Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The masks are coming out this week, and not just for the ICE agents. Costumes will be everywhere, and cosplayers will suddenly blend into the crowd. Exaggerated lips, hair, and boobs will no longer be the exclusive domain of drag clubs and Mar-a-Lago parties. Thousands of mini-Spider-Men and a million princesses will be knocking on doors and turning up on Ring cameras across the land.
Here in New York, we’re accustomed to extremes in fashion and personality, despite the dulling effect of gentrification on so many neighborhoods. We like our graffiti and street artists to get in on the act, entertaining us with Halloween creatures, ad hoc horror stories, and colorful personalities on the street. It all adds to the buildup to next Saturday, when thousands will descend on the Village for the annual Halloween Parade.
Hope your days are crisp and sunny, and your nights are spooktacular.
Here is our weekly interview on the street, with Andre Trenier, BK Foxx, Chaz, IMK, NYC Kush Co, Optimo NYC, Ski, Too Fly, and Wooley Nick.
Our hearts are full of love this Valentine’s weekend for you, dear reader.
A new study shows New York’s artist population is declining for the first time in decades due largely to housing costs, and most people here will agree with that conclusion. Brooklyn-based Street Artist Marka27 (Victor Quiñonez) found that censorship is strong on campus when his exhibition addressing immigration enforcement was cancelled at the University of North Texas, yet another example of universities not standing up for free speech but suppressing it. Meanwhile, Street artist Ernest Zacharevic has filed a lawsuit against AirAsia for unauthorized use of his famous Penang mural imagery, highlighting ongoing battles over ownership and reproduction of street art. In graffiti news, Street Art NYC has a brief interview with curator Christine DeFazio on her Tales from the Ghost Yard show in the Bronx. In Paris A Valentine’s Day exhibition yesterday brought together street and contemporary artists Clément Herrmann, Mr Byste, FinDAC, Uri Martinez, Belin, and Sandra Chevrier in a live, public-facing showcase.
The Federal government continues its campaign to remove people’s histories from public space, most visibly this week with the removal of the Pride flag from the Stonewall National Monument — the symbolic birthplace of the modern LGBTQ rights movement — before local officials and activists raised it again in defiance. New York Governor Kathy Hochul criticized the removal, calling it “hurtful”, noting that the LGBTQ community has been “discriminated against and oppressed for much of its history,” adding, “The Pride Flag has meant a lot to all of us here in New York and to those who come around the world to see this place.”
New York’s Public Art Fund is featuring a number of artists in 2026 whose paths have crossed with street art, including Barbara Kruger, whose early wheatpaste posters and later bus-shelter text works established a new language of the street; Nina Chanel Abney, whose large-scale murals and façade projects have extended the public wall tradition with socio-political critique; and Jane Dickson, whose decades of street-level and transit-based projects in Times Square and the subway system connect directly to New York’s urban visual culture. It’s encouraging to see institutions recognize artists whose methods have long existed outside the mainstream—even if that recognition often arrives only after the market has validated the work.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Appleton Pictures, Atomik, BK Foxx, Chuck U, Dee Dee, EASC, Homesick, IMK, NESC, and Siner One.
Queens, New York-based Duendita often moves between NYC and Berlin contexts. “Mind” reads more as an intimate, interior/performance piece rather than a particular place.
Welcome to BSA Images of the week, where we have been surfing through street art in Miami for 7 days. Wynwood keeps upping the ante in terms of spectacle: the entire neighborhood this week has been awash in events, openings, dinners, tours, panel discussions, gallery openings, exhibition boxing, live music performed in store windows, boisterous rooftop cocktails, sponsor ‘activations’, stickers, t-shirts, lanyards, festivalized clubs with fire jugglers and whirling light shows, and pop-up playgrounds in nontraditional venues like parking lots and warehouses. Many people catch these events when they look up from their phones.
Clubs with long lines on the sidewalk are running hot on reggaeton and Latin trap, colliding Bad Bunny’s stadium-sized hooks with Karol G, Rauw Alejandro, Feid, and Peso Pluma, all cut and slammed into sweat-soaked house – with EDM drops. It’s loud, physical, and relentless — the sexy fashion and sleek swagger on the nighttime sidewalk is all fueled by a heavy bass heartbeat blasting out the door and off the roof. If your window panes are thumping rhythmically louder than the air conditioner hum inside the hotel room at 2 am, you are in Wynwood. Also, why are you asleep, bro?
Oops — almost forgot to mention the painting. These days, the lineup is broad: graffiti writers, street artists, mural painters, and plenty of contemporary artists testing their footing out in public. The range of styles is wide — genuinely wide — and if we’re being honest, a fair number of walls double as neatly disguised brand exercises, selling trends back to us in fresh packaging.
