A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground. Artistic direction by Andrea Conte (Andreco).
One more project above the streets before it snows! Italian street artist and environmental engineer Andreco has a natural talent for bringing together people, ideas, and disciplines, and his latest project installed last week in Rome is another tribute to the natural world—this time, an imaginary lake spread across an elevated pedestrian plaza and its connecting walkways, large enough to be seen from the sky. Titled Lago sospeso (Suspended Lake), the sprawling pavement painting brings aquatic life to the Vigne Nuove neighborhood, where a formerly neglected public space has acquired fish, algae, corals, mollusks, and other fanciful inhabitants. No snorkel required.
Andreco, also known as Andrea Conte, has spent more than two decades developing an artistic practice that moves between street art, environmental science, installation, public performance, and ecological activism. His visual vocabulary of rocks, plants, rivers, geological formations, and scientific symbols reflects his training as an environmental engineer and his ongoing interest in the relationship between human activity and natural systems. Whether painting a wall, planting a living installation, or organizing a collective intervention, he has a knack for making environmental concepts tangible in public space. A recurring thread in his work is turning ecological knowledge into public experience, and public experience into ecological action. Just as importantly, he seems to enjoy getting other people involved in the process.
For Lago sospeso, Andreco worked with Futurecologies, his studio team, students from Liceo Artistico Bramante, participants from local disability and developmental health services, and neighborhood residents to imagine an aquatic landscape winding through the former market square and elevated pedestrian walkways of the Vigne Nuove public housing complex. The design emerged from workshops and conversations about the neighborhood, its inhabitants, and the emotions people associate with different environments. Water, lakes, and rivers surfaced repeatedly as images of serenity and transformation.
The result is less a monumental artwork than a shared experiment in how a public space might feel and function differently. Children jump between painted shapes to avoid getting their feet wet. Others navigate improvised routes on bicycles, scooters, and wheelchairs. They even invented a rule about losing a turn if you touch the jellyfish. Beyond the playful imagery, the project explores how participation, imagination, and improvements to neglected public spaces might contribute to a greater sense of connection and well-being. The surrounding plaza and walkways were also renovated as part of the initiative, giving the neighborhood something more lasting than a new coat of paint.
Lago sospeso was developed under the artistic direction of Andrea Conte (Andreco), with Futurecologies and Studio Andreco, in collaboration with ATER Roma, Municipio III Roma Montesacro, and Roma Tre University, as part of the European Urban Initiative’s WE-Z project.
The collaborative process included students from Liceo Artistico Bramante, service users from Polo Lumière of ASL Roma 1’s Adult Disability Service, participants from TSMREE ASL Roma 1, and residents of Vigne Nuove.
Participants in the creation of the street painting: Alessandro, Alex, Arianna, Bianca, Carlotta, Elena, Elena F., Elena R., Ludovica, Manar, Marta, Martina P., Martina S., Matilde C., Matilde L., Rita, Sarah, Susanna (Liceo Artistico Bramante); Valerio Pignataro, Yrma Antonella Tito Ayma, Sara Sampaolese, Andrea Conte, Daniele Cimaglia, Elisa Veronelli, Luisa Fioravanti, Cecilia Daniele, Fabiola Postacchini, Alberto Scipioni, Fabio Bravetti, Valerio Butteroni, Federico Mariani, Matteo Monarchi, and Simone Evangelista.
The co-design workshops were coordinated by Andrea Conte with Daniele Cimaglia, Cecilia Daniele, Luisa Fioravanti, and Sebastiano De Angelis.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The masks are coming out this week, and not just for the ICE agents. Costumes will be everywhere, and cosplayers will suddenly blend into the crowd. Exaggerated lips, hair, and boobs will no longer be the exclusive domain of drag clubs and Mar-a-Lago parties. Thousands of mini-Spider-Men and a million princesses will be knocking on doors and turning up on Ring cameras across the land.
Here in New York, we’re accustomed to extremes in fashion and personality, despite the dulling effect of gentrification on so many neighborhoods. We like our graffiti and street artists to get in on the act, entertaining us with Halloween creatures, ad hoc horror stories, and colorful personalities on the street. It all adds to the buildup to next Saturday, when thousands will descend on the Village for the annual Halloween Parade.
Hope your days are crisp and sunny, and your nights are spooktacular.
