Art Book Review

TRIPL / Repainting Subway Art: The Most Audacious Graffiti Homage in a Generation

TRIPL / Repainting Subway Art: The Most Audacious Graffiti Homage in a Generation

July 21, 2026 ,

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

Editor: Ferry van Zijderveld

Read more
Books In The MCL: Rafael Schacter: Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art And Resistance In The City.

Books In The MCL: Rafael Schacter: Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art And Resistance In The City.

June 25, 2026 ,

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

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

Read more
Books In The MCL: Buff Monster. Stay Melty

Books In The MCL: Buff Monster. Stay Melty

May 19, 2026 ,

Stay Melty. Buff Monster. 2021

Reprinted from the original review.

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

Title: Buff Monster. Stay Melty
Published: Ginko Press, 2021
Author: Buff Monster
Language: English

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

Read more
Books in The MCL: Alison Young. Street Art World

Books in The MCL: Alison Young. Street Art World

May 5, 2026 ,

Alison Young. Street Art World. 2016

Reprinted from the original review.

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

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

Read more
A Working Object: Shoe’s Black Book (1985–1987)

A Working Object: Shoe’s Black Book (1985–1987)

April 30, 2026 , ,

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.

Authors: Niels Shoe Meulman, Carlo McCormick

Read more
Hyuro: Beauty Of A Tragedy. 2009-2019

Hyuro: Beauty Of A Tragedy. 2009-2019

March 10, 2026 , ,

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.

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

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

March 5, 2026 ,

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

Reprinted from the original review.

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

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

Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo     Fotos Eveline Wilson

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

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

Read more
Books In The MCL: Mehdi Ben Cheikh. Djerbahood: Open Air Museum of Street Art

Books In The MCL: Mehdi Ben Cheikh. Djerbahood: Open Air Museum of Street Art

February 26, 2026 ,

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

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

Read more
Books In The MCL: Vladimir Manzhos. WAONE: Worlds of Phantasmagoria, Vol. 1

Books In The MCL: Vladimir Manzhos. WAONE: Worlds of Phantasmagoria, Vol. 1

February 10, 2026 ,

WAONE: Worlds of Phantasmagoria, Vol. 1. Vladimir Manzhos. 2020

Reprinted from the original review.

Worlds of Phantasmagoria, Vol. 1 is a comprehensive exploration of the monochromatic works of Ukrainian artist Vladimir Manzhos, known as WAONE. Spanning the years 2013 to 2020, this 208-page hardcover book provides a chronological view of his artistic evolution. It highlights his transition from large-scale, colorful murals in public spaces to intricate black-and-white compositions created in the studio.

The book features a range of works, including murals, ink drawings, etchings, and lithographs, each accompanied by detailed narratives from the artist. These descriptions provide insight into WAONE’s creative process and the philosophical themes that underpin his work. Drawing inspiration from mythology, folklore, science, and personal introspection, his pieces weave together surreal imagery with symbolic depth.

With the aesthetics of a musty and mythical library, the illustrations open the preconceptions of psychology, offering myriad views through recombining familiar elements into unusual associations. In the process, you travel with Waone as he dedicates himself to this uncolorful view, which is nonetheless rich, if not tinged with a bit of antiseptic horror.

Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo     Fotos Eveline Wilson

Title: WAONE: Worlds of Phantasmagoria, Vol. 1
Published: WAWE 2020
Author: Vladimir Manzhos (WAONE)
Language: English

Click URBAN NATION BERLIN to continue reading

Read more
Books In the MCL: Bill Posters “The Street Art Manual”

Books In the MCL: Bill Posters “The Street Art Manual”

February 5, 2026 ,
Bill Posters. The Street Art Manual. September, 2020.

Reprinted from the original review.

A field guide to resistance and reinvention, The Street Art Manual by artist and agitator Bill Posters is equal parts DIY toolkit, art history primer, and subversive etiquette handbook. Structured with the confidence of a seasoned practitioner and the welcoming, humorous tone of a supportive older sibling, the book offers practical instruction and philosophical grounding for anyone intent on engaging with public space creatively—and responsibly.

Posters, co-founder of the Brandalism project and known for controversial deep-fake online campaigns like Spectre, brings a broad knowledge of global activist art movements to the table. From Beuys’ notion of “social sculpture” to John Fekner’s typographic landmines and the ACT UP visuals of the AIDS crisis, the opening chapters trace a lineage of public dissent that informs his own practice. These references aren’t dusty citations but sharp reminders that creativity in the streets has always been more than aesthetics—sometimes it feels like survival, strategy, and classic satire.

Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo     Fotos Eveline Wilson

Title: The Street Art Manual
Published: Laurence King Publishing. September 08, 2020
Author: Bill Posters
Language: English

Click URBAN NATION MUSEUM to continue reading.

Read more
BSA HOT LIST 2025: Books For Your Gift Giving

BSA HOT LIST 2025: Books For Your Gift Giving

December 18, 2025 , , ,

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.

Books in the MCL: John P. Jacob (ed.). “Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection”

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.

Sofort alle Fenster und Türen schliessen! (Immediately Close All Windows and Doors)

Arek Stankiewicz & Bartek Swiatecki. WARMIOPTIKUM. Warmia, Olsztyn. Poland. 2024

From BSA:

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.”

Arek Stankiewicz & Bartek Swiatecki. WARMIOPTIKUM. Warmia, Olsztyn. Poland. 2024

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.

