Swedish street artist Herr Nilsson has long built his work around a deceptively simple collision: take characters and images associated with innocence, beauty, childhood, or cultural familiarity and let them misbehave, or worse.
Sweetness meets guns, alcohol, rebellion, and darker impulses; the joke lands first, but a certain discomfort is rarely far behind. His recent works around Stockholm continue that strategy, drawing on sources as different as Swan Lake, Winnie the Pooh, and John Bauer’s beloved fairy-tale princess Tuvstarr. What connects them is not simply provocation, but the idea of a familiar character breaking character—escaping the roles, behaviors, and meanings that have been assigned to them.
Several of these paintings have found an especially effective stage beneath a bridge at Lillsjön, a lake in Stockholm, where Nilsson uses the water itself to complete the composition. The setting is picturesque but shadowy, distorted reflections in currents, public yet protected. The reflections give his altered cultural icons a second life below the surface, opening the imagination for altered subrealities.
Here ballerinas perform Danse des petits cygnes while carrying and firing Kalashnikovs in a work responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh drift away from respectable expectations for a drunken day out; and Bauer’s once-innocent Tuvstarr returns as a figure who, in Nilsson’s telling, has simply had enough.
Taken together, the pieces suggest a recurring narrative of innocence confronted by the adult world—and familiar figures deciding, sometimes gleefully and sometimes angrily, that they are no longer going to behave as expected.
BSA: The Ballerinas. At a glance, this image appears straightforward. Four young dancers from the corps de ballet are seen performing the sequence “Danse des Petits Cygnes” from Swan Lake. On closer inspection, the viewer sees them locking arms and holding two fired war-grade weapons, AK-47s? Can you tell us what inspired you to combine these two seemingly different concepts into one? Are you speaking up against firearms violence?
HN: Yes, they are AK-47 Kalashnikovs, and the ballerinas are performing Danse des petits cygnes, or Dance of the Little Swans, from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. It is a very beautiful work, both visually and musically, and I got the idea for the painting while watching the ballet at the Stockholm Opera House with my daughter, who is a ballet dancer.
The painting is a comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I wanted to create something beautiful and poetic while, at the same time, holding a sense of brutal and raging violence.
Some friends from Estonia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, visited me in my studio while I was working on the painting. They told me that there is a strong tradition in the Soviet Union, and now in Russia, of broadcasting Swan Lake on television and radio when a president dies or another major crisis occurs. My friends told me that it’s quite common that people in Estonia can say to each other, like an expression, that they are hoping to watch the Swan Lake on TV soon.
Also when independent Russian media outlets were forced to shut down following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, including the TV channel TV Rain (Dozhd), they ended their final broadcast by playing Swan Lake.
BSA: Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin? Floating on a river, an inverted umbrella as a boat. They seem to be drunk. Do you wish to draw attention to youth drinking with this image? Underage drinking?
HN: It’s Today, My Favourite Day, featuring Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, plays with roles and expectations, with the ways people are expected to act and behave. It is about rebelling against those expectations, or simply hiding away with your friends, having fun and party like a maniac.
BSA: This image shows a Non-binary or Gender non-conforming individual. They are nude; their right breast is exposed, and the primary symbol of anarchism, Circle-A, is drawn on what their left breast would have been. Their face is cast in shadow, looking down and mostly covered by an abundant cascade of blond hair. What’s the significance of this illustration? What inspired you to paint it?
John Bauer was a famous Swedish painter and illustrator, best known for his atmospheric and mysterious fairy-tale illustrations in the children’s book series Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), first published in 1913.
One of his most iconic characters is Tuvstarr, an innocent fairy-tale princess who ventures into the forest and encounters representatives of the wild: the fairies, the Skogsrå (forest nymph), and the forest tarn. Along the way, she loses the three symbols of her royal dignity: her princess crown, her white dress and her gold necklace, ultimately ending up sitting beside a dark forest tarn, endlessly gazing into the water. Eventually, she disappears, leaving only a white flower behind.
In my painting, she is no longer quite so innocent. It is about having had enough, embracing the wild and rebelling.
BSA: Is there a particular reason why you chose to place them under a bridge other than the resulting effect of seeing the image’s reflection on the water?
HN: Yes, I have painted three different motifs that needed a water reflection to complete the image. The atmosphere underneath that bridge is beautiful, but also dark and mysterious, which I found perfect for all three paintings.
It is a popular spot for walkers and runners who go around the lake Lillsjön, so the paintings are seen by many people. In Sweden, graffiti and street art are strictly forbidden in many places and are often removed within hours or days. The water beneath the bridge is quite deep, which gives the paintings some additional protection.
At the same location, back in 2017, I painted my own version of Caravaggio’s Narcissus, replacing Narcissus with Justin Bieber, sitting by the shore and staring at his reflection in the water. I have attached that painting in this email.
When we recently visited Mourad Fedouache in his Berlin studio, the 2026 Martha Cooper Scholar had begun covering the white walls with photographs and collage. They did not yet form a finished sequence. Instead, they appeared in small groupings, sometimes joined by drawings, objects, dates, and handwritten marks—compact stories developing alongside a larger photographic project.
One grouping grew out of an inflamed tooth, bringing medication packaging, handwritten text, and his photograph of a bug on the studio window—a reference to Kafka—into a small, self-contained story. Elsewhere, Fedouache had drawn the outline of a house directly onto the wall. Inside it were photographs he had taken of his iPhone screen, showing people and places back in Morocco, including his mother.
“This is like a diary,” he said while showing us the wall.
On a table nearby, small photographic prints were being sorted into loose groups. They included demonstrations and public gatherings, individual portraits, street and transit scenes, family-run restaurants, and quieter observations made while moving through Berlin. In one image, a pigeon passed through the city with the same claim on his attention as anyone else. Fedouache moved among the prints, pointing out repeated gestures and possible connections while the sequence was still taking shape.
People remain at the center of his photography.
“I try, because I love people,” he told us. “For that, you will see my pictures—all my pictures, it’s with people.”
Born in Morocco in 2000, Fedouache is a self-taught photographer raised in Douar Chanti, a neighborhood of Sidi Yahya El Gharb, near Kénitra. He earned his baccalaureate in physical sciences and later enrolled at Ibn Tofail University to study Arabic law. His academic interests led him in a different direction from his law studies, and he opted to pursue a Master of Excellence in Screenwriting and Directing at the same university. His photographic education began in the market and streets of his hometown. He started taking pictures in 2017 while working as a vendor in the local market, where the customers, workers, children, and families around him became his first subjects. His earliest camera was a mobile phone.
“I worked in markets and with people,” he recalled of his childhood. “Every time I see people, I see the human.”
That sentence, delivered with his direct and unexpectedly frank sincerity, comes close to describing the animating spirit of the work. The people in his photographs are not illustrations of a social condition. They are individuals encountered while working, waiting, celebrating, playing, traveling, or simply passing through a day.
Fedouache first photographed Douar Chanti from within, as someone whose family and history were already part of the place. His pictures record its working life, traditions, children’s games, aspirations, humor, and difficulties without presenting the neighborhood as a spectacle of deprivation. In discussing his first solo exhibition, he said that he wanted viewers to understand that people who possess little and live may nevertheless be happy. Neither Fedouache nor Martha Cooper denies hardship; it is a dry-eyed reality in much of the work. But neither allows hardship to become the entire identity of the people pictured.
Fedouache’s work appeared in Sourtna, the inaugural group exhibition at Morocco’s National Photography Museum in Rabat in 2020. In late 2022, he won the photography competition Dream Artist, broadcast on Morocco’s 2M television channel. The program helped make possible his first solo exhibition, From Douar Shanty to New York, presented at the American Arts Center in Casablanca in the spring of 2023. The exhibition brought together photographs of the people, rituals, labor, play, pain, and dreams he had observed in his home community.