Here is our weekly interview on the street, with Andre Trenier, BK Foxx, Chaz, IMK, NYC Kush Co, Optimo NYC, Ski, Too Fly, and Wooley Nick.
Barcelona’s B-Murals has never been particularly interested in treating urban art as a matter of filling empty walls with attractive pictures. Based at Nau Bostik, the former industrial complex in La Sagrera, this project has spent years making room for graffiti writers, street artists, muralists, and practitioners whose work doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.
They have provided room for exhibitions, experimentation, research, publishing, and the occasional argument about what belongs in public space – that’s part of their identity too. For those familiar with the project’s history, including exhibitions that examine graffiti culture and the less commercially convenient corners of urban art, this broader approach is hardly a surprise.
The 2026 B-Murals Fest, held October 7–10, continue in that spirit, turning Nau Bostik into a working laboratory and public gathering place rather than simply an outdoor gallery – or platform for a gallerist to show their stable and call it “community”. Artists painted new murals while visitors tried their own hands at graffiti, stickers, paste-ups, and other forms of image-making.
Colectivo Monday organized a collective paste-up, Clara Nubiola led a laboratory investigating how people observe and interpret public space, and projects such as Can Safari, Revorn, Malicia Walls, and RavaleArt joined the program. There were discussions, publications, video installations, music, and an exhibition by XPIELLAX titled WHY YOU MAD?, accompanied by a live performance.
What distinguishes B-Murals from many of the increasingly familiar mural-festival circuits is its willingness to keep the process visible, the categories open, and the audience involved. The finished walls matter, certainly, but so do the conversations, experiments, improvised collaborations, and sometimes awkward questions that surround them. In a field where urban art can easily become a promotional backdrop or branding vehicle, B-Murals continues to argue for the culture’s less predictable possibilities.
This selection of photographs of new walls from BSA contributor Lluis Olive Bulbenas gives a look at what this year’s gathering offers – something that happens when artists, visitors, and a former factory complex share the same creative territory.
Asbury Park has always had a taste for spectacle. From its late-19th-century beginnings as a seaside resort to the vaudeville performers, amusement rides, carousel music, carnival attractions, and rock-and-roll legends that followed, this stretch of the Jersey Shore has long invited people to become part of the show.
The old boardwalk architecture still carries some of that theatrical swagger, and the salt air supplies an atmosphere that no stage designer could quite reproduce. This September, with the Sea.Hear.Now music festival brought thousands to the beach for performances by the Strokes, Pixies, Fontaines D.C., and others, the city once again became a gathering place for music, public art, and the magical, quirky, spontaneous street-level encounters that make seaside towns particularly entertaining.
Into that atmosphere came Dennis McNett’s fourth annual March of Medusa, a glorious and somewhat unruly procession of fantastical creatures, handmade masks, flags, and mythological characters brought to life by artists and community participants. McNett, whose Wolfbat creations draw on woodcut traditions, folklore, and the communal rituals of carnival, was joined by artists Swoon, Adam Wallacavage, Jodi Rice, Steve Olson, Jude Harzer, and others who contributed masks and sculptural works. Ben Venom supplied flags, and the Ocean Avenue Stompers kept the procession moving. Swoon’s involvement was a natural fit for an artist whose work has long crossed between the street, immersive installations, and collaborative public projects. The art had legs, occasionally horns, and plenty of company as it made its way along the boardwalk.
Meanwhile, the surrounding streets and beachfront architecture offered another kind of performance. Portuguese street artist Add Fuel brought his intricately patterned Carnival Nautical mural to the First Avenue Pavilion, weaving references to Asbury Park’s maritime architecture into his signature blue-and-white tile vocabulary. Shepard Fairey returned to the city with portraits of Chuck D and Joe Strummer, alongside tributes to punk icons and a restoration of his earlier megaphone mural, connecting the city’s musical inheritance to dissent, independence, and the democratic possibilities of public expression. With rock music spilling across the beach, enormous painted creatures moving through the crowd, and murals occupying the walls, Asbury Park offered a lively reminder that street art doesn’t always stand still. Sometimes it marches, dances, makes a racket, and invites everybody else to join in.
Thanks to photographer Martha Cooper for sharing her fantastic photos that capture the heart of Asbury Park.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Yesterday, New York’s streets filled with protests, marches, performances, and signs—you might even call some of it art.
