G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020.
Reprinted from the original review.
Few forms of public discourse have endured as effectively as political caricature. Political cartoonists can express sentiment and opinion without uttering a syllable, using humor, observational skills, deep knowledge of the subject matter, and skillful craft. The political cartoon, when done well, lands its punch with a blunt efficiency that can influence the direction of a debate. For more than four decades, Robbie Conal has built a reputation by searing some of the most mendacious figures in politics, finance, media, and the celebrity-industrial complex, wheat-pasting his visually scathing posters on the street in the manner of advertisers’ wild-posting campaigns.
With succinct texts, crisp slogans, and curt nicknames, Conal pulls back the veil of public image-making and exposes what he regards as the less flattering truths beneath. He strips away the carefully maintained façade and drops it onto the street for public inspection. His depictions cannot easily be dismissed as those of a partisan sycophant; his subjects have ranged across a spectrum of personalities from various points on the political and cultural landscape. Posted in multiples like political advertisements, his portraits force the accidental viewer on the street to grapple with the grotesque, look below the surface of a public persona, and confront contradictions, hypocrisies, ambitions, and self-interest that often remain hidden from view. Like an X-ray, the work attempts to reveal what lies beneath the polished exterior rather than what is presented for public consumption.
What has consistently distinguished Conal’s practice is his understanding of the street as a communications platform. Long before social media became a primary arena for political commentary, Conal was placing dissent directly into public space. His posters appeared on walls, utility boxes, vacant storefronts, and neighborhood corners, meeting viewers where they already were. Equal parts caricature, editorial commentary, and public intervention, the works use the city itself as a distribution network.
In this book, author G. James Daichendt, EdD, who has previously written about Kenny Scharf and Shepard Fairey and authored The Urban Canvas: Street Art Around the World, examines, documents, and contextualizes Conal’s oeuvre. A street artist himself, among many other pursuits, Daichendt describes Conal as “an LA fixture and someone who is universally respected for the passion and vitality that he has brought to his work as an artist and teacher for several decades.”
Text: Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos: Diana Paun
Title: Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Published: Schiffer Publishing, 2020 Author: G. James Daichendt. Language: English
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
Hyuro: Beauty of a Tragedy. Impressum, Valencia, 2022.
Reprinted from the original 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. Designed by Ângela Almeida and Maria Gómez-Senent, the book compiles murals, paintings, drawings, sketches, and Hyuro’s own texts. It also includes reflections from figures such as 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.
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 makes 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.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos Diana Paun
Title: Hyuro: Beauty of a Tragedy Published: Impressum. Valencia, 2022 Author: A collection of authors Language: English
Niels Shoe Meulman: Shoe’s Black Book / Graffiti in the 1980’s.
Reprinted from the original review.
There are black books that function as polished archives, and then there are black books that still feel alive—creased at the edges, unstable, carrying the residue of graffiti movement, personal exchange, theft, boredom, obsession, and natural elements – like weather. Shoe’s Black Book: Graffiti in the 1980s is the latter. Drawn from the surviving pages of Niels “Shoe” Meulman’s working black book from roughly 1985 to 1987, this oversized volume feels like a partially stabilized artifact from a moment when European graffiti culture was still inventing itself.
Shoe—now known internationally for his later contributions to typography and calligraffiti—presents the black book not as a sacred relic but as a functional object that absorbed experience as it traveled. The pages move associatively rather than chronologically: sketches, throw-ups, train stories, prison recollections, handstyle experiments, hotel-room meetings, and technical observations are piled together the way memory often does inside graffiti culture itself. A muddy anecdote about losing drawings beneath a bridge sits comfortably beside reflections on line weight, marker tips, or the evolving geometry of a single letterform. Throughout, Shoe resists overexplaining, avoiding the nostalgic deep dive that can flatten graffiti history into sentimentality. Like many black books, the accumulation becomes the narrative.