Addison Karl. KULLI. A Natural Spring of Artwork, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, Public Art, and Inspiration. Self-published. Monee, IL. 2024.

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.

Rafael Schacter. Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in The City. MIT Press. 2024

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.

SETH on Walls. Editions de La Martiniere. 2022. Distributed by Abrams. An imprint of ABRAMS, 2023.

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.

Sonny Gall. 99 of NY, released by King Koala Press with text by Mila Tenaglia. 2025.

Read more
Finding the City Between Moments, Streets, and Rooftops: Sonny Gall and Mila Tenaglia’s “99 of NY”

Finding the City Between Moments, Streets, and Rooftops: Sonny Gall and Mila Tenaglia’s “99 of NY”

November 11, 2025 ,

For one week this fall, BlankMagBooks in New York quietly hosted photographs by Sonny Gall from her new publication 99 of NY, released by King Koala Press with text by Mila Tenaglia. The exhibition was small but telling — a passing moment in the life of a project that had already taken a decade to form.

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.

Gall, born in Milan and long settled in New York, brings a deep familiarity with the city’s hip-hop and graffiti circles and a sensitivity to its architecture and light. Tenaglia, from Rome by way of Pescara, came to New York through journalism and documentary film, drawn to stories that find beauty in imperfection. Their partnership is grounded in trust, a love for street culture, and shared intuition: one sees, the other shapes the narrative.

99 of NY feels like the city it portrays — restless, imperfect, alive. The brief gallery presentation served as an echo of the book’s essence, but it’s the pages themselves that hold the weight: a decade or more of lived experience distilled into images and words that ask to be read slowly, with attention and care.

We spoke with Gall and Tenaglia about their work:

Brooklyn Street Art: When did you first begin to see yourself as a photographer, rather than simply someone taking pictures?

Sonny Gall: Honestly, I still see myself simply as someone who takes photos to satisfy a personal instinct and sense of pleasure. It was friends, acquaintances, and even people I didn’t know—my Instagram followers—who started calling me a photographer and encouraged me to pursue this project more seriously.

BSA: What do you feel you’re capturing in your photographs of New York — is it its people, geometry, pulse, or something more elusive?

Sonny Gall: What draws me in are all the things often associated with graffiti and street art—the play of colors, architectural contrasts, the diversity of people, and those small details that catch my eye on an aesthetic level. I tend to visualize compositions that I enjoy framing and coming back to later.

BSA: How do graffiti and street culture weave into the moments you frame — are they a backdrop, a rhythm, or a conversation within your images?

Sonny Gall: Graffiti and street art are what primarily capture my attention. I love framing them within the urban context of the city. They’ve become a defining element of my work, giving my photos rhythm, identity, and a distinctive character.

BSA: When did this project first take shape for you, and in what ways has your vision of the city evolved since then?

Sonny Gall: 99 of NY was conceived in 2013 but stayed on hold for several years. Life happened, but the idea never left me. With the encouragement of friends and family, I realized I needed someone to help bring it to life. That’s when I reached out to my friend Mila Tenaglia, in 2021, during Covid. We had both moved from Italy to New York around the same time, sharing similar experiences and a deep love for the city. I immediately knew she would be the perfect partner—our visions aligned naturally. With her structured writing and my photography, we created something beyond a book: a visual and emotional portrait of a transforming New York—our New York—rapidly reshaped by gentrification.

BSA: If someone could not see these images, what would you want them to understand about them through your words?

Mila Tenaglia: I’d want the writing to pull readers straight into that chaotic, creative spiral that is New York — a city of bombed-out corners, tags, graffiti, and gestures that still breathe in the semi-illegality of pure expression. Every mark on a wall is an act of self-definition: it demands nothing, yet it insists on being seen. I hope that pulse — the urgency, the defiance, the raw emotion — can be felt even without the images, carried only by the words.

BSA: The city is chaotic and unpredictable — how do you capture its essence in language?

Mila Tenaglia: That’s a beautiful question — one I ask myself all the time. My life and my work, built around culture, people, and documentary storytelling, keep me on the streets every day. I live and work within the pulse of the city. After so many years here — in a place I can finally call home — I think I’ve absorbed something of its rhythm. Like a painter with a brush, I’ve tried to translate that rhythm into language, to turn what I see and live into words that still breathe New York’s restlessness.

99 of NY by Sonny Gall. Written by Mila Tenaglia. King Koala Press. Italy 2025

BSA: Whose words or voices have most inspired your own?

Mila Tenaglia: I’ve always been drawn to voices that carry both fire and fragility — writers who turn experience into resistance. Oriana Fallaci, with her fearless confrontation of power, taught me that truth has a pulse and a price. Patti Smith showed me how poetry can be lived — raw, unfiltered, born from the noise of the streets. Joan Didion taught me the precision of silence, how restraint can be as powerful as rebellion. And Rebecca Solnit, with her wandering intellect, reminds me that thinking and walking are the same act — a way of mapping the world through attention. Together, they form a kind of compass: their words move through chaos with grace, and that’s what I try to do too — to find beauty without erasing the struggle. There are many other names I could mention, but right now I feel like highlighting these voices in particular.

Mila Tenaglia and Sonny Gall, BlankMagBooks Gallery, Eldridge Street, New York (photo ©Steven P. Harrington).
Read more

Recent Articles on BSA