From Columbus Circle through Times Square and across the boroughs, the No Kings march moved with swing, swagger, rage, humor, and a street rhythm that feels like NYC at its best. Hand-lettered signs and flags bobbed above the crowd like fresh ink on a city wall, while chants carried down the avenue, through the parks, up the blocks. “Regime change begins at home” stood out among the messages, mere weeks before the country’s mid-term elections, expected to change things, at least in some measure. Police counted tens of thousands in New York City; organizers put the citywide turnout at more than 350,000.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring AESOP One, Albertus Joseph, Barb Tropolis, BG 183 Tats Cru, Bio Tats Cru, BLUME, Call her Al, CRKSHNK, Danie, Kam S. Art, KENOS, Kobra, Miss Lushy, Pazzesco Art, Phetus88, Pyramid Guy, Sebi Sketch, SHUX, SOZE527, Sue Works, The Butchers Cru, and Vers
Here is Part 2 of our look at Mural Ruzyně, an epic 700-meter wall project in Prague 6 that presents the work of 30 Czech and international artists across roughly 1,800 square meters. Part 1 let you see the scale, structure, and curatorial logic of the project; this second group makes the scope of it clearer.
What is striking across the wall is not simply the number of artists, but how many distinct visual languages can coexist without the project losing its footing. As you roll, you’ll find polished realism, cartoon figures in all their personality, graphic reduction, painterly portraits, surrealism, dense and detailed illustration, architectural fantasy, comic-strip mayhem, and work that somehow still emits the pulse of graffiti culture at its root. The range is broad, and overall the level of execution stays unusually high for a project this long.
This second section pushes variety into the end zone: Kreda288 moves into a monochrome, architectural-surreal register; Zmoka goes intensely intimate, photographic; EMIC folds portraiture into something darker, more atmospheric. This Lux Easy strips birds down against a hard graphic field, Vincent Chignier packs the wall with a feverish illustrated cast, and Tom HRVB brings an overtly graffiti-inflected cartoon language. Michal Škapa, a.k.a. TRON, builds an entire techno-urban universe, while X Dog, Bona Berlin, KRAM, Denis Dendy, Obraz Akrobat, Lukas Kladivko, Mandi Oh, David Lejsek, and Juanjo Surace each push the wall in still other directions.
Seen together with Part 1, the project feels like a long-form survey of what mural practice looks like right now – when artists are given real space, time, and support. Some sections are slick and highly designed, others strange, rougher, funnier, more pictorial, or more rooted in graffiti and character culture. The breadth is what keeps the wall alive over such an extreme distance.
It is rare to see a project of this scale maintain this much stylistic range without flattening everyone into a house look. Mural Ruzyně does the opposite: it lets the differences remain visible, which is what makes the project worth walking all the way through.
Prague has no shortage of handsome walls, but this one takes a little of your stamina to fully experience. Stretching roughly 700 meters along Vlastina Street in Prague 6, Mural Ruzyně brings together 30 Czech and international artists across some 1,800 square meters of concrete. Unusually long, it remains visually alive, and the project’s strength lies in the work’s consistency across it. Rather than thirty unrelated commissions competing for attention, the mural is curatorially organized as a continuous sequence, with one visual language handing off to the next.
The project is the latest large-scale public-art effort from The Chemistry Gallery and its founder and artistic director, Petr Hájek, whose earlier mural work included the WALL STREET festival in 2022. That work now continues under Urban Pictus, the biennial festival and public-art platform founded the same year. Mural Ruzyně is the centerpiece of its third edition in 2026, bringing together 15 Czech artists and 15 international participants from Spain, Austria, Romania, Italy, Ireland, France, Germany, and Poland.
The announced theme, “City, Motion, Beauty,” is broad, and this first group of works shows how many directions it can take. Dozy Doss combines carefully rendered birds with looping graphic bands of red and blue; RAME13 reduces birds, cyclists, and movement into the cleaner economy of contemporary illustration; Chemis plays directly with the material of the wall through a trompe-l’oeil scene of cracking concrete. Elsewhere, YBR SHC builds a mechanical insect into a miniature urban ecosystem, while MATE brings a polished, almost airbrushed surrealism to cars, architecture, and oversized forms. These approaches share little formally, which may be the point.
