We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the year by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and are sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather…
There have been many storms these last few years, and sadly it looks like there are a couple on the horizon. At its most turbulent, we wish you health and, at least, a portion of periodic happiness.
As neighbors and as a community, let’s remember and remind each other “Storms don’t last forever”. We can ride them out together!
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the year by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and are sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
From winter earlier this year, a simple scene of sublime storm sculpture; the contrast of the compact yellow car enclosed with the curvilinear snow-white powder whipped by a blizzard, immobilizing the city for a day.
While trudging through the snow-filled streets in thickly treaded boots, suddenly your mind turns to summer! The frothy yellow and white reminds you of The Lemon Ice King of Corona, Queens during the hot and humid days of July. Mmmmmmnnn.. lemon ice. Alternately, thoughts may turn to white sugar icing on top of Italian Lemon Drop cookies at any number of bakeries, one which may only be a few blocks away. Oh, New York, how we love you to the moon and back.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the year by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and are sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
It’s the elephant in the room at every social gathering, turning each store, restaurant, studio, living room, museum, pool hall… into a mental jail of some sort. Will this be the holiday office dinner that kills me? Will this be the graffiti jam that jams my lungs? Will this be the Christmas cashier who makes me finally cash out?
Probably that is why this diminutive statue in prison garb waving the white face mask flag high above the sidewalk, over our heads, ever-present, unmoving, – captures a moment that we are living in, courtesy of artist Styro in Berlin.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the year by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and are sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
Your human rights are inalienable. You are born with them, and no one can “take them away”.
Unfortunately, there always seem to be insidious new laws and new lawlessness to prevent people from exercising their rights fully.
We like this piece from Colombia’s Toxicomano on a New York street in 2021 because it has a certain “retro” style, dating back to the 2000s Street Art vernacular with its “photocopy” filtering – as well as the 70s/80s punk pioneers and the hand-made zine culture of that time.
We also think it is incredibly on-point today when rights are being eroded wherever you look, and knowing your rights is the first step to retaining them.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the year by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and are sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
Aside from being a well-played piece on the Lower East Side this year, we admire how graffiti writer False’s graphic presentation contributes to the word salad of the street.
The brain tries to make a sentence out of this, or rather, a poem.
Essex Street Market False Acne New Roma Pizza Hot & Cold Sandwiches Gyros Hot Coffee Italian Food Free Delivery Stay Busy!
Words of wisdom that make about as much sense as the debates and speeches this year by so-called leaders and talking heads. So much scatting, free-associating, so much stream-of-consciousness collectibles from your road trip through this life. It’s all music. It’s all dance. It’s all up to you.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots from the year by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and are sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
One misconception about living in the city is that you can’t really appreciate nature among the harried cacophony of honking cars, screeching trains, bullets flying, and teens screaming at Tik Tok videos. OMG, same!
But in fact, the act of tracking down graffiti and street art requires you to prepare for hours of weatherly indignities… and thrilling moments of natural wonder. Like these geese convening in the snow, goose-stepping around, for a few stolen moments anyway.
“The geese flew on, I have never seen them again. Maybe I will, someday, somewhere. Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that, when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.”
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2021. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, from the year and will share a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street.
So we begin with an image created by Mother Nature, the original artist and the greatest one. Looking to the sky, the sun illuminates these Brooklyn spring blooms from behind.
It’s that time of the year again! BSA has been publishing our “Hot Lists” and best-of collections for more than 11 years every December.
Our interests and understanding and network of connections continued to spread far afield this year, and you probably can tell it just by the books we featured: stickers, illustration, murals, copyright law, a cross-country spraycation, anamorphic street installation, Hip-Hop photography, graffiti writers community, and a lockdown project that kept an artists sanity.
So here is a short list from 2021 that you may enjoy as well – just in case you would like to give them as gifts to family, friends, or even to yourself.
Leon Keer: “Break Glass In Case Of Lost Childhood”
From BSA:
One of the challenges in creating a book about anamorphic art is presenting images that tell the viewer that they are being tricked by perspective yet hold onto the magic that this unique art conjures in people who walk by it on the street.
In a way, that brass skeleton key that allows entry into another world is precisely what Dutch pop-surrealist artist Leon Keer has been seeking for decades to evoke in viewers’ heads and hearts. Some would argue he is preeminently such; certainly, he is the wizard whose work on walls and streets has triggered memories for thousands of children and ex-children of the fantastic worlds they have visited.