What emerges most clearly is that graffiti is not primarily an aesthetic category but a form of interpersonal behavior and connectedness—a repetitive, improvisational system of exchange carried “mouth-to-mouth and hand-to-hand.” Shoe documents the fixation on style with unusual candor: the endless reworking of an “S,” the influence absorbed after meeting another writer, the quiet competition embedded inside even casual sketch sessions. The obsession is visible everywhere, but so is the camaraderie – as is the low-grade paranoia that accompanied painting trains illegally, traveling across borders, and navigating police pressure in pre-Internet Europe.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos Diana Paun
Title: Shoe’s Black Book. Graffiti in th 1980’s Published: Ryuzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, 2024. Author: Niels Shoe Meulman Language: English
When you consider the time, talent, commitment, and sheer nerve required to create Repainting Subway Art, you hope that, at least once in your life, you have been as thoroughly possessed by an idea as Tripl, a.k.a. Furious. To undertake something on this scale requires the devotion of a monk, the discipline of an archivist, and the alertness of someone who knows that a light may flick on suddenly, a train may move, or a security guard may appear at any moment. What began as a joke in 2013 somehow became an obligation, then an expedition, then ten years of returning to the same nearly impossible proposition: repaint every work in Subway Art, photograph it, restage its scenes, and somehow make the whole unwieldy puzzle hold together.
TRIPL. REPAINTING SUBWAY ART. Tripl a.k.a Furious. Ryuzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. December 2024.
The original 1984 book by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant has been carried across continents in backpacks, studied in bedrooms, circulated in photocopies, and worn ragged from repeated use. According to long-standing graffiti lore, more than a few copies were also “borrowed” from bookshops and libraries and never found their way back. Its photographs are inscribed in the visual memory of generations of writers, many of whom still name it as the first door that opened onto a life of nocturnal reconnaissance, railway yards, letterforms, and paint. Writing about the project in Nuart Journal, Dutch author and researcher Daniël de Jongh notes that Subway Art is commonly called “the Bible of Graffiti”; the phrase conveys its stature, but perhaps not the intimacy with which people have lived beside it. For many, it was less a commandment than an internal map.
Tripl did not merely borrow its compositions or repaint a selection of celebrated pieces. Working principally on trains in the Netherlands, he recreated all 239 individual works pictured in the original, repeatedly translating the names into TRIPL, FURIOUS, and related aliases while entering the styles, proportions, gestures, humor, and visual decisions of the earlier writers. Dutch train cars were often substantially larger than their New York counterparts, requiring changes of scale, thousands of cans, carefully arranged bags of paint, advance sketches, nights in railway yards, and hurried returns by daylight to document the work before it was cleaned. In that respect, his routine echoed part of Cooper’s own: getting up early, tracking newly painted trains, and trying to make the photograph before the buff erased the evidence.
Painting the trains was only part of the assignment he had set for himself. Tripl also pursued the photographs—the angles, clothing, backgrounds, passengers, poses, interiors, and accidents of place that gave Cooper and Chalfant’s original images their documentary force. He impersonated writers, police officers, commuters, and children; tracked down period-appropriate objects; and sometimes repainted completed works simply because the first photograph was not good enough. Martha Cooper eventually participated in several of these reenactments herself, photographing Tripl in scenes that echoed her pictures of Dondi White and Henry Chalfant.
The resulting book is not a facsimile, although its dependence on the architecture of the earlier volume is central to its conceit. The substitutions, updated details, altered names, changes of country, and movement across four decades make it a reply written in paint, risk, repetition, and stolen hours. Tripl does not answer Subway Art from a desk. He answers it in railway yards, inside an operating train system, under pressure, by submitting himself to some of the scale, uncertainty, and impermanence that shaped the original work—and sometimes answering it with humor. An anti-Koch message becomes an anti-Trump message; a newspaper-reading passenger becomes a woman looking at a smartphone; old declarations receive new answers. Tripl preserves the visual scaffolding while allowing the present to enter through the seams.
At 196 pages and 371 illustrations, Repainting Subway Art is considerably larger than the book it answers. Its additional space accommodates working images, unsuccessful attempts, reconstructed scenes, new writing, and interviews with Tripl and Martha Cooper. Rather than presenting ten years of activity as a seamless triumph, the volume allows the labor to remain visible: the planning, repetition, improvisation, missed photographs, repainted trains, accumulated materials, and improbable persistence required to carry the project across the finish line.
