tree is lit and doing its annual job of reminding everyone they live in New York, not wherever they came from. Add in these amazing periodic Fifth Avenue street closures when you can literally run on the streets — these rare moments when pedestrians get the upper hand — and the city briefly becomes what it’s always threatening to be: festive, walkable, and almost humane.
Of course, depending on which headline you read, all joy is apparently set to expire on January 1. Certain tabloids would have you believe the city is one Mamdani mayoral term away from collapse, chaos, and moral freefall. That’s one way to welcome the new guy. But if you’ve lived here longer than five minutes, you already know the script — New York absorbs the panic, shrugs off the noise, adapts, and keeps moving. Ideally on foot. Preferably with a hot chocolate.
Zohran Mamdani is a New Yorker, part of the long line of immigrants and children of immigrants who built this city and, frankly, the country. While we’re at it — love to our Muslim friends and families across the five boroughs. New York works best when everybody’s in the room. Happy Hanukkah, Christmas, Solstice, Kwanzaa — and to everyone else, good luck making it to January.
This week, our interview with the streets has a Miami hangover and a New York winter cold snap (slap), with new murals, graffiti pieces, and street art conversing with you as you march to the subway, laundromat, or ice-skating rink. Artists and writers and street scholars this week include: Atomik, Clown Soldier, Cruze Oner, Daniel Lloyd, Dreamscape, EXR, Hiero Veiga, INFOE, Kams Art, Lexi Bella, Mesper, Mr. June, Mucky, Shepard Fairey, Tati, Tesoe, Werds, Zoot, and Zwon.
Michal Škapa (b. 1978, Prague), known in graffiti circles as Tron, is one of the defining figures of the Czech graffiti movement. He emerged in the first wave of Prague writers in the early–mid 1990s, active in influential crews such as DSK, CAP, NUTS, and TOYZ. His reputation grew not only through his presence on Prague’s walls and train lines but also through some of his under-the-radar painting exploits — always a symbolic moment for graffiti writers testing their ambition.
Over nearly three decades, he has expanded from traditional graffiti into murals, airbrush figurative work, acrylic “manuscript” abstractions, neon and light installations, and site-specific projects, while maintaining a clear connection to the tempo, structure, and discipline of lettering. His long associations with Trafačka/Trafo Gallery and MeetFactory placed him within two of Prague’s most important hubs for post-1990s urban and contemporary art, and his work with The Chemistry Gallery and the Urban Pictus festival may have brought him greater international reach.
Within the Czech Republic, Škapa is recognized as an artist who successfully bridged illegal writing, large-scale public works, and the gallery world. He co-founded the Analog!Bros serigraphy workshop, creates commercial visual works and has exhibited across significant Czech venues. On the mural tip, he is associated with massive works such as Kosmos — a 350-meter mural along the runway wall at Václav Havel Airport — and Vesmír medúz (The Universe of Jellyfish) in Prague’s Karlín district for Urban Pictus, both large semi-abstract compositions that merge cosmic imagery with undersea forms. His illuminated works for the Signal Festival and other public commissions may further assert his role in redefining how Czech graffiti vocabulary evolves into a contemporary visual language.
Škapa’s trajectory parallels that of many European artists who began as train writers in the 1990s and gradually expanded into broader artistic practices, yet his work feels distinctly rooted in Prague’s cultural landscape. Writers of his generation absorbed global influences through books, films, and early media circulation, but their reinterpretation of those sources unfolded within a city experiencing dramatic social and urban transformation.
In contrast to artists who favor punchline-driven street interventions or pop-derived collage, Škapa’s work leans toward atmosphere — cosmic, psychological, occasionally sci-fi — a sensibility shared by several Czech artists who transitioned from the underground into muralism, abstraction, and installation. The local ecosystem of DIY spaces, collectives, and multi-disciplinary hubs like Trafačka and MeetFactory helped shape this approach, and Škapa stands out as one of the artists who synthesizes and creates accordingly.
We had the opportunity to tour the artist’s studio, see many of his works in progress, to read the layering of the walls, and to learn from his wide-ranging experience and storytelling what themes drive him. Among them were these three: the construction of a personal alphabet, cross-media experimentation, and the transformation of graffiti experience into contemporary practice.
Škapa’s studio makes clear how central his self-created alphabet is to his practice — a system that merges graffiti logic with global typographic traditions. He describes it as “based on the Latin alphabet but mixed with inspirations from Brazil, heavy-metal logos, ruins, all kinds of writing systems,” his is a layered script that allows him to embed messages and structure his compositions. Some of his works contain readable words; others dissolve into semi-abstract fragments that behave like scaffolding or urban grids. Skapa is in love with the urban cityscape and its language pushes up like a raised grid into many of his works.