Now he is the second recipient of the Martha Cooper Scholarship for documentary photography, administered by Stiftung Berliner Leben within its Fresh A.I.R. artist-residency program. The 2026 scholarship runs from February through November and provides a Berlin living and working space, financial and production support, and time to develop a new photographic project. The theme for this second scholarship cycle is “Future Visions: Artistic Approaches to Peace.”
The Berlin work was still very much in formation during our visit. Fedouache had been photographing immigrant communities, marches, neighborhood businesses, public transportation, and encounters on the street. Some images were made with his camera and others with his phone. For him, the distinction matters less than remaining prepared.
“The good image, it comes to you,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you, ‘Oh, I’m here.’”
He described constantly looking at photography online and in films, sometimes without knowing the name of the person who made the image. “I need to eat photography in my mind,” he said. At home, he keeps a camera near him. On the street, the phone may be enough. The important thing is to remain alert to the picture before it disappears.
His mother’s presence in the studio extended beyond the photographs inside the hand-drawn house. She had sent him a large parcel from Morocco filled with familiar foods, each wrapped and labeled with his name. Part of the reason, he explained, was her concern that he might not find the same things in Berlin. Part of it was simply the impulse to send pieces of home along with them.
Fedouache served Moroccan tea and shared one of the foods from the parcel while showing us his photographs. The afternoon moved easily between the table and the walls, between Berlin and Morocco, and between pictures already made and ideas still being tested. The hospitality did not interrupt the studio visit. It was part of it.
One developing idea concerned immigrant families and the meaning of home. Fedouache was considering asking children to draw the houses or places their parents remembered in Morocco, Sudan, or other countries. He might then enlarge the drawings and use them as backgrounds for family portraits. He presented it as an idea rather than an established project, something that had come to him only recently as he considered what he could realistically develop during the residency.
“You know, on the first day I’m in Berlin, I’m just walking here, and I tell myself, ‘Mourad, you used to say to yourself, “I need a place, money, and photography, and you have this now. Do it.’”
The idea of a child drawing a remembered or inherited home also suggests one of the strongest connections between Fedouache and the photographer whose name the scholarship carries.
These photographs became the basis of Cooper’s book Street Play. They also reveal something fundamental about her way of working. She paid attention to the intelligence of street life and to cultural practices that adults, institutions, and the news media frequently ignored. The same curiosity guided her later documentation of graffiti writers: look closely, learn how a community understands itself, and do not assume that an outsider’s first interpretation is correct.
During the visit, we looked at one of Fedouache’s photographs of a child playing with a handmade toy in Douar Chanti. It recalled Martha Cooper’s long-running interest in the games children invent from available materials. During decades of international travel, Cooper photographed children turning tires, bottles, scrap wood, wheels, and other discarded objects into toys. When she later examined photographs made in different countries, she noticed children separated by geography and culture improvising many of the same games.
Fedouache immediately recognized himself in the comparison.
“Because when I was a child, I did this,” he said. “I did this with my mom.”
The resemblance between the two photographers is not primarily visual. Cooper’s photographs are often direct, systematic records of people, actions, and environments. Fedouache’s work can be more diaristic, allowing his own memories, physical experiences, and visual associations to enter the developing sequence. Yet both are drawn to the ingenuity of ordinary people and to the unofficial ways they use streets, buildings, objects, and public space.
Cooper frequently entered communities as an attentive visitor who gradually earned access. Fedouache began by photographing the community from which he came. In Berlin, he is learning how to carry that closeness into places where he is the newcomer. His photographs suggest that he does so by spending time, speaking with people, returning, and allowing an encounter to become more than a picture taken in passing.
He described photography as a box with one eye. You turn it toward the world, he said, and decide how you will see what is there: beautiful or difficult, intimate or distant. Somewhat comically, he demonstrated the idea by putting a box over his head.
For now, the Berlin photographs remain spread across tables and gathered on the studio walls. A repeated hand may become a sequence. A photograph from a family restaurant may find its place beside an image from a march. Pictures of his mother and Morocco sit within the outline of a house while another idea about home develops nearby.
The final form will emerge later, during his exhibition for the program. What is already present is the consistency of Fedouache’s attention: a willingness to remain close to people, to recognize invention alongside hardship, and to keep looking until daily life begins to tell its own story.
Italian-Argentinian art director and illustrator Nacho Valentini spends much of his professional life moving through the polished worlds of branding, motion graphics, illustration, and commercial visual identity. But on the streets of Pescara, where he lives along Italy’s Adriatic coast, another side of his practice has quietly emerged in recent years.
In his ongoing urban intervention project “Enelgumeni,” Valentini transforms ordinary electrical utility cabinets into cartoon-like characters drawn from sports, cinema, celebrity culture, mythology, neighborhood archetypes, and collective memory. Looking at the boxes, he realized many already resembled figures with oversized heads, tiny bodies, and exaggerated feet; rather than imposing imagery onto the city, he describes the process as “revealing what is already there.” More than 50 painted cabinets now appear throughout Pescara and nearby neighborhoods, turning overlooked infrastructure into playful interruptions in the rhythm of daily urban life.
The project sits somewhere between street art, character design, and public-space psychology. Valentini approaches the cabinets less as blank surfaces for self-expression than as dormant personalities waiting to be activated. The figures range from lifeguards and fishermen to Maradona, Serena Williams, Harry Potter, Frida Kahlo, the Pope, and neighborhood workers whose identities often echo the spaces around them. The work carries the warmth and accessibility of illustration culture rather than the territorial language of graffiti, yet it still participates in the essential street-art impulse of reclaiming ignored urban surfaces and giving them new meaning.
BSA: Which city do you transform the electrical boxes in? Nacho Valentini: The project takes place in Italy, mainly in the area where I live, Pescara City, along the Adriatic coast. It’s an ongoing urban intervention that continues to expand as I discover new boxes.
BSA: Do you have permission from the municipality, the city authorities, or the electricity company to paint them? NV: Most of the boxes are painted in agreement with e- Distribuzione, the Italian electricity distribution company and a local cultural association. For many others, I’ve asked for permission, while in some cases the intervention has been more spontaneous.
BSA: What sort of paint do you use to paint? NV: I mainly use water-based spray can, specifically Montana Water-Based. I like them because I can mix the colors to create new tones, they are very versatile and high-quality and do not pollute the environment.
BSA: Why do you think painting the boxes is a good idea? NV: Because these objects are already part of the urban landscape but are usually ignored, often dirty and visually neglected. At a certain point, I realized that many of these boxes already follow the basic principles of cartoon character design: big heads, small bodies, and oversized feet. That intuition became the starting point of the project. I’m not really adding something new, I’m revealing what is already there. It’s a way to transform something purely functional into something playful and unexpected.
BSA: What sort of satisfaction do you get from painting the boxes? NV: The most interesting part is seeing how perception changes. Once people notice the character, they can’t unsee it anymore. It creates a small moment of discovery in everyday life.
BSA: Does the public react positively to seeing the boxes transform into characters? NV: Yes, very much. People often stop, take photos, smile, or share them. The most rewarding part is the direct feedback from people in the neighborhood. They often stop to say thank you for improving their area and their everyday routine.
BSA: How do you select the characters to transform the boxes? NV The shape of the box always comes first. One of the initial rules I gave myself was to work with internationally recognizable, almost iconic and inspiring characters. This is important because in an urban context people often pass by quickly (on a bike or in a car) so the character needs to be immediately recognizable.
LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY at Urban Nation Museum, Berlin
A newly released Interview snippet with curator Michelle Houston and Steven P. Harrington from the opening of the exhibit toys with the question of where art belongs and who gets to decide.
Has this been settled to your satisfaction?
Video credits: Commissioned by Stiftung Berliner Leben. Shot by Alexander Lichtner & Ilja Braun. Post-production, additional footage, graphics, and a final version by Michelle Nimpsch for YAP Studio/YES, AND… productions GmbH & Co. KG
“Love Letters To The City” is currently on view at Urban Nation Museum Berlin. Click HERE for more details about the exhibition, schedules, directions, events, and programs.
On a late-night private tour during the Art Basel week madness, with just two guests in tow, the Museum of Graffiti can feel less like a public institution and more like an unlocked archive after hours—quiet enough to hear details that usually get lost in daytime traffic: the cadence of a tag, the logic of a crew name, the way a single artifact can rearrange what you thought you “knew” about the early years.
Alan Ket, co-founder of the museum alongside Allison Freidin, has an advantage as a guide that goes beyond carrying the historian’s timeline in his head. He knows the people in that timeline. Together, Ket and Freidin have spent years building a place where those histories can be shown without being flattened into a slogan.
Three Arguments, One Program
The current program is structured like a three-part argument, each section reinforcing the next: the foundation of UGA-era legitimacy, the long arc of a writer who outlived the rules and the era that formed around graffiti, and a parallel street-writing tradition from Brazil that insists on its own terms. Around those anchors, interstitial context stations—about Subway Art, about a “Hall of Fame,” about what writing is when it’s more than a product—and those do real work in a short visit, especially when the museum is closed, and you’re not fighting a crowd.
The Origins exhibit opens with a title that doesn’t hedge: “UNITED GRAFFITI ARTISTS (UGA), 1972–1975 — The First Organized Graffiti Collective.” The wall text frames the early 1970s not as a hazy prelude, but as a moment when New York’s walls and trains became “the visual language of a new generation writing its name into history.” The intent is clear: to meet those writers as authors, not as an anonymous “phenomenon.”
In a key early moment, a 22-year-old sociology student at City College of New York, Hugo Martinez, pulls together a group, a show, and a generation of young writers emerging from an expanding visual movement. Seeking out Puerto Rican and African American writers, Martinez traces an early chain of connection—through HENRY 161, he meets active Washington Heights figures including SNAKE 1, SJK 171, MIKE 171, STITCH 1, and COCO 144—and invites them into something new: a collective, publicly legible, with a name that could travel.
The Canvases Reappear
The exhibition pins down a crucial milestone: UGA’s first exhibition at City College in December 1972, anchored by a 10-by-40-foot collaborative mural that drew coverage in The New York Times. That context explains why the newly surfaced canvases land with such force today. They aren’t “early work” in the abstract; they are evidence of one of the first moments graffiti writers entered an art context without shedding the culture’s DNA.
Then Ket takes you to the proofs themselves—the ones that stop conversations. He describes the unveiling of the massive canvas as a reunion at the edge of disbelief:
“We opened yesterday—the first time anyone had seen the (mural by UGA) work publicly. Doze was here. Coco was here. Flint 707 was here. Mike 171 was here. Artists who were part of that original moment, or closely connected to it.”
And then the realization:
“A lot of people initially thought the paintings were replicas. Even people who knew the work. They couldn’t believe these were the original canvases.”
UGA’s short-lived run broke cultural barriers that still echo graffiti’s resistance by many institutions today, timid as they are to recognize this movement. The 1973 Deuce Coupe live backdrop performance with the Joffrey Ballet, UGA on the cover of New York magazine, and early exhibitions—including the group show at the Razor Gallery in SoHo—all pushed that door open. Like coming across a great piece on the street—there one day, gone the next—UGA’s tenure was brief, explosive, and foundational.
The museum’s educational nodes function as interstitial primers, uncovering codes and influences that might otherwise be missed. Between the larger narratives, local histories offer insight into Miami’s scene, here with a focus on Tesoe and his highway sign writing. The tag, forever individual and cryptic to the everyday observer, is decoded and compared across multiple cities, enabling a handstyle compare and contrast.
Elsewhere, a closer look at style points to a youthful desire for flash and image, shaped by the tensions of New York’s 1970s streets—gang violence, territorial pressure, and a driving need among artists to create, to mark presence, and to be seen.
“SUBWAY ART: The Book That Changed Everything” is presented as the crack in the wall that allowed the rest of the world to look in. A quote from Daze underlines the point: “I don’t think anyone could have anticipated the global impact that Subway Art has had on the culture. For many, it became the entry point to a worldwide phenomenon.”
“GRAFFITI HALL OF FAME — Strictly Kings and Better” shifts the lens from documentation to reputation—how writers judge writers. The inaugural class sets out clear benchmarks: CASE 2, DONDI, FUZZ ONE, IZ THE WIZ, and TRACY 168, with painted portraits by Beto Landsky. It points to a canon shaped internally, through practice, reputation, and peer recognition.
One of the most useful sentences in the building comes from PHASE 2, because it tells visitors what to value without preaching:
“Writing is centered on names, words, and letters… Writers agree without a doubt that there is an attitude and commitment within the soul that accompanies being a true writer… that one’s volume of work can in no way replace.”
The JonOne featured section reads as a biography laid out in public, a sprawling timelines history that holds back little, crowding in detail and storytelling. “JonOne — Key Milestones & Exhibitions” is dense on purpose, with purpose. The wall text defines tiguere as Dominican slang for someone street-smart and resourceful, then charts the arc from Washington Heights adolescence into 1980s New York graffiti, where the city “asserts its status as the capital of graffiti.”
The timeline—supported by the artist’s own handwritten explanations—allows visitors to track the evolution without forcing a “from trains to galleries” redemption narrative, as if commercial success retroactively absolved the past. It doesn’t skip the way things actually played out: Catholic school discipline, immigrant family pressure, street education, and the reconfiguration of practice in Paris.
“I have been following Jon’s artistic journey since the 1980s in New York City and marvel at what he has accomplished with his signature tag. Once vilified, we now celebrate his artistic genius.”
“PIXAÇÃO — MARKS OF REBELLION” opens with a question about whether you live on your own terms or follow a script written before you arrived. The wall text situates pixação historically—dictatorship-era Brazil, punk culture, São Paulo’s hard edges—while refusing oversimplification. Before conclusions form, it names the internal infrastructure outsiders often miss: hierarchies, disputes, archives, and community memory.
When artists like LIXOMANIA!ZÉ, Cripta Djan, and Eneri bring pixação into the Museum of Graffiti during Art Basel, the question isn’t whether it’s art. It’s what it forces viewers to reconsider about culture, value, and voice.
Adjacent Wynwood Art Gallery makes the museum’s economy explicit: a commercial-facing space where the work is translated into objects—canvases and small sculptures—without pretending that’s where any of it began. Artists who came up in the street, like UFO 907, alongside projects like Las Bandidas, sit within a now-expanded field of artists finding traction on different registers of the broader art world. Young collectors and die-hard old-school fans criss-cross, each eyeballing the other and the works for sale, well-lit and charged with sudden jolts of electricity.
Bathed in light and framed by white walls, the work is legible to a buyer while remaining tethered to the culture that produced it. This is also where familiar critiques tend to surface—often loosely aimed—circling class, race, commerce, vandalism, validation, and contradiction. The argument isn’t whether this belongs here—it’s what gets lost once it does. Most people, quietly and without much hand-wringing, agree on one thing: it’s good when artists can make a living, and it always has been. This gallery appears to contemplate the complexities, the backstories, and opens the expanse of studio expression that is global today, wide and varied, multistyled and multi-lingual.