The differences become sharper as the wall continues. Toy Box works narratively, using figures and episodes that feel closer to editorial illustration and graphic storytelling; Pauser breaks the surface into compact comic-like scenes and symbols; Luca Ledda builds a strange sequential passage of hands, flowers, eyes, planets, and repeated circular forms. RUIN turns toward crisp modernist geometry, David Strauzz uses the repeated pedestrian pictogram almost like a visual beat, and Tim Marsh pushes athletic bodies through angular, faceted fields of color and architectural space. Taken together, they show how far contemporary mural practice now travels beyond any single definition of “street art” — absorbing illustration, comics, graphic design, realism, surrealism, abstraction, signage, – and fragments of graffiti vocabulary along the way.
What holds the project together is not a common style but a high level of finish and a certain clarity of intention. These are not hurried interventions or walls dependent on confrontation for their charge; the artists have been given the room, materials, and organizational support to work at scale and to complete their ideas properly. The result is approachable without becoming generic, polished without becoming uniform, and useful as a snapshot of the many influences currently moving through mural and street-art practice. In this first of two parts, the pleasure is partly in seeing just how many different ways 700 meters of concrete can be persuaded to move.
Trees are turning, politicians are jamming your phone texts with election slogans, Comic Con 20 is celebrating Coney Island, and hundreds of murals are in full effect this fall in every borough of New York City. We’ve been riding bikes through the streets to find new stuff and give you some of the best that makes this NYC.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, legal and otherwise, this week featuring Cram, Ejek98, El Cekis, Hektad, Jappy Agoncillo, Jim Power, MCY, Minhafofa, Mosaic Man, Motomichi Nakamura, OG King 157, Optimo NYC, and WC.
Mr. Power is a well known ceramic tiles artist whose work can be found primarily in the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan, NY. The Mosaic Man as he’s better known has been working on his installations in the East Village since the early 1980s creating a trail of tiles installations on urban furniture and the bases of street lamp posts. We were surprised that some of his work has been vandalized and in some cases completely destroyed. We can’t make any sense of why and who is responsible for the destruction of public art that contains an oral and visual history of the city and contributes to the dynamism of the city.
Graffiti has spent decades being chased off trains, scrubbed from walls, prosecuted in courtrooms, and occasionally welcomed into museums with a glass of champagne. This November, BEYOND THE STREETS returns to London’s Saatchi Gallery for a six-month occupation of more than ten rooms, bringing together over 100 international artists and cultural troublemakers. Curated by Roger Gastman, the exhibition promises a sprawling look at six decades of street-born creativity, from subway writing and punk graphics to feminist activism, fashion, photography, and the music that accompanied it all. The numbers can impress – organizers estimate more than 150,000 visitors to its previous London outing in 2023, and this time the lens grows wider.
The lineup has some serious mileage on the odometer, and the acknowledgment of contributors from outside the scene, or at least its outer margins, is what gives it intellectual punch. FUTURA 2000, LADY PINK, and ZEPHYR represent New York’s more traditional subway-writing history, while GOLDIE, KAWS, Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey, Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls, and Damien Hirst suggest just how far the definition of street culture can stretch – of course there will still be arguments by some, but relatively few.
Other highlights include a reconstructed section of a New York subway car, an examination of graffiti on London’s Underground, early hip-hop Polaroids, the archives of Hip-Hop Connection, and a tribute to Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art, the book that helped put New York graffiti into the hands of aspiring writers around the world.
Gastman also pays tribute to the hosts, giving Britain’s own history of cultural rebellion its due, from 2Tone’s unmistakable black-and-white graphics and ska soundtrack to its multiracial cultural politics. To fully realize the scene and its tenor, the exhibition includes photography by Janette Beckman and Normski; radical feminist printmaking from the See Red Women’s Workshop; Jill Posener’s documentation of feminist graffiti; and an archive of English football firms’ calling cards. Add Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, Black Panther photographer Neil Kenlock, and 35 covers from The Big Issue, and the exhibition continues to examine in greater detail the conversation about who gets to occupy public space, who gets heard, and what happens when dissent becomes collectible.
We’re looking forward to seeing how BEYOND THE STREETS brings these histories together, particularly the less familiar material that challenges a tidy but shallow narrative of graffiti’s journey from subway tunnels to museum walls. Hopefully we won’t forget the irony of celebrating cultures built on trespass, dissent, and disregard for authority inside any institution that now recognizes their cultural and commercial value. A more interesting question is whether the exhibition can examine the contradictions of street culture — its independence and commercialization, its political convictions and opportunism, its outsiders and newly minted insiders — without sanding off the rough edges that made it matter to so many in the first place.