As he put it, “I work with my own alphabet… I put some messages in the canvas. You can find the letters if you look.” His alphabet becomes both a personal code and a generative architecture, a way to “build” cities, atmospheres, and imagined systems that tie back to his years on the street.
With great appetite for discovery, Škapa moves fluidly between media — neon, lithography, silk-screen, drawing, comics, hand-painted canvases, sculptural models — driven not by stylistic restlessness but by a desire to test how each material can host or distort his visual language. His collaborations with Czech glass studios illustrate this curiosity. He showed us vases produced through layered techniques involving silk-screened transfers, hand-drawn enamel lines, and kiln-fused materials.
“I love to experiment,” he said. “I’m still searching. I change styles a little, but it’s all connected.”
His neon-cube sculptures, glass models, and smoked-glass vessels borrow from Czech glassmaking’s legacy while extending it into a hybrid territory shaped by graffiti structure, sci-fi atmosphere, and architectural imagination.
It Emerges from Graffiti as Origin, Ethos, and Continuum
Škapa’s early years as a writer in post-revolution Prague remain a defining foundation for the artist. He recounts discovering graffiti in a city that felt grey and decaying, then experiencing the shock of Berlin’s scene and, later, painting trains in New York just before 9/11.
“It was like shining diamonds in the grey,” he said of graffiti’s arrival in 1990s Prague.
The energy of those years — improvisation, risk, collaboration, and an irreverent sense of possibility — continues to shape his work. He is clear that he is not “bringing graffiti into the gallery,” but rather transforming its mindset:
“You cannot take it from the streets and just exhibit it. You have to transform it.” His temporary, large-scale installations — painted walls later repainted white, layered panels reassembled into new environments — reflect graffiti’s ephemerality while channeling its instinct for immersion, confrontation, and city-scale rhythm.
Škapa’s studio practice reveals an artist who continues to translate three decades of experience into a visual language that is still expanding. His alphabet operates as both structure and code — a personal script rooted in graffiti’s devotion to the written mark. His cross-media experiments, moving from neon to lithography to Czech glass, reflect a sustained curiosity about how ideas behave when they migrate across materials and traditions. And his grounding in early graffiti culture remains an ethical engine, shaping how he thinks about improvisation, community, and the life cycle of artworks.
Taken together, these themes show how Škapa has built a practice inseparable from Prague’s cultural landscape while remaining fully engaged in a broader conversation about how street-born creativity transforms within contemporary art.
Launched in 2022 and heading into its third edition in 2026, Urban Pictus is the mural festival shaping Prague’s public art future. Co-founded by Petr Hájek and Petr Kopal of The Chemistry Gallery, the biennial brings together the city’s cultural institutions, municipal partners, and an evolving network of post–Velvet Revolution creative districts. In a city defined by Gothic spires and Baroque curves, Urban Pictus doesn’t shy from the friction of graffiti and street art—it uses it. The festival has activated walls across Prague 1, 6, 7, 8, and 10, inserting large-scale muralism and street-rooted practices into the visual rhythm of a city known for its architectural legacy.
On our recent visit to the so-called City of a Hundred Spires (real count: more like 500), that energy was hard to miss. Prague’s street scene is compact but loaded, less sprawling than some but no less charged. Writers and muralists work tight: from industrial edges to sanctioned façades, they’re building a visual grammar that feels deliberate, hybrid, and defiantly local. You can see the push and pull—between reverence and rebellion, tradition and disruption. What’s emerging is a language that mixes studio finesse with graffiti instinct: abstract fields, narrative symbols, pop-text hits, and gestures that still carry the urgency of the street. The trains and tunnels haven’t gone quiet either—graffiti here still breathes fast, and the old codes hold.
Beyond being a wall project, Urban Pictus is a mural-driven platform with gallery exhibitions, guided tours, workshops, and crossover projects that build bridges between institutional and informal public-voiced scenes. Born out of The Chemistry Gallery’s commitment to newer voices in contemporary urban art, the festival walks both sides of the line between the street and the gallery.
Across its first two editions, Urban Pictus has hosted a sharp and varied roster: Innerfields (Germany), AEC / Interesni Kazki (Ukraine), M-City (Poland), Gorka Gil (Spain), Michal Škapa (Czech Republic), and Tim Marsh (France/Spain). More recent editions have added Toy_Box, YBR, Malujeme Jinak, Zeb One, and Matěj Olmer (Czech Republic), as well as Yessiow (Indonesia), expanding the festival’s reach across Europe and beyond.
With 2026 on the horizon, here are a few standout murals we caught on the ground this fall.
Toy_Box (Czech Republic) is known for blending classical painting, comic art, and street aesthetics. Her mural on Milady Horákové Street in Prague 7 honors the politician Milada Horáková on the 75th anniversary of her execution by the communist regime, depicting her portrait in fractured forms alongside a bilingual quote.