It is easy to admire the project simply as an endurance feat, but the book becomes more interesting when considered as a form of historical participation. Tripl could not preserve the original works; those painted trains disappeared long ago. He subjected himself instead to a version of their circumstances—speed, secrecy, scale, uncertainty, and the necessity of documentation—and then carried the resulting evidence back into print. Repainting Subway Art is homage, reply, performance, open reinterpretation, and a decade-long refusal to let the idea go. Even after the trains have been cleaned and the nights themselves have disappeared, the evidence remains: someone actually did all of this.
Selected exhibitions and events
MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, Netherlands June 10–August 27, 2023. Curated by Jasper van Es. Martha Cooper joined Tripl during the exhibition for a screening of Martha: A Picture Story and a public discussion.
Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, United Kingdom February 3–May 27, 2024. Presented in association with Bring the Paint.
Colab Gallery, Weil am Rhein, Germany June 10–November 2, 2024, as part of the group exhibition Patience.
Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany January 17–March 1, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Jasper van Es, opened with a book signing on January 17.
Museum of the City of New York, New York City April 4, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. Tripl appeared with Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, and John “Crash” Matos for Repainting Subway Art: From NYC to Amsterdam. Moderated by graffiti scholar Edward Birzin, the conversation examined the evolution and international reach of graffiti, the continuing influence of Subway Art, and Tripl’s decade-long response to it.
WallWorks New York, Bronx, New York A companion exhibition featuring work by Tripl opened April 5, 2025, following the Museum of the City of New York program.
Book details
Produced with support from the Mondriaan Fund
Repainting Subway Art — Tripl a.k.a. Furious
Published by Ruyzdael Publishing, Amsterdam
Publication date: December 19, 2024
196 pages
371 illustrations
Paperback, 21 × 27.5 cm
ISBN: 978-90-833493-2-9
Authors: Tripl/Furious, Edward Birzin, and Mikel van den Boogaard
Rafael Schacter: Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City.
Reprinted from the original review.
In Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City, Rafael Schacter proposes a reconsideration of monumentality through the lens of graffiti and street-based practices. Rather than approaching monuments as fixed, permanent structures, Schacter frames them as acts—gestures that remind, advise, or warn. Drawing on his research as an art historian and curator of urban art, the book examines how graffiti and monuments can illuminate one another, offering a way to understand public memory that is grounded in community, embodiment, and the acceptance of transience.
Using images and examples from streets around the world, Schacter explores how graffiti can function monumentally without relying on scale, legality, or durability. He argues that monuments do not need to be grand or permanent to carry social meaning, and that graffiti, through its visibility and public presence, can demand attention in ways comparable to traditional monuments. In this framing, monumentality becomes conceptual rather than material, rooted in action and participation rather than physical endurance.
A central focus of the book is the role of memorial practices within graffiti culture. Schacter examines how community-created walls, tributes, and tags operate as grassroots monuments that commemorate loss, mark affiliation, and address social concerns. He distinguishes between spraycan memorials—often visible, collective, and broadly respected—and memorial tags, which he describes as more intimate and cryptic gestures, legible primarily within the subculture. Both forms, he suggests, function as living monuments shaped by shared understanding and repeated acts of writing.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos Diana Paun
Title: Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City Published: MIT Press, 2024 Author: Rafael Schacter Language: English
Stay Melty is a vibrant and comprehensive chronicle of Buff Monster’s world—a visual universe that has grown from his early wheatpastes and stickers in Los Angeles to large-scale murals, collectible toys, and fine art editions recognized internationally. The volume functions as a mid-career survey and an update to the artist’s earlier 2015 book of the same name, expanding the original scope with six additional years of work and hundreds of full-color illustrations. The edition captures Buff Monster’s relentless productivity and his unbroken commitment to the “melty” aesthetic that has defined his visual identity for more than two decades.