List of featured artists
A-ONE · Aida Wilde · Alexis Ross · André Saraiva · BANDO · Barry McGee · BLADE · CAINE 1 · Chantal Pinzi · Conor Harrington · C.R. Stecyk III · CRASH · Damien Hirst · David Storey · DEFER · DONDI · Drift · Duncan Weston · Bart Simpson as El Barto · ERIC HAZE · Estevan Oriol · FAFI · Fátima de Juan · Felipe Pantone · FUTURA 2000 · GG The Illustrator · GOLDIE & Metalheadz · Guerrilla Girls · Gus Coral · HELCH · Henry Chalfant · Hip-Hop Connection · Hunt Emerson · HuskMitNavn · Invader · IZ THE WIZ · Janette Beckman · Jenny Holzer · Jill Posener · John “Teflon” Sims · JR · Julio Anaya Cabanding · KAWS · KC Ortiz · Kenny Scharf · LADY PINK · LEE 163rd · Lucy Sparrow · Mark Bodē & Vaughn Bodē · Martha Cooper · MEAR ONE · MODE2 · MOSES TAPS · MR B. & KIX · Nadya Tolokonnikova · Neil Kenlock · NOC 167 · Normski · Okuda san Miguel · Ozzie Juarez · Patrick Martinez · Paul Insect · Pauline Black · PHASE 2 · PHLEGM · PREF · PRIDE · QUIK · RAMMELLZEE · RAMS · Richard Reyes · RISK · Rocco and his Brothers · Roger Perry · ROIDS · Roy Reed · SABER · See Red Women’s Workshop · Shepard Fairey · SHIRT KING PHADE · SHOK 1 · SCRIBLA · SNAKE 1 · STAY HIGH 149 · Stephen “Buddha” Leafloor · TAKI 183 · TEACH · The Big Issue · Tim Conlon · Timothy Curtis · Todd James · TOX · TRACY 168 · Trevor Jackson + Donald Christie · TRIPL FURIOUS · VHILS · WILSONBROTHERS x LWL · ZAKI DEE 163 · ZEPHYR
Including:
Freestyle ‘85 · History of Spray Paint & Infinity Room · Subway Art · Tube Graffiti History · Londonz Burning Archive · 2Tone Fashion & History · BreakBeat Lou – Ultimate Breaks & Beats · Hip Hop Polaroids, Fashion Posters & Flyers · Rubbish Stuff Puppet Shop · Pedestrian Graffiti · Chrome & Black: DIET, FATSO, TEACH, TIME, TOX, VEXZA, WISE & ZOMBY
Curated by Roger Gastman with Raoul Shah, Nichole Procopenko, Kim Stephens, Evan Pricco, Dante Parel, Aurora Fisher-Kendrick, Sky Gellatly and Don Letts
Historical Research & Curation Rob Fever, Andrew Hayes, Toby Mott, Claw Money, Pete Nice and Paradise Gray
Artistic Direction Paul Insect
Exhibition Design Studio Bloomer
Supported by Rifflandia
Partners Amanda Bessette, Craig Shapiro (Collaborative Fund) and ICNCLST
Before opening this book, try to imagine what it would take for one artist to recreate a publication so deeply embedded in graffiti culture that it has been called its Bible. Talent and painting skills are only the beginning. Add discipline, logistics, nerve, physical stamina, photography, styling, train knowledge, and an almost unreasonable willingness to keep going. That is essentially what Dutch graffiti writer TRIPL, a.k.a. FURIOUS, set out to do with Repainting Subway Art: recreate all 239 works pictured in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art, then reconstruct the photographs, situations, and ultimately the book itself. What began as a joke among friends developed into a project that consumed roughly a decade.
Published in 1984, Cooper and Chalfant’s Subway Art became one of graffiti’s defining documents. Its influence traveled far beyond New York, introducing generations of young writers to painted subway trains, letter construction, names, characters, techniques, and an entire culture that many readers had never encountered firsthand. Copies were carried in backpacks, studied until the bindings failed, photocopied, shared, and — according to persistent graffiti lore — sometimes liberated from bookstores and libraries. Dutch author and researcher Daniël de Jongh titled his 2024 Nuart Journal review of TRIPL’s project “A Reincarnation of the Bible of Graffiti in Slow Motion,” which gets close to the peculiar devotion at work here.