A daunting task, the Museum of Graffiti is telling the stories and assembling the language needed to explain to a broader audience how a culture built through vandalism and illegality also produced enduring forms of authorship, influence, and value. It gives voice to writers and artists who have hit the streets for more than five decades, across many cities. There is enough grammar here to choke on, and enough history to get buried under—but also enough evidence to make the tension unavoidable.
With each layer, a viewer understands why certain objects carry weight, and encounters enough names—accurate, specific, and placed in time—to keep the story from dissolving into lazy “legend” tributes. And because the guide is Alan Ket, co-founder of the museum, someone who can stand with writers in front of a newly unearthed UGA canvas and watch them realize it’s the real thing, the scholarship doesn’t feel like a lesson delivered from above; it feels like a history being returned to its authors, in public.
ORIGINS, JonOne, and Pixação: Marks of Rebellion are open to the general public MUSEUM OF GRAFFITI for information on schedules, events, and directions.
While at MOG, make sure to visit WYNWOOD ART GALLERY next door to see their current exhibitions featuring Las Bandidas, UFO907, and more.
Snowy. Hard to see through right now. The physical temperature here in NYC is low, but the rhetorical temperatures are spiking across the land. The battle for freedom is in the courts and Congress and in the streets again, with the demonized and disenfranchised reeling back on their heels. When pressure like this builds, it surfaces everywhere at once—across institutions and culture, on ballots, in courtrooms, and eventually on the street—because culture absorbs, and sometimes rejects, what power attempts to normalize.
Humans never tire of this story—our story—the one where autocrats punch down, reign briefly, and are eventually upended by resistance. Otherwise, why does it recur across centuries, across societies and school districts and states and strata and Shakespeare? Silly and careless as we are, immigrants and the descendants of immigrants let our guard down again, and those who mistake domination for virtue rise again, attempting to strip us all of liberty, to fracture us, to manufacture narratives of the “other.”
One thing people don’t tire of is what keeps reappearing on walls and signs in cities nationwide: reminders of our ideals of welcoming the stranger, embracing difference, and becoming stronger because of it. Walls—often instruments of exclusion—remain contested surfaces for street artists and rebels, carrying rebuttal, invoking memory, and thrashing out dissent in public view. Immigrants are the heart of New York, our DNA melded through toil, competition, and chutzpah. We know tyrants, many of us, as did our parents and grandparents—having escaped them, named them, and fought back against them.
Lo, beware of those who forget where we came from: everywhere.
Here is our visual interview with the streets, this week featuring ACE, Caryn Cast, CRKSHNK, DELUDE, Dieka, Garrett Wasserman, Homesick, Jibz, Jim Power, Mosaic Man, Naiver, Qzar, Rae, Salami Doggy, and Wellnoo.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free… The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
New York has long acted as a magnet for graffiti and street artists from around the world—not just because of its mythology, but because this is where the culture took shape, evolved, fractured, and spread outward over more than five decades. For many, that history still matters.
So when Mick La Roc—an important figure in the international graffiti scene who has been writing and painting since the 1980s—recently passed through Brooklyn and took on a new wall, the response was immediate. Despite freezing temperatures, tough winds, and the limited available hours of a short winter day, the block began to fill with young writers and established artists alike. They were eager to meet her, reconnect, paint alongside her, and help bring the piece to completion before she returned to Amsterdam. BSA caught up with Mick La Roc as cans were passed, layers were added, and a multigenerational wall came together—an appropriate setting for an artist whose history and approach have always leaned toward inclusion and exchange.
Mick La Roc came up as a graffiti writer at a time when very few women were visible or welcomed in the culture. Her presence was not positioned as a statement so much as a commitment—showing up, painting, and earning respect through practice. That early grounding in graffiti’s codes, risks, and sense of community shaped her understanding of the street as a place of shared experience as well as rock-solid performance, and it continues to inform how she approaches both public and studio work.
Over time, La Roc has moved between street and studio without severing ties to graffiti’s history or its people. Through decades of activity, she has accumulated a deep reservoir of firsthand stories, images, and lived knowledge—an informal archive built through participation and some retrospection. She shares that history openly, often working alongside younger writers and painters, pairing her own experience with new voices in ways that emphasize continuity rather than hierarchy.
Alongside this role, La Roc has maintained an active international presence for more than four decades, with work appearing on the streets and in exhibitions in cities including New York, Berlin, London, and Paris. She has participated in festivals, group exhibitions, and gallery projects that situate her practice within broader conversations around graffiti, street art, and urban contemporary culture. Her work is often discussed alongside other women who helped expand the field’s visual and social possibilities, while remaining firmly rooted in the graffiti lineage that shaped her early years.
Brooklyn Street Art:You’ve painted in cities all over the world, but New York carries a particular weight in graffiti history. What does it feel like to be back here, painting in Bushwick today? Mick La Roc: It’s really great to be back in New York. Bushwick kind of blew me away. There’s so much street art and graffiti now. The last time I was here was about ten years ago, and it didn’t feel like this at all. What I’m seeing now is really impressive, and I’m happy to be part of it.
BSA:Compared to your last visit, what stands out most to you about how the neighborhood has changed visually? Mick La Roc: It definitely feels like there’s more work now. It keeps expanding. I think more people are open to having their walls or buildings painted compared to the last time I was here.
BSA:Bushwick has become a place where graffiti and street art coexist very closely. How does that mix read to you as someone who came up through graffiti? Mick La Roc: I see a lot of street art, and also a lot of graffiti. To me it’s kind of like Japanese and English—you need both languages. So I think the balance is okay. Honestly, though, I haven’t analyzed it too much. I’ve mostly just been walking around, taking it all in.
BSA:You started writing and painting in the early 1980s, long before graffiti was widely accepted. When did New York first enter the picture for you? Mick La Roc: I started writing my name in 1983, and I started painting in 1985. The first time I came to New York was in 1993.
BSA:Do you remember where you landed when you first arrived? Mick La Roc: I stayed in South Ozone Park. That’s actually where I painted my first pieces here. On 104th Street, I did my first train, and I also painted my first really big piece—it was about this size (gesturing toward the current wall)—at the Franklin K. Lane schoolyard.
Brooklyn Street Art:What are you working on here today, and why did you choose this approach for this wall? Mick La Roc: I’m doing a traditional New York–style name piece. Style writing. Just my name.
Brooklyn Street Art:This wall turned into a group effort pretty quickly. Who ended up painting with you today? Mick La Roc: I’ve been really lucky. Nikki, who has worked closely with Lady Pink over the years, is here with me, which I really appreciate. And then a few guys from the scene stopped by—people I know—telling me their New York stories as they’re living them right now. I asked if they wanted to help out, and they jumped in. That was really nice.
Brooklyn Street Art:There’s a strong sense of respect and familiarity happening around this wall. Does that kind of spontaneous collaboration still matter to you? Mick La Roc: Yeah, it really does. When the Bushwick Collective offered me this wall and I saw the size of it, I thought, why not do the biggest one? Go big or go home!
Nearing two decades of this annual list, BSA has changed as the local and global street art/graffiti/fine art scenes have. Less interested in the celebrity and more interested in the people and passions that drive the need to express yourself creatively in public space, BSA has gone through whatever doors opened and a few that were slammed shut. Our shortlist for 2025 reflects a diversity within the street art, graffiti, and fine art worlds that many once assumed would become centralized and homogenized.