Tim Marsh (France/Spain) works in geometric abstraction, using bold colors and masking-tape precision. His 22-meter mural in Holešovice portrays David Attenborough surrounded by animals, part of his ongoing series celebrating biodiversity.
Innerfields (Germany), a trio known for blending realism and symbolism, painted a mural in Karlín of a figure staring at a smartphone while a levitating Earth floats nearby, striking him in the head—a reflection on digital distraction and environmental neglect.
Lukáš Veselý / Malujeme Jinak (Czech Republic). The brothers use optical tricks and graphic design to bring kinetic energy to this university environment. Their Holešovice mural on a student residence features abstract dancing figures that celebrate youth and movement.
M-City (Poland) is recognized on many continents for his large-scale stenciled cityscapes with industrial themes. His mural in Invalidovna, “Road Ahead Closed,” presents a dense monochrome metropolis made from layered mechanical motifs and factory forms.
AEC / Interesni Kazki (Ukraine) is known for surreal, mythic, sometimes epic murals. His piece “Chasing the Red Demon” in Holešovice allegorizes resistance to Soviet imperialism, referencing both Ukrainian and Czech histories.
Michal Škapa (Czech Republic) brings a graffiti-rooted, semi-abstract style to murals, often with cosmic or social themes. His Vesmír medúz (“Universe of Jellyfish”) in Prague’s Karlín district for the 2022 edition of “Wall Street Prague”, the inaugural version of what would later become Urban Pictus. Škapa painted a vertical mural that depicts glowing, jellyfish-like forms ascending like spacecraft against a dark background. The piece reflects his signature fusion of street art energy and speculative futurism, creating a surreal visual field that floats somewhere between deep sea and outer space.
Dede Bandaid (Israel) uses warm-toned urban illustration with metaphorical motifs. His mural “Ambitions” in Žižkov, created with poet Nitzan Mintz, pairs wooden animals with a Czech-language poem about creative drive and personal sacrifice.
EPOS 257 (Czech Republic) is a conceptual street artist known for anonymous public interventions. His “Graffomat” installation—shown at Urban Pictus 2025—is a vending machine that dispenses spray cans, satirizing the boundary between sanctioned art and illegal graffiti.
Our thanks to Chemistry Gallery and the many folks who volunteer to make this festival a success. Our thanks to our partner Urban Nation Museum (UN) in Berlin for their support as we bring the art on the streets and people of Prague to BSA.
Welcome to BSA Images of the week, where we have been surfing through street art in Miami for 7 days. Wynwood keeps upping the ante in terms of spectacle: the entire neighborhood this week has been awash in events, openings, dinners, tours, panel discussions, gallery openings, exhibition boxing, live music performed in store windows, boisterous rooftop cocktails, sponsor ‘activations’, stickers, t-shirts, lanyards, festivalized clubs with fire jugglers and whirling light shows, and pop-up playgrounds in nontraditional venues like parking lots and warehouses. Many people catch these events when they look up from their phones.
Clubs with long lines on the sidewalk are running hot on reggaeton and Latin trap, colliding Bad Bunny’s stadium-sized hooks with Karol G, Rauw Alejandro, Feid, and Peso Pluma, all cut and slammed into sweat-soaked house – with EDM drops. It’s loud, physical, and relentless — the sexy fashion and sleek swagger on the nighttime sidewalk is all fueled by a heavy bass heartbeat blasting out the door and off the roof. If your window panes are thumping rhythmically louder than the air conditioner hum inside the hotel room at 2 am, you are in Wynwood. Also, why are you asleep, bro?
Oops — almost forgot to mention the painting. These days, the lineup is broad: graffiti writers, street artists, mural painters, and plenty of contemporary artists testing their footing out in public. The range of styles is wide — genuinely wide — and if we’re being honest, a fair number of walls double as neatly disguised brand exercises, selling trends back to us in fresh packaging.
We’ve met plenty of real creators along the way — people with muscle memory, ideas of their own, and a sense of why this work matters. But there’s also a growing crowd of art-fair regulars who’ve vacuumed up the look of graffiti and street art, mixed it with a few drips and gestures, and sent it right back out. In their work, you’ll spot familiar DNA — KAWS, Basquiat, Fairey, Warhol, Banksy — sliced, layered, splashed, and lettered across the surface. It’s street art by collage and citation, often stripped of the context that made those references meaningful in the first place.
Here’s a selection of works seen on the street this week in Wynwood, Miami, including: Aine, BK Foxx, Dirt Cobain, Dustoe, Earsnot, EMERGE, Entes, Gyalgebra, Jason Naylor, Johann Aven, Lae, Luis Valle, Marcos Conde, MEPS, Patrick Churcany, Saturno, Shepard Fairey, SMOG ONE, STOE, and TATS004.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