Recreating, however, is not simply copying. TRIPL did not select a few famous pieces and repaint them in his own style. He took on the entire proposition, primarily using Dutch and other European trains while adapting the original compositions to different rolling stock. The original writers’ works became the structure for new versions, with TRIPL working through their proportions, gestures, colors, characters, jokes, and letterforms while introducing his own names and substitutions. Each completed page became another piece in an enormous puzzle.
The painting was only part of it. TRIPL also reconstructed the photographic world surrounding the trains: angles, poses, close-ups, portraits, action shots, clothing, passengers, backgrounds, and other details that gave Cooper and Chalfant’s original images their character. He styled and staged scenes, stepped into different roles, found props, and recreated circumstances that had occurred four decades earlier on another continent. One of the most difficult was DONDI’s whole car, for which Cooper had photographed both the painting process and the completed train in motion. TRIPL had to reproduce not only the piece but the circumstances of the photographs themselves.
Text: Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos: Diana Paun
Title: Repainting Subway Art. TRIPL a.k.a. FURIOUS Published: Ruyzdael Publishing. The Netherlands, 2024. Author: TRIPL a.k.a. FURIOUS, Dr. Edward Birzin, Mikel van den Boogaard Language: English
Congratulations to HAZE for his opening of Eric Haze & Matt Weber — Vanishing City at Atelier Jolie, 57 Great Jones Street this week. The show runs through December 30 and it connects Haze’s graffiti-rooted practice with Weber’s New York street photography and their shared history in the city’s 1970s scene.
Our late summer has been blessed by the methodical beast that is Kiwi artist Owen Dippie, who still doesn’t get enough love from New York considering his photorealistic chops and appetite for blockbusters. Catch him in action on the southwest corner of Bowery and Great Jones Street, where he’s building a mammoth, nearly six-story Jean-Michel Basquiat mural just around the corner from Atelier Jolie. It’s still in progress.
…and don’t forget Charlie Ahearn’s New Paintings at WHAAM! on Elizabeth Street, still on view through October 23, or Vandals to Vanguard at BronxArtSpace, up through October 24 — both keeping the city’s graffiti and hip-hop histories in active circulation rather than treating them as finished chapters.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring AAron Wrinkle, Billy Barnacles, City Kitty, DARA, Filthy Freak, Free Humanity, Fumero, Hektad, Jappy Agoncillo, JerkFace, Lexi Bella, Minhafofa, My Dog Signs, OGKING157, Richard Hoffman, RIOT, SEKHMET, UNEG, and Welder Underground.
Street-art festivals are often judged by the size of the walls, the names on the roster, and the photographs that circulate afterward. ALL CAPS has been playing a longer game in Rotterdam.
Founded in 2018 by Daniël Claessens and Dave Vanderheijden as POW! WOW! Rotterdam, and renamed ALL CAPS in 2022, the festival has spent successive editions moving through different parts of the city, adding new walls rather than routinely painting over the old ones. Vanderheijden stepped away in 2024; today Claessens continues as artistic director, working with managing director Katherina Doxiadis and the Rotterdam team.
The result is less a temporary showcase than an accumulating public record — graffiti, murals and street art settling into neighborhoods here across Rotterdam, the Netherlands, long after the visiting artists have moved on. This year the festival landed in Lombardijen, Rotterdam-Zuid, continuing a pattern of working outside the most obvious cultural corridors and letting new areas of the city itself become part of the curatorial equation.
That matters because ALL CAPS is not simply chasing names, but exposing talent. Claessens and the team travel, look at walls, visit other festivals, trade recommendations with organizations abroad, and keep an eye on what is actually happening in the field. Their stated aim is to show a broad spectrum of graffiti and street art, bringing together Dutch artists, Europeans and artists from farther afield, with newer names sharing the program with people who have been at it for a while.
The program also creates a useful tension in how they work. “Artists with us get complete artistic freedom,” ALL CAPS says in the interview below. At the same time, artists learn about the neighborhood, who lives there, and what issues matter to the people locally. The process steers clear of “design by committee” but also raises artists’ awareness so the wall isn’t treated like a blank object dropped from the sky, ready to be Instagrammed for clicks.