Sure, there is a lot of derivative drippy “street art” dreck at art fairs and on particular walls. Still, we suggest the scene is no longer best described as a single movement traveling toward institutional acceptance. We would also argue that it was never the goal, regardless of the Street Art hype of the 2010s. In an interconnected artist’s life, this ‘scene’ is a network of practices that share tools (reproduction, scale, public encounter), ethics (authorship vs anonymity, permission vs necessity), and stakes (who gets to speak in public, and how).
The common threads aren’t style, or even medium—they are circulation, context, and the social life of images. In that sense, this group of books doesn’t just document a year; it maps a portion of the expanded field where street culture, publishing culture, and contemporary art culture now overlap—sometimes comfortably, sometimes in productive friction.
Books in the MCL: John P. Jacob (ed.). “Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection”
Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection. John P. Jacob (ed.). 2012
From BSA:
“Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection“, edited by John P. Jacob with essays by Alison Nordström and Nancy M. West, provides an in-depth examination of Kodak’s influential marketing campaign centered around the iconic Kodak Girl. With a riveting collection of photographs and related ephemera, the book dives into the intersection of technology, culture, and the role of gender in the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries. It offers readers a comprehensive look at how Kodak not only transformed photography into a widely accessible hobby but also significantly influenced societal perceptions of women.
Sofort alle Fenster und Türen schliessen! (Immediately Close All Windows and Doors)
Poster campaign in Basel (Switzerland), 1986, by anonymous artists to highlight the Sandoz fire disaster in Schweizerhalle. Zine photographed and printed anonymously, Basel 1986. Self-published. No longer available for purchase.
From BSA:
On the night of November 1, 1986, Basel was told to “immediately close all windows and doors.” A fire ripped through a Sandoz chemical warehouse, and the Rhine River ran red with toxic runoff. Thousands of fish floated belly-up, and citizens were left in fear and fury, just months after the trauma of Chernobyl【1】.
When the authorities stumbled and minimized the danger, Basel’s artists and students seized the opportunity to express themselves on the walls. Within days, in the middle of the night, activists from the School of Design plastered the city’s billboards and poster kiosks with their furious responses【2】. They worked fast, stayed anonymous, and left the streets covered with raw, hand-painted images and biting slogans.
Interpreting Warmia’s Hidden Patterns from Above and Within
Bartek Swiatecki’s latest book, Warmioptikum, is a striking fusion of abstract painting and aerial photography, capturing the landscapes of Warmia, Poland, from a new perspective. Featuring Swiatecki’s expressive, in-the-moment paintings set against Arek Stankiewicz’s breathtaking drone photography, the book transforms familiar rural scenes into an evolving conversation between art and nature.
Swiatecki, known for his roots in graffiti and urban abstraction, takes his practice beyond the cityscape and into open fields, painting directly within the environment. Stankiewicz’s aerial lens frames these artistic moments, emphasizing their relationship with the land’s patterns, textures, and rhythms. As noted in the book’s foreword by Mateusz Swiatecki, Warmioptikum is a documentation and an exploration of how we perceive and engage with landscape, helping the reader see Warmia through “extraordinary perspectives and new, nonobvious contexts.”
Addison Karl. KULLI. A Natural Spring of Artwork, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, Public Art, and Inspiration. Self-published. Monee, IL. 2024.
From BSA:
Over the last two decades of covering the street art movement and its many tributaries, one of the deepest satisfactions has been watching artists take real risks, learn in public, and mature—treating “greatness” as a path rather than a finish line. Working at BSA, we’ve interviewed, observed, and collaborated with scores of artists, authors, curators, institutions, and academics; it’s been a privilege to see where they go next.
Addison Karl’s self-published 2024 monograph, “KULLI: A Natural Spring of Artwork, Sculpture, Painting, Drawing, Public Art, and Inspiration,” reads as a first-person chronicle from an artist who moved from the wall to the plaza to the foundry without losing the intimacy of drawing. Dedicated to his son—whose name titles the book—KULLI threads words, process images, and finished works across media: murals, cast-metal and glass sculptures, drawings, and studio paintings, all guided by a sensibility that treats color and material as vessels for memory and place.
Rafael Schacter. Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in The City. MIT Press. 2024
From BSA:
Graffiti is a living monument—an act of doing rather than keeping.
Rafael Schacter has been offering an alternative to institutional monumentality in his latest book Monumental Graffiti (2024). He buttressed his alternative view during his keynote speech for the New York 2025 Tag Conference (BSA is a sponsor). To a packed audience at the Museum of the City of New York, Schacter talked about a monumentality that is grounded in community, embodiment and the acceptance of transience as truth.
In his talk and his book, the London-based art historian argues that monuments and graffiti can illuminate each other: monuments don’t need to be grand or permanent, but can be understood—as their Latin root monere suggests—as acts that remind, advise, or warn. Drawing on counter-monuments and non-Western traditions, he would like to redefine monuments as socially and emotionally engaging public artifacts that may be ephemeral, community-driven, and conceptually monumental rather than physically imposing.
SETH on Walls. Editions de La Martiniere. 2022. Distributed by Abrams. An imprint of ABRAMS, 2023.
From BSA:
“In a world where the system alienates the most vulnerable, imposing a cynical or pessimistic outlook seems impossible to me,” says French street artist Seth. “Walls remain the space of resilience. Unlike cartoons, which leave no room for ambiguity, the choice to interpret a mural is essential. The curious are free to discover the hidden meaning.”
His new book “Seth On Walls” candidly offers these insights and opinions, helping the reader better understand his motivations and decisions when depicting the singular figures that recur on large walls, broken walls, and canvasses. A collection that covers his last decade of work in solo shows, group shows, festivals, and individual initiatives, you get the central messages of disconnection, connection, and honoring the people who live where his work appears.
Sonny Gall. 99 of NY, released by King Koala Press with text by Mila Tenaglia. 2025.
From BSA:
Described by the publisher as “a compositional and documentary endeavor that unfolded naturally over the course of a decade,” 99 of NY gathers 99 photographs across 110 pages, printed in both color and black and white, in a durable hardcover, album-sized format. True to King Koala’s limited-edition tradition, it’s a finely produced object — modest in scale and rich in substance — that rewards slow looking and quiet reading.
Gall’s images vibrate and render when leaning toward the overlooked: empty lots in Queens, warehouse walls, families at home, scattered pigeons, playgrounds under scaffolding. They are fragments of a living city seen with patience and affection, moments that feel at once offhand and deliberate. Tenaglia’s accompanying texts deepen those impressions without overexplaining, their language as sharp and unadorned as the photographs themselves, yet evocative of the unseen – with a poetic wandering appropriate for the attitude of discovery. Together they capture what it means to move through New York — not as spectacle, but as encounter.
Michal Škapa (b. 1978, Prague), known in graffiti circles as Tron, is one of the defining figures of the Czech graffiti movement. He emerged in the first wave of Prague writers in the early–mid 1990s, active in influential crews such as DSK, CAP, NUTS, and TOYZ. His reputation grew not only through his presence on Prague’s walls and train lines but also through some of his under-the-radar painting exploits — always a symbolic moment for graffiti writers testing their ambition.
Over nearly three decades, he has expanded from traditional graffiti into murals, airbrush figurative work, acrylic “manuscript” abstractions, neon and light installations, and site-specific projects, while maintaining a clear connection to the tempo, structure, and discipline of lettering. His long associations with Trafačka/Trafo Gallery and MeetFactory placed him within two of Prague’s most important hubs for post-1990s urban and contemporary art, and his work with The Chemistry Gallery and the Urban Pictus festival may have brought him greater international reach.