“You develop your senses all your life. Through what you experience, you involve affinities and aversions,” he says in his first comprehensive bound collection of gorgeous plates entitled In Case of Lost Childhood Break Glass. “Your memories shape the way you look at the world. When it comes to reflecting my thoughts, my memories are key. I needed to feel some kind of affection or remorse towards the object or situation I want to paint.”
Street Art Today 2 by Bjorn Van Poucke: An Update on 50 “Most Relevant” Artists
From BSA:
A worthy companion to the original tome, Bjørn Van Poucke and Lanoo publishers extend the hitlist of favored muralists that he & Elise Luong began in Street art/ Today 1 – and the collection is updated perhaps with the perceived cultural capital many of these artists have garnered since then.
Replete with full-color plates from the artists’ own collections and garnished with brief overviews of their histories, creative background, and philosophies, the well-designed and modern layout functions as an introduction for those unfamiliar with the wide variety of artworks that are currently spread across city walls as large scale opus artworks in public space. As organizer and curator of The Crystal Ship mural festival in Oostende, Belgium, Mr. Van Poucke has had his pick of the litter and has showcased them during the late twenty-teens.
A new illustrated tome capturing the black and white work of one-half of Ukraine’s mural painting duo Interesni Kazki welcomes you into the past wonders and future imaginings of a world framed in “Phantasmagoria.”
Full of monochromatic fantasies at least partially inspired by the worlds unleashed by Belgian inventor and physicist Étienne-Gaspard “Robertson” Robert, Waone’s own interior expanding fantascope of miss-appended demons, dragon slayers, riddle-speaking botanicals, and mythological heroes may borrow as deeply from his father’s Soviet natural science magazines that brimmed with hand-painted illustrations – which served as his education and entertainment as a child.
This book, the first of two volumes of graphic works, explores Waone’s move from the street into the studio, from full color into black and white, from aerosol and brush to etching, lithography, augmented reality, and sculpting.
“Closed (In) for Inventory”: FKDL Makes the Most of His Confinement, 10 Items at a Time
From BSA:
The world is slowly making movements toward the door as if to go outside and begin living again in a manner to which we had been accustomed before COVID made many of us become shut-ins. Parisian street artist FKDL was no exception, afraid for his health. However, he does have a very attractively feathered nest, so he made the best of his time creating.
“March 17, 2020, the unprecedented experience of confinement begins in France,” writes Camille Berthelot in the introduction to Closed (in) for Inventory, “Time that usually goes so fast turns into a space of freedom, and everyone has the leisure or the obligation to devote himself to the unexpected.”
FKDL quickly began a project daily, sorting and assembling 10 items and photographing them. He posted them to his Instagram by mid-day. Eventually, he saved the photographed compositions together and created this book.
“My duty of tidying up and sorting out turned into a daily challenge. I dove like a child into the big toybox my apartment is to select and share my strange objects, my banalities, my memories, my creations, and those of others,” he writes. “I gather these treasures, valuables or not, in search of harmony of subject, forms, materials, and nuances.”
The street sticker, be it ever so humble and diminutive, is profligate and sometimes even inspiring. An amalgamated scene that is anonymous, yet curiously stuck together, the organizers and sponsors of so-called sticker jams have been overwhelmed in recent years by thousands of participants.
Artist and organizer IWILLNOT has compiled, organized, archived, and preserved this collection as a ‘field guide,’ he says, and another artist named Cheer Up has laid out page after page. It is a global cross-sample from 60 countries and a thousand artists – a treasure trove of the witty, insightful, snotty, and sometimes antisocial street bards of the moment, seizing their moment to speak and mark territory.
A year after its close, we open the book on American street artist MOMO’s new book chronicling the exhibition “Parting Line.” Writing about and covering his work for 15 years or so, we’re always pleased to see where his path has led – never surprised but always pleased with his evolution of decoding the lines, textures, practices, serendipity of discoveries unearthed by this wandering interrogator.
Here, along the river Seine banks, we see his exhibition for the still young Hangar 107, the recently inaugurated Center For Contemporary Art in Rouen, France. While we think of his work in New York in the 2000s, we see the steady progression here – his cloud washes, raking patterns, his experimental, experiential zeal. This is the spirit of DIY that we first fell in love with, the lust for uncovering and the desire for making marks unlike others across the cityscape, quizzically folding and unfolding, pulling the string, drawing the line.