The other distinction becomes clearer after the festival is over. ALL CAPS says most of its walls are intended to remain for years, and the organization does not normally erase one festival wall to make room for the next. It goes looking for another wall instead. Over time, that begins to produce something closer to an open-air collection spread through the city — not fixed, not precious, not simply a switchable platform for trends, and still vulnerable to demolition, renovation, weather, and whatever else happens in public space.
ALL CAPS runs on a mixed public/private model: its published 2024 financing plan projected 45 percent from subsidies, 24 percent from funds, 25 percent from partners and sponsors, and 6 percent from audience and earned income. It’s useful transparency at a time when street-art festivals can double as branding platforms and gallery-owner showcases — especially for a culture built by graffiti writers who were sometimes criminalized for putting their names on the same public spaces that brands now pay to occupy.
This year, particularly experienced eyes moved through the scene as well. Martha Cooper was in Rotterdam photographing the festival, joined by her respected peer and friend Nika Kramer, who also contributes to this feature. Cooper hardly needs an introduction in graffiti circles; Kramer has built a substantial photographic record of her own around graffiti, street art, hip-hop and the people who make those cultures move.
The photographs do more than document completed walls. They catch the people behind the story: artists up in the lifts, paint moving across concrete, neighbors stopping to watch, equipment in the street, conversations at ground level — all the activity surrounding a mural before the spectacle leaves and the work becomes part of the street and the city.
Below, ALL CAPS talks about how the artists are chosen, how much freedom they get once they arrive, and why the organization would rather keep looking for another wall than erase the one it painted last year.
BSA: How do you choose the artists each year, and how important is it that they come from graffiti or street-art backgrounds rather than the gallery world?
ALL CAPS: We always know far in advance approximately how many walls we are doing in a certain neighborhood, so we know how many artists we need for the selection. Daniel tries to show the broad spectrum of what is possible within street art or Graffiti and also show what’s relevant at the moment.
Daniel (and I) travel a lot to see other Festivals or murals and get to know artists from around the world. We also work with many organizations around the world that suggest artists, or we do exchanges.
Within the festival, it’s important that the work fits the neighborhood we’re going to; it’s important the quality, but also, of course, the person, since we were doing so many things at the same time. It’s different than doing a single mural project.
We don’t have the strict criteria that you have to come from the graffiti scene or other communities. It’s important that the quality is good, that it’s a good fit, and that we show the whole spectrum.
We try to select one third of the artists from overseas, one third from Europe, and one third from the Netherlands, and we also try to combine newer talent with the big names.
BSA: How much freedom do artists have creatively once they arrive—are they responding to the neighborhood and local residents, or are most murals planned in advance?
ALL CAPS: Artists with us get complete artistic freedom, but we find it important to tell them what neighborhood we’re in, what kind of people live there, and what the most important issues over there are.
For a couple of years, we have also worked with a theme that’s broad enough to fit your work: last year, the theme was “I will change the world,” in our opinion, focusing on hope.
The only thing we don’t allow is political statements, religious statements, or offensive work; that’s why we ask for a sketch upfront.
BSA: What happens to the walls after the festival ends: how long do the works usually stay up, who decides when they are replaced, and do any become permanent landmarks?
ALL CAPS: In most cases, our walls are there to stay: we get most of the walls from housing corporations, and we tell them that unless there are pressing issues, we want to keep them up for at least five years. We never paint over the festival walls; we always start looking for new ones.
Of course, sometimes we have building walls being torn down or renovated, and then it’s a different case, but the idea is to create an open-air museum in areas of the city where art is not common.
Kalani’s own roots lie in California and Hawaii, but he also shares family ties with the Lombardijen neighborhood. His father-in-law is a true native of Lombardijen and walked these very streets in his youth. Kalani based this portrait on a 1978 photograph of his father-in-law at 17. In the mural, he wears a Hawaiian floral garland, known as a lei, crafted with Bird of Paradise flowers. A bloom cherished by both men.
While parts of the piece are photorealistic, the artist also incorporates more abstract shapes. These areas allow him to experiment with saturated colors and rich textures. Kalani even intentionally used the texture and color distribution caused by rain in the lower part of the hair. This marks the first time Kalani has created a portrait on such a grand scale. The different elements come together as an ode to his own roots, those of the neighborhood and above all, his wife’s family.
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground.Artistic direction by Andrea Conte …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