Within the Czech Republic, Škapa is recognized as an artist who successfully bridged illegal writing, large-scale public works, and the gallery world. He co-founded the Analog!Bros serigraphy workshop, creates commercial visual works and has exhibited across significant Czech venues. On the mural tip, he is associated with massive works such as Kosmos — a 350-meter mural along the runway wall at Václav Havel Airport — and Vesmír medúz (The Universe of Jellyfish) in Prague’s Karlín district for Urban Pictus, both large semi-abstract compositions that merge cosmic imagery with undersea forms. His illuminated works for the Signal Festival and other public commissions may further assert his role in redefining how Czech graffiti vocabulary evolves into a contemporary visual language.
Škapa’s trajectory parallels that of many European artists who began as train writers in the 1990s and gradually expanded into broader artistic practices, yet his work feels distinctly rooted in Prague’s cultural landscape. Writers of his generation absorbed global influences through books, films, and early media circulation, but their reinterpretation of those sources unfolded within a city experiencing dramatic social and urban transformation.
In contrast to artists who favor punchline-driven street interventions or pop-derived collage, Škapa’s work leans toward atmosphere — cosmic, psychological, occasionally sci-fi — a sensibility shared by several Czech artists who transitioned from the underground into muralism, abstraction, and installation. The local ecosystem of DIY spaces, collectives, and multi-disciplinary hubs like Trafačka and MeetFactory helped shape this approach, and Škapa stands out as one of the artists who synthesizes and creates accordingly.
We had the opportunity to tour the artist’s studio, see many of his works in progress, to read the layering of the walls, and to learn from his wide-ranging experience and storytelling what themes drive him. Among them were these three: the construction of a personal alphabet, cross-media experimentation, and the transformation of graffiti experience into contemporary practice.
Škapa’s studio makes clear how central his self-created alphabet is to his practice — a system that merges graffiti logic with global typographic traditions. He describes it as “based on the Latin alphabet but mixed with inspirations from Brazil, heavy-metal logos, ruins, all kinds of writing systems,” his is a layered script that allows him to embed messages and structure his compositions. Some of his works contain readable words; others dissolve into semi-abstract fragments that behave like scaffolding or urban grids. Skapa is in love with the urban cityscape and its language pushes up like a raised grid into many of his works.
As he put it, “I work with my own alphabet… I put some messages in the canvas. You can find the letters if you look.” His alphabet becomes both a personal code and a generative architecture, a way to “build” cities, atmospheres, and imagined systems that tie back to his years on the street.
With great appetite for discovery, Škapa moves fluidly between media — neon, lithography, silk-screen, drawing, comics, hand-painted canvases, sculptural models — driven not by stylistic restlessness but by a desire to test how each material can host or distort his visual language. His collaborations with Czech glass studios illustrate this curiosity. He showed us vases produced through layered techniques involving silk-screened transfers, hand-drawn enamel lines, and kiln-fused materials.
“I love to experiment,” he said. “I’m still searching. I change styles a little, but it’s all connected.”
His neon-cube sculptures, glass models, and smoked-glass vessels borrow from Czech glassmaking’s legacy while extending it into a hybrid territory shaped by graffiti structure, sci-fi atmosphere, and architectural imagination.
It Emerges from Graffiti as Origin, Ethos, and Continuum
Škapa’s early years as a writer in post-revolution Prague remain a defining foundation for the artist. He recounts discovering graffiti in a city that felt grey and decaying, then experiencing the shock of Berlin’s scene and, later, painting trains in New York just before 9/11.
“It was like shining diamonds in the grey,” he said of graffiti’s arrival in 1990s Prague.
The energy of those years — improvisation, risk, collaboration, and an irreverent sense of possibility — continues to shape his work. He is clear that he is not “bringing graffiti into the gallery,” but rather transforming its mindset:
“You cannot take it from the streets and just exhibit it. You have to transform it.” His temporary, large-scale installations — painted walls later repainted white, layered panels reassembled into new environments — reflect graffiti’s ephemerality while channeling its instinct for immersion, confrontation, and city-scale rhythm.
Škapa’s studio practice reveals an artist who continues to translate three decades of experience into a visual language that is still expanding. His alphabet operates as both structure and code — a personal script rooted in graffiti’s devotion to the written mark. His cross-media experiments, moving from neon to lithography to Czech glass, reflect a sustained curiosity about how ideas behave when they migrate across materials and traditions. And his grounding in early graffiti culture remains an ethical engine, shaping how he thinks about improvisation, community, and the life cycle of artworks.
Taken together, these themes show how Škapa has built a practice inseparable from Prague’s cultural landscape while remaining fully engaged in a broader conversation about how street-born creativity transforms within contemporary art.
The first Martha Cooper Scholar in Photography, Dylan Mitro, has completed his residency year of study and development in Berlin. Along the way, he became more closely aligned with his identity as a documentary photographer, a storyteller, an archivist of history, and a member of the queer community. Looking back on his project of study hosted by Berliner Leben and Urban Nation Museum, he says his appreciation for social movements came into focus, as did his role as aphotographer in capturing people and preserving cultural memory.
We spent a few hours speaking with him in the rooftop space atop the Urban Nation Museum talking about his experiences over the past year and looking at the materials that he created. We took away a few lessons on culture, art, preservation, and being present.
“Before I can be a person with a camera, I have to be a person they can trust… I cannot be exploitative, especially with communities that have been exploited so much.”
Photography Isn’t Just Style; It’s Witnessing.
For Dylan Mitro, the camera has become less an instrument of aesthetics than a way of being present when history is unfolding before him. His “24 hours of protest” sequence of photos from animated and boisterous marches and demonstrations on the streets of Berlin is where this becomes clearest. He describes being in the street, whether raucous or quietly vigilant, with “thousands of people coming towards me,” running through the crowd and asking, “Can I take your photo?” as events unfolded in real time.
That sense of urgency and adrenaline is exactly what he admires in Martha Cooper’s work: her “always on” state, the way she treats the street as a field site and people as subjects rather than props. Dylan understands, as Martha does, that the most meaningful images are not staged or pretty; they are “honest and raw,” capturing people at protests, in queer nightlife, and in ordinary moments of showing up for one another. When he looks back at his protest images this year and says, “This is why I’m doing it,” he’s telling us that he recognizes that these fleeting, unposed encounters would otherwise vanish, leaving no trace in official records. Street photography through an ethnological lense, in his hands, becomes a way of witnessing courage and vulnerability in the moment and preserving it for those who come after.
“In the moment it’s so high energy, but then when you see the photos you’re like—okay, this is why I’m doing it.”
Archiving and Re-Photography are Acts of Care and Resistance.
Dylan’s unconventional project of re-photographing and reactivating historic photos begins in the archive and brings people to speak to us here, now. He related his experience of making contact with private collectors of LGBTQ+ history and organizations who have documented queer history in Berlin, sifting through collections, commercial advertising, and personal stories without quite knowing what he was looking for. Possibly because people hid their identity for protection, some things were just out of reach, and Mitro related how images “appear… in this almost ghostly, haunting way.” From our perspective, this work looks like a fresh battle against erasure.
His research led him to retrace the locations of social clubs and bookstores and to pore over a varied and deep selection of printed and digitized materials at the LGBTQIA+ archives at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, including the publication Berlin von Hinten. Thanks to the careful collecting and preservation by many in the Berlin community, the artist says he found himself faced with an overwhelming array of diverse materials to study. Mitro brought his own scanner into the reading room, mechanically capturing pages to “deal with later,” making sure nothing important slipped past him in the flood. When he began making cyanotypes from sex journals, classifieds, and Berlin bar magazines like Berlin von Hinten, he was not merely appropriating images but changing their context and use, turning fragile, easily discarded ephemera into durable goods like book pages, prints, even shirts that he wore into the public and to the opening of his exhibition.