“Born In The Bronx” Expanded: Joe Conzo’s Intuitive Eye on Early Hip Hop
From BSA:
Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop
Yes, Yes, Y’all, it’s been a decade since this volume, “Born in the Bronx,” was released. The images here by photographer Joe Conzo seem even more deeply soaked in the amber light of early Hip Hop culture from the late 1970s and early 80s, now taking on a deepened sense of the historical.
As the city and the original players of this story have evolved through the decades that followed the nascent Hip Hop era, it’s clearer than ever that this was nothing less than a full-force eruption, a revelation that cracked and shook and rocket-fueled an entire culture. Thanks to Conzo it was captured and preserved, not likely to be repeated.
Born in the Bronx is full of gems, insider observations, interviews, and personal hand-drawn artworks. One critical cornerstone is a timeline from Jeff Chang that begins in 1963 as the boastful but failed Urban Planner Robert Moses constructed the Cross Bronx Expressway – painfully destroying and displacing people and families, severing culturally significant, vibrant areas of the borough and producing a dangerous malaise.
Enrico Bonadio is a contributor to BSA Writer’s Bench OpEd column, he is a Reader in Intellectual Property Law at City, University of London, and a street and graffiti art aficionado. His current research agenda focuses on the legal protection of non-conventional forms of creativity. He recently edited the Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Non-Conventional Copyright – Do New and Atypical Works Deserve Protection? (Elgar 2018). He is currently working on his monograph Penetration of Copyright into Street Art and Graffiti Sub-Cultures (Brill, expected 2022).
Enrico is a Member of the Editorial Board of the NUART Journal, which publishes provocative and critical writings on a range of topics relating to street art practice and urban art cultures.
His academic research has been covered by CNN, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, BBC, Washington Post, The New York Times, Financial Times. Reuters, The Guardian, The Times, Independent, and The Conversation, amongst other media outlets.
A “Gentle People” Aussie Tour: Paint, Fun, and Run with 1UP & Olf
From BSA:
It’s almost sublimely subversive to publish your illegal graffiti escapades in a handsomely bound photo book with creamy paper stock and gauzy, professional photos. Positioned as a travelogue across the great Australian continent (complete with a hand-drawn map), the international troupe of sprayers named 1UP from Germany provides a genteel accounting of their expansive itinerary in a diary here for you, dear reader.
The stories are not without surprise and carefully touch on all the necessary road trip tropes you may wish for but cannot be assured of in a cross-country graffiti tale of skylarking and aesthetic destruction: angry rural police, security cameras, sleeping in rolled-up carpets, fancy receptions with Aperol Spritz, climbing over fences, sudden fire extinguisher tags, exploding paint cans, smoky wildfires, beaches, wallabies, long never-ending-stretches of road, the Sydney Harbor, an emergency-brake whole-car in Melbourne, and yes, a large kangaroo smashing into your car on a darkened country path.
“Nation Of Graffiti Artists” Opens Another Chapter of NYC Writer History
From BSA:
SCORPIO, BLOOD TEA, ALI, STAN 153, SAL 161, CLIFF 159. It was the mid to late 70s in New York and train writing was in its foundational stages, later to be referred to as legendary. For a modest crew of teenagers, it was the hypest stage you could be on, and going all city constructed many dreams of fame and recognition on the street.
Jack Pelsinger wanted to help shepherd these talents and energies into something they could develop into a future, maybe a profession. With a lease on a storefront from the city for a dollar in 1974, he made way for the Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA). An artists workshop and haven for a creative community that was regularly sidelined or overlooked, the author of this new volume, Chris Pape (acclaimed OG Freedom), says “Like moths drawn to a light, the kids showed up, hundreds of them.”
With extraordinary photos shot by Michael Lawrence, the book serves as a true document for the New York of that moment and opens doors to a chapter of graffiti history you may not even have known of until now.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The weather is tropical this weekend, like we’re expecting a hurricane – ominous and windy. Maybe its our ongoing fear of runaway inflation, which Fed Chair Jerome Powell is trying to make us forget he called ‘transitory’. That should be the word of 2021. Transitory. Like fanny packs worn diagonally across the chest, or Dua Lipa.
The city’s vaccination rate is 78, and the mayor is requiring more vaccine and mask mandates in private companies and schools. Let’s hope it works, brothers and sisters.
So here’s our regular interview with the street, this week including 4SomeCrew, Buff Monster, Calicho, DAK 907, DOT DOT DOT, Drecks, ERRE, MIDABI, Not Banksy, Paper Monster, Paul Richard, Praxis VGZ, Roachi, Swrve, Urban Ruben, and Zexor.