We’ve met plenty of real creators along the way — people with muscle memory, ideas of their own, and a sense of why this work matters. But there’s also a growing crowd of art-fair regulars who’ve vacuumed up the look of graffiti and street art, mixed it with a few drips and gestures, and sent it right back out. In their work, you’ll spot familiar DNA — KAWS, Basquiat, Fairey, Warhol, Banksy — sliced, layered, splashed, and lettered across the surface. It’s street art by collage and citation, often stripped of the context that made those references meaningful in the first place.
Here’s a selection of works seen on the street this week in Wynwood, Miami, including: Aine, BK Foxx, Dirt Cobain, Dustoe, Earsnot, EMERGE, Entes, Gyalgebra, Jason Naylor, Johann Aven, Lae, Luis Valle, Marcos Conde, MEPS, Patrick Churcany, Saturno, Shepard Fairey, SMOG ONE, STOE, and TATS004.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! The energy always builds on the streets of NYC as Halloween approaches. The night feels inky and dense, the air cold and damp, with dried leaves and bits of garbage lightly clattering across the sidewalk in sudden whirlwinds. The city’s nerves tightened this week as masked ICE agents descended on Canal Street, pursuing the sidewalk sellers of faux Chanel and Versace shades. And in a curious coincidence, the East Wing of the White House was reduced to rubble — surely a metaphor waiting to be explained.
A piece inThe Art Newspapertracks how the mayoral candidates view the arts: funding, creative-sector jobs, and affordability for artists.
In street art news, we were lucky to catch the naming of a NYC street after Jean-Michel Basquiat this week with his two sisters, step-mom, and the extended family – and an enthusiastic crowd. The City of New York dedicated the Jean-Michel Basquiat Way at The Bowery and Great Jones Street a few feet from JMB’s old studio. Some might consider it an irony that a former vandal gets his way, all these years later. Other’s recognize that these issues are not black and white, but are often GRAY.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this time featuring Chusma, Dirt Cobain, JG Toonation, Mack & Frodrik, Merck, Modomatic, Outer Source, SAMO, Uncut Art, and Unfollow.
The sidewalks sizzle and the city purrs with heat and hustle. It’s your daily movie out here.
July is in full swing, and the summer nights are a little looser around the edges between important holidays and commitments. At MoMA, the Friday crowds are drifting through galleries to the low thump of downtown DJs tucked into corners of the atrium—spinning ambient loops, soulful edits, and the occasional dance-floor memory into the marble echo chamber. Outside, the sculpture garden murmurs with art talk… and a sort of slow-motion flirtation.
The NYC mayoral race is, in its way, a kind of performance art—though less conceptual than cynical – with people from every crevice finding fault and stirring fear about the presumptive winner, Mandami. With prices everywhere still climbing, the city’s rhetoric is starting to sound like an old podcast that you thought was deleted. Yak yak yak. On the national stage, the Trump saga soldiers on—ever orbiting a surreal mix of court filings, celebrity fallout, international threats, hatchet budget cuts, and the ever-present Epstein shadows. With this constant drone of chaos, much of this is no longer shocking, just strangely ambient, a screensaver cycle. Ignore these proceedings at your peril.
On the walls and rooftops, there’s a different story unfolding. Some have observed that graffiti writers whose names once seemed fossilized in memory or confined to old flicks and zines—have been spotted again, dropping clean throwies and sharp tags on buffed surfaces from Bushwick to the Bowery. You’ll be biking past an auto-body shop or abandoned roll gate and do a double-take: Was that fresh?
The sun bounces off chrome and scaffolding, and somewhere near Broadway and Broome, you catch yourself squinting up at a cast-iron cornice—gargoyles crouched in cool shadows. Is that a cherub? Is it… flipping you off? Perhaps it’s just the heat, or the cumulative effect of too many hateful headlines. Don’t stop. Rooftops beckon, turntables whirl, community gardens bustle. It’s not utopia. But it’s yours.
Here’s a glimpse of NYC graffiti, street art, and murals captured in Red Hook, Gowanus, Bushwick…in this week’s survey, including Chris RWK, DeGrupo, Espo, EXR, Humble, Ian Cinco, John Echo, Manuel Alejandro, Mdot, MSK Kings, Qzar, Red Rum, Rime, Sharpy, Tess, and Zimer.
Here’s our weekly conversation with the street, this week featuring Homesick, Degrupo, BK Foxx, Werds, EXR, Manuel Alexandro, Great Boxers, Wild West, Fred Tomaselli, Mr. Mustart, Imok, and Sokem.
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 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays Everyone!
Accompanying us through the day and night, a wonderland of images leaves us bemused, beguiled, bewildered, bedazzled, and bewitched.
BSA readers loved looking into the eyes of BKFoxx’s news-watching kids this year, perhaps recognizing