“The beautiful thing about an archive is you don’t know what you’re looking for when you go in, and then it just appears to you in this almost ghostly, haunting way.”
Thoughtful in his description of this self-created research process, he appears fully aware of an ethical minefield that he kept seeing in the materials: the sexualization of hustlers, questions of consent, the AIDS epidemic unfolding in the background, and the way one scandalous case can be used to demonize and smear an entire community. He also remarks on how much things have changed as queer culture has learned from its own past and become more equitable and inclusive. For him, to re-photograph, to print, to bind, is to refuse both erasure and simplistic moral panic. It is an act of care for those who lived through those years and a quiet resistance to the ways queer histories are flattened, censored, or selectively remembered.
Passing the Torch: How New Artists Build on Earlier Legacies
Dylan repeatedly frames his work as a kind of “grief politics” — a way to process his own grief and “collective grief” through images and stories. While he handles materials that can be considered crass, campy, or uncomfortable, he treats them as evidence of what previous generations built so that people like him can enjoy the relative freedoms they have now. During the conversation, we recalled that on earlier Zoom calls in the year, he talked about “recognizing the work that our ancestors have done… so we can enjoy the freedoms that we have now,” and he confirmed that this became central to his mission. In practical terms, this shows up in small but telling decisions.
Looking over materials and images, he noticed that many photographs in these magazines are uncredited or minimally credited; however, it was vital for him to reconstruct a credit page in his own book from the publication’s credit lists, even when he could not match each image to a specific name. He sees this as “doing the work for the crediting now,” anticipating a future researcher who might ask “who took this?” and refusing to leave them with a dead end.
His admiration for the photographer Martha Cooper is also part of it: he recognizes that she endured periods when her work was underappreciated, then gradually became a reference point for entire scenes and was treasured for their historical significance. By aligning his practice with her documentary, ethnological approach — attentive, long-term, grounded in real communities — Mitro is situating himself in a lineage of photography that tells our stories to each other and future generations.
When Time, Space, and Support Open a Path for an Artist
Dylan Mitro arrived in Berlin after a decade in Toronto, working punishing 14–15-hour days on commercial shoots and features, a rhythm he describes as “so unsustainable.” The residency allowed him to step off that treadmill and begin a course of study in a new city on another continent. He talked about the stark contrast: in the exact moment that he got the news about being selected for the residency, he learned the news of a close family member’s illness. As he talks, you realize that the year in Berlin became a hinge between these two realities — a chance to focus on his art and a forced confrontation with “what are these next chapters of my life?”
“It’s grief politics… how do I deal with my grief that’s also collective grief? And I deal with that in all of my work.”
With a new perspective, removed from Toronto, he considers that he cannot simply “jump right back into the way I was living.” While he regroups in Ontario and supports family, you can see that the residency gave him room to experiment: scanning archives, learning cyanotype techniques, organizing negatives by place, developing a whole book, and then pivoting mid-project to the “24 hours of protest” series that ties everything together. Along the way, he learned how to structure a day when nobody is calling call time, manage the pressure to enjoy and study the city, and answer the uncomfortable question he keeps coming back to: “Why are you doing it. The support he receives — from the scholarship, the residency, and mentors — may make it possible for him to build a thoughtful, ethically grounded body of work that he could not have assembled in the gaps between commercial gigs.
Regarding his project, the cultural ground keeps shifting, and Mitro couldn’t have been more timely. In a political climate in the Western world where there is a backtracking on human rights and queer and trans lives are attacked and simplified, this kind of photography and archiving says: we were here, we are complex, and our images won’t disappear.
Throughout the conversation, Dylan connects his work directly to the present rise of fascism and reactionary politics. He notes that people now often say, “You can be queer anywhere in the city,” as if dedicated spaces and organizing structures were no longer necessary. He counters this by pointing back to history: earlier generations had to fight for those spaces and used them to manage when “the world kind of feels so helpless.” At the same time, he sees how quickly media and political actors can weaponize isolated events — a murder, a scandal, a stereotype — to brand entire communities as dangerous, from gay men in the 1990s to immigrants and trans people today.
That’s precisely why he went to the archive, sat with the original materials, and made new work grounded in lived experience rather than sensational headlines. His insistence on consent and trust in photographing protests, especially when working with trans folks, is part of the same refusal to flatten people into symbols. He’s acutely aware that much of the public visual language around queerness is still dominated by highly sexualized images, corporate Pride floats, and what he and the sponsors describe as “rainbow capitalism.”
By pairing reactivated archival images with new, candid protest photographs, Mitro constructs a more layered record: people organizing and dancing, grieving and celebrating, dressing up and just existing. In the shadow of book bans, anti-trans legislation, and cultural backlash, his project quietly insists that queer and trans lives are not a recent “trend” or a single issue to be voted up or down. They are entire worlds, spanning decades, and his camera — like Martha Cooper’s — is there to make sure those worlds are seen and remembered.
“I know I’m not going back to the life that I had before… I’m really reshaping how things are gonna be moving forward.”
Click HERE to read our first interview with Dylan, where he speaks in depth about their project Inhereted Thread for their Fresh A.I.R. Residency and the Martha Cooper Scholar for Photography 2025.
After a successful, painful, and funny take-down of the Dollar bill at their last group show, the artists-run collectivists at 148 Frost Gallery are smoking again with their newest installations and canvases related to the biggest money-maker of all time: War.
“War & Order” features street artists, contemporary artists, outside artists and those adjacent ruminating on the role and roll of the war machine in the 2020’s with Gabriel Specter, Renelerude, Escif, Dan Sabau, Kazuhiro Imafuku, M Shimek, and Cash4 on the march.
Between those two shows, this gallery may have captured the moment prophetically, like a seer in a storm, evaluating the past and anticipating what is next.
During WWI, all major governments resorted to a programmed money printing. Whether by design or incompetence, the results were undeniable: economic destabilization, often hyperinflation, internal chaos, political upheaval, and war. For many decades people swore that we would never let that happen again. But most of those people are dead now, and the dollar today is worth a nickle, compared to a century ago.
What is that saying, often paraphrased, “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.”?
“War and Order” enlists international and local artists for a pointed, and occasionally mischievous, look at the world we’ve managed to build for ourselves. It doubles as inquiry and needling social commentary, with each artist charting our tangled relationship with war, the creeping architecture of the police state, and the long shadow of militarism, surveillance, and planetary harm—all unfolding in an age where social media spins narratives and we scroll past catastrophe.
Murals, installations, paintings, and performances push these ideas, probe our past, and interrogate the present. It’s uncomfortable, for sure. What comes next, we have a dreadful guess. But there is a countenance of repairing the broken, correcting injustices, healing pain – even though this is not the focus. As the organizers put it, the exhibition is “our protest, our loud speaker to the world—an unedited, unsilenced voice.”
Kazuhiro Imafuku’s watercolors read like a plaintive diary of a soul under siege—an illustrated reckoning as he “displays and deciphers” his grandfather’s service in the Manchurian war. Though distant in time and culture, the story feels painfully familiar to the stories of soldiers here and abroad today. His grid of small works echoes the disarming clarity of Escif’s massive hand-painted banners hanging around the homemade gallery space, where the Spanish conceptualist delivers coded commentary in a deceptively plain voice, sharpened by deep critique. Elsewhere and throughout, artists confront imperial overreach, immigration persecution, and high-tech terror without flinching—perhaps daring us not to look away.