The book opens with an essay by New York critic and curator Carlo McCormick, who contextualizes Buff Monster’s approach within contemporary art’s dialogue between pop imagery and personal mythology. McCormick identifies how the artist’s playful surfaces and consumer-inspired imagery mask a deeper commentary on impermanence and sentimentality—qualities that resonate beneath the glossy veneer. Rather than approaching graffiti or street art as rebellion, Buff Monster frames his practice as a celebration of optimism, humor, and the handmade mark. Design and advertising are part of the language, along with immediacy and accessibility of the street.
Each section of Stay Melty blends process documentation with finished works: sketches pinned to studio walls, murals under construction, and limited-edition sculptures lined up for production. This structure mirrors the artist’s own fluid boundaries between mediums. Murals become the basis for prints; trading cards evolve into paintings; street interventions feed back into gallery pieces. Across these transitions, Buff Monster maintains a notable consistency of tone and color. His signature pink palette—applied to characters that drip, ooze, and smile—is both brand and philosophy, a way of confronting chaos with playfulness and control.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Fotos Eveline Wilson
In Street Art World, criminologist and cultural theorist Alison Young brings two decades of field research and observation to one of the most visible, contested, and misunderstood forms of contemporary art. Published by Reaktion Books, the volume extends her earlier inquiries into graffiti, legality, and public space to provide what is a comprehensive sociocultural study of street art at date of publication.
The book reads like both travelogue and academic analysis, combining first-person encounters in cities from Melbourne to London and New York with interviews, case studies, and photographs. Young’s narrative is grounded in her background in criminology and law, but she writes with the curiosity of an ethnographer and the eye of someone who has walked the laneways and backstreets where this art breathes.
Street Art World is organized into seven chapters that trace the practice from its beginnings in graffiti writing to its institutional and digital transformations. “Beginnings” revisits graffiti’s early codes and gestures, setting up the argument that street art diverged not simply in style but in how it engages public space. “Streetness in Art” defines the characteristics that distinguish street art from its studio or mural counterparts—its ephemerality, its negotiation with risk, its intimate relationship with the urban fabric.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Fotos Eveline Wilson
Title: Alison Young. Street Art World Published: Reaktion Books, 2016 Author: Alison Young Language: English
With its smooth-to-the-touch pages and oversized, flapping format, this Black Book is a working object—a collection of shared memories stabilized just enough to be shared. Not quite a memoir, Shoe’s Black Book sits somewhere between a journal, a field manual, a scrapbook, and a massive piece of evidence of one guy’s path—specifically a tight window between 1985 and 1987, when everything was still forming. Pulled together from the remains of an actual collection device, it reads as an artifact that was never meant to be read cleanly, now presented with enough framing to make it legible without smoothing its rough edges.
Niels Shoe Meulman. SHOE’S BLACK BOOK: Graffiti in the 1980’s. Ruyzdael Publishing (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
The contents move like much graffitied memory does: not chronologically, not cleanly, but by association. A Montessori school reference sits not far from a story about racking paint; a meeting with Dondi in a hotel room opens into a muddy anecdote about losing that same drawing under a bridge; a Munich S-Bahn throw-up becomes a gateway into prison, Polaroids, and the unwritten rules of not confessing. Techniques appear in passing—line weight, tool precision, color choices—alongside notes about locations, near-misses, and the quiet passing of knowledge “mouth-to-mouth and hand-to-hand.” Shoe accumulates rather than overexplains, cataloging encounters, rushes of adrenaline, disappointment, styles, influences, and a thousand small turning points—without insisting on hierarchy.
Like most people’s black books, that accumulation is the point. Your blank volume gradually fills, accompanying the writer not as a finished object but as a constant companion—something to carry, to show, to trade, to lose, to recover. It absorbs time and is battered by it. Influence becomes visible in real time: a handstyle shifts after meeting someone, a logo gets reworked into something personal, an “S” becomes a problem to solve repeatedly, and possibly worship. Shoe gradually reveals the obsessive nature of this process—the fixation on color, style, and technique, and the thrill of cat-and-mouse with the cops. Now the obsession reads less as nostalgia than as a working condition and a possible formation of character.