SCORPIO, BLOOD TEA, ALI, STAN 153, SAL 161, CLIFF 159. It was the mid to late 70s in New York and train writing was in its foundational stages, later to be referred to as legendary. For a modest crew of teenagers, it was the hypest stage you could be on, and going all city constructed many dreams of fame and recognition on the street.
Jack Pelsinger wanted to help shepherd these talents and energies into something they could develop into a future, maybe a profession. With a lease on a storefront from the city for a dollar in 1974, he made way for the Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA). An artists workshop and haven for a creative community that was regularly sidelined or overlooked, the author of this new volume, Chris Pape (acclaimed OG Freedom), says “Like moths drawn to a light, the kids showed up, hundreds of them.”
With extraordinary photos shot by Michael Lawrence, the book serves as a true document for the New York of that moment and opens doors to a chapter of graffiti history you may not even have known of until now.
NATION OF GRAFFITI ARTISTS, NYC. WRITTEN BY CHRIS PAPE WITH PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL LAWRENCE. PUBLISHED BY BEYOND THE STREETS, 2021.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Prince Of Luna Park 2. Of Memory and Debris a film by Rodrigo Michelangeli 3. The Velvet Underground / Official Trailer
BSA Special Feature: Prince Of Luna Park
New York’s history is marbled and concrete, full of dreams and philosophy, and brutish transactional business at all costs. Before there was this Luna Park, there was the original Luna Park. But all the Luna Parks are tied together in a haze of thrills, chills, excitement, oddity, and french fries with hot dogs. Here in Daniel Lombroso’s “The Prince of Luna Park,” Alessandro Zamperla works to protect his family’s iconic theme park during the pandemic—and prove himself to his father.
Prince Of Luna Park. A film by Daniel Lombroso
Of Memory and Debris a film by Rodrigo Michelangeli
More than 20 million people have left Venezuela in the last five years due to economic collapse. A gorgeous story of love, loss, memory, and the artifacts of life that are all set in motion by upheaval.
“An intimate character diptych, OF MEMORY AND DEBRIS tells the story of an unseen generation — the grandparents left behind by the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history.”
The Velvet Underground / Official Trailer
Good Evening. We’re your local velvet underground.
It’s almost sublimely subversive to publish your illegal graffiti escapades in a handsomely bound photo book with creamy paper stock and gauzy, professional photos. Positioned as a travelogue across the great Australian continent (complete with a hand-drawn map), the international troupe of sprayers named 1UP from Germany provides a genteel accounting of their expansive itinerary in a diary here for you, dear reader.
They say they are embarking on what is cheekily described as the “Gentlemen’s Tour” in certain aerosol circles. The band of anonymous travelers accompanies their multi-city art exhibition tour at respectable art/café/gallery venues with a parallel expedition in mind: hitting all five commuter train systems of Australia – including Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Jotted with aplomb, these adventures appear rather squirreled away between sometimes heroic, sometimes misty atmospheric photographs by OLF, – a gentle mix of storytelling that can be disarming in its dreamy aspirational quality. “Our imagination was running wild: what will happen in Australia? Kangaroos, parties, trains, bombing! What will the desert be like? How will we endure the many thousands of kilometers driving across the country?”
The stories are not without surprise and carefully touch on all the necessary road trip tropes you may wish for but cannot be assured of in a cross-country graffiti tale of skylarking and aesthetic destruction: angry rural police, security cameras, sleeping in rolled-up carpets, fancy receptions with Aperol Spritz, climbing over fences, sudden fire extinguisher tags, exploding paint cans, smoky wildfires, beaches, wallabies, long never-ending-stretches of road, the Sydney Harbor, an emergency-brake whole-car in Melbourne, and yes, a large kangaroo smashing into your car on a darkened country path.
One favorite tale includes the officer who grills them about painting a water tower and who protects the little lady from his swear words so he can awaken the slippery conscience inside these trapped vandals.
Then he told our female companion to put her hands over her ears and screamed at us two blokes, “Fucking grow up!”
By the end of the slim journal told in the voice of the royal “we”, you are satisfied that they have traveled further than they ever imagined, and you went with them. They may have indeed matured a little, you’ll tell yourself, but hopefully, they have not grown up. Thankfully, not enough to assure that there will not be a sequel adventure trip in another country sooner than later.
PAINT, FUN, RUN, 1UP & OLF: GENTLE PEOPLE TOUR. 1UP CREW BERLIN. PRINTED AND BOUND IN GERMANY
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