Specter’s opus “Expressive Love” calls to mind the glib narcissism of the 20th century westerner historically, a simplistic Norman Rockwell sentimentality that sees the ideal in spite of the truth. It also calls to mind the last enormous propaganda push that engulfed continents for the profits of a few, the fake ‘war on terror’ of the 2000s, when an Internet meme featured UK Prime Minister Tony Blair happily posing for a selfie before a hellfire scene from the oilfields of Iraq.
Adjacent to Specter, the French street artist Rene LeRude presents a disjointed monochrome macabre missive of winners and losers updated with dark tech, echoing the dimension, and disconnected field of vision of Guernica by Picasso – a phalanx of streaming cameras mounted to the wall next to it make sure the scene is monitored and broadcast for best effect. These are the suffering and distorted figures that Picasso was protesting, reported without humanity in black and white back then; atrocities committed against civilians; violence unleashed by authoritarian regimes. LeRude’s own neo-cubism strikes a similarly expressive distortion, his own moral indictment.
This is the kind of work you can still encounter in Brooklyn today, in a warehouse space that brings together music, art, theater, and other forms that resist easy classification. Rooted in DIY culture, punk, activism, and inclusion, Frost doesn’t need to be idealized—only recognized for its commitment to fostering conversations that many would rather sidestep.
We spoke with curators and artists Gabriel Specter and Rene La Rude about the show,
Brooklyn Street Art: “War & Order” is described as both a social study and a critique of global affairs. What was the initial spark that inspired you and the other artists involved in the show to frame the exhibition around the tension between war and order, and did the original idea evolve as you and the rest of the artists began discussing the show?
Gabriel Specter: The initial spark was our current political state. Where freedom of expression and protest are being silenced. We wanted to make a show where the artist could speak their minds without censorship. Each artist added their voice, and through that, there was a natural evolution of the original idea.
BSA: The exhibition explores our “personal and collective relationships to war and the threat of the police state.” How do you balance your own perspective as an artist with the collective voices and experiences represented in the show?
GS: Part of having your own perspective is about respecting and listening to others perspectives at the same time so the show reflected that type of idea creating a nice balance.
BSA: The show is described as “our protest, our loudspeaker to the world.” How do you see visual art functioning as a form of protest or resistance today—especially in an era dominated by social media and engineered narratives?
GS: I feel like people are starting to value real interactions more and word of mouth is coming back in vogue so I believe the underground has a real power to effect change and as they say a picture tells a million words!
BSA: Since we have known you, and your work on the streets, you have been consistent with delivering messages highlighting a scope of social issues that are relevant to our society. When you began this practice social media and AI didn’t exist. Do you think these new digital tools are useful for you in the transmission of your work? If so how?
GS: New tools are always helpful, can save time, make you more self-sufficient and help you reach new audiences but they can also dilute a lot of your messages and take away the edge and reality of what you’re trying to get across.
BSA: The exhibition includes murals, installations, and paintings. How did you decide which mediums best convey the urgency and emotional weight of these themes? I think the combination of mediums gives an overall experience and that is what we were really trying to achieve.
GS: We have the power of scale in the murals, the intimacy of the smaller paintings and the raw visceral nature of the installation.
BSA: In an age of “mass desensitization to violence,” what emotional or intellectual response do you hope visitors will leave with after experiencing War & Order?
GS: I hope they care about people’s lives and recognize that life is important even the lives of those you disagree with. People are not pawns, they are flesh and blood and we should never forget this.
BSA to Specter and Rene LaRude: The murals are compelling and powerful, with references to both Picasso and Rockwell. How did you decide to use these two paintings as inspiration for your murals?
GS: I chose the work by Rockwell as inspiration exactly for this reason that it is revered as a romantic time in American history. The kids depicted would have been of “The Greatest Generation”
We still cling to this American Iconography today. It is rebranded and used for promoting a xenophobic political message, so for me this iconography was the perfect tool to use to flip the narrative.
Rene LaRude: It wasn’t an easy decision given the impact the piece has had over the years.
I wanted to make use of certain things from Guernica, narrative, composition, and of course colour (or lack thereof) to apply it to what is happening now.
The piece is about Gaza and the litany of war crimes that have been committed. I wanted to honor the original composition and change elements to stories relevant in Palestine. The use of greyscale is because Gaza has been turned into a land of rubble. even things which are not grey are covered in dust.
My effort is certainly overly dense and packed in but then again, that’s just what I wanted to get across in many ways.
Street art functions best when it is a witness, not only a declaration. “I was here, I am here” is the simplified version, and often there are clues that tell you so much more.
In the case of New York’s Appleton, that voice speaks of more than presence: it traces a life lived, marked by survival, activism, and visual urgency.
This week he returns to Chelsea with his new solo exhibition—A New Hero Emerges—to be held at Sims Contemporary, 509 W 23rd St (10th Ave), New York City, opening Thursday, November 6, 2025.
Appleton (image courtesy of the artist)
Artist, activist & speaker, he’s been developing a compelling body of work on the street over the last decade or so – with the goal of raising awareness of type 1 diabetes, which he is directly affected by. With street art, painting, photography, and sculpture, his lived experience becomes the substrate of his art: the insulin vials, the syringes, the shoes of children, the climb of street-wheatpastes from New York’s High Line to alleyways abroad.
In the new show, his metaphorical reach expands. A New Hero Emerges draws on the iconography of the Tin Man from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—that winning figure of armor, of missing heart, of longing—as a symbol of perseverance, courage, and compassion. Although we know that Oz didn’t give anything to the Tin Man that he didn’t already have – in this example, a heart. Appleton’s motto may well be: “Oil to the Tin Man is insulin to the diabetic.” It’s street-art poetics meeting personal reality.
Over the years, Appleton has taken his message across U.S. cities and continents: gallery shows from New York to Los Angeles, Miami to San Francisco; street-walls from Busan to Barcelona, London to Lisbon, Bangkok to Berlin. His past solo exhibitions include Out of the Cold (NYC, 2016), Too Young for Type One (LA, 2017), and Too Young for Type One II (NYC, 2019). His role extends beyond the wall: he is Artist-in-Residence and speaker with $dedoc #dedocvoices, sharing in major diabetes-/health-conferences (e.g., Madrid #EASD60, Lisbon #ISPAD50, Bangkok #ADA85th).
As part of the street-art community, he uses the anonymity of the city to amplify a deeply personal voice. The “tag” Appleton is, in fact, his grandmother’s maiden name and his middle name—an intentional reclaiming of identity.
Approaching the opening of A New Hero Emerges, we spoke with Appleton thinking about his practice, empathy of strangers, survival in the city, street art presence and gallery fame.
Brooklyn Street Art: What is the message you are sending out to the world?
Appleton: That we are all one. That we are all in this together. In this daily struggle & hope for a cure.
Diabetes can really be… Forgive me, a fucking nightmare that a lot of people hide the difficulties even from their closest friends.
BSA: What is the response, if any, you’d like to receive from the public?
Appleton: A wide range of responses people describe my work as inspiring, thought-provoking, and moving.
Others are disturbing, even cynical.
I went into a coma at six years old and almost died.
An older sister died before I was born of unrecognized diabetes.
In one of my Street pieces, it says Diabetes coming to a child near you and someone wrote over a day later, “a child sees this.”
I cleaned it up and wrote back I hope so I knew what Diabetes was at when I was six so should every six year old talk to eat better and be aware of conditions that they might not recognize.
I went into a coma from unrecognized diabetes, and it still happens today.
Diabetes masquerading as the common cold as something else, and even in today’s age, doctors still miss it.
That’s pretty much my mission in a nutshell as an artist and a person with decades of lived diabetic experience.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