The identity keeps shifting: vandal, decorator, designer. Shoe pushes back on the soft language applied to graffiti early on—“Oh, such nice colors”—with the blunt assertion of VANDALISM, and later reflects on the terminology with pragmatic clarity: “What all graffiti writers have in common is their GSD (Get Shit Done) and DIY (Destroy It Yourself) mentality.” It’s a useful correction. The book doesn’t present graffiti as an aesthetic category first, but as a behavior and connective culture—repetitive, driven, and often indifferent to how it is received. This collection, though, doesn’t feel indifferent. It has been gathered, protected, and now carefully presented—suggesting that even the most committed posture of not caring has always carried an awareness of being seen.
What gives this particular black book additional weight is not only who passes through it—Dondi, Haring, Angel, Bando—but how those encounters are recorded. Shoe doesn’t pitch them all as monumental events, but as moments: a drawing made casually in a hotel room, later water-damaged and forgotten; a nickname given; a lesson absorbed. Carlo McCormick frames this well in his introductory essay, calling it “a travelogue, scrapbook, sketchpad, and diary” that doubles as “a book-shaped treasure chest of memories.” The book never resolves into one thing. It remains plural. Each spread pairs original pages with later notes and images, reinforcing that split between what happened and how it’s remembered.
This is also a constructed narrative. Pages were lost, removed, damaged, returned—some literally cut out and resurfacing years later in places like Christie’s. The decision to unbind the original and treat each page as an individual work shifts the object again, from private tool to displayable archive. Memory fills in gaps; certain stories get sharper over time. The theft itself marks a break—pushing him, at least for a time, out of graffiti and into design. McCormick’s aside—that when a veteran tells these stories “you can be sure they’re full of shit, but… it’s solid gold”—isn’t dismissive so much as accurate, and told with a certain pathos. This is lived history, shaped in the telling.
What emerges is not a definitive account of a scene but a close-range view of how one forms—through repetition, proximity, and exchange. Amsterdam and New York fold into each other here, not as competing origin stories but as Shoe’s overlapping circuits. The book shows how styles move, how ideas travel, and how a localized practice becomes something shared across cities. Intelligence and aspiration pass through pages like these—handled, carried, traded, sometimes stolen, sometimes returned.
For someone unfamiliar with why a black book matters, this one answers without overexplaining. Here is the process before it is resolved, the work before it is framed, the evidence before the story hardens around it. Shoe’s Black Book is not simply a record of what graffiti became. It shows how it moved and how it was bound before anyone decided what it was worth.
Niels Shoe Meulman. SHOE’S BLACK BOOK: Graffiti in the 1980’s.
Ruyzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, Netherlands. December 2025.
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.
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
Djerbahood: Open Air Museum of Street Art. Mehdi Ben Cheikh. 2015
Reprinted from the original review.
If Tour Paris 13 was the demolition swan song of an era, Djerbahood may feel like an expansive sunrise on the other side of the world. Conceived by gallerist and curator Mehdi Ben Cheikh and realized in the whitewashed village of Erriadh on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, this project gathered more than one hundred artists from thirty countries to create what Ben Cheikh calls a “museum à ciel ouvert”—an open-air museum under the North African sun. The resulting book, published by Albin Michel, offers a monumental visual record of this transformation: 500 photographs across 272 pages, documenting walls, artists, and villagers in a rare moment of collective creation.
In these images, the desert light hits walls like paper. Works by eL Seed, ROA, Pantonio, Phlegm, Jaz, Fintan Magee, Curiot, Inti, and Sebas Velasco coexist with local architecture—white domes, low arches, latticed shadows—turning the town into a living gallery. As Brooklyn Street Art observed in its review, Djerbahood “absorbs your mind and imagination, giving you a sense of the place and the people who live there.” It’s true: the book’s pacing—half atlas, half photo-essay—lets readers wander through alleys as if following the scent of plaster and sea air.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Fotos Eveline Wilson
Title: Djerbahood: Open Air Museum of Street Art Published: Published by Albin Michael / Galerie Itinerrance, Paris, 2015 Author: Mehdi Ben Cheikh Language: English
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
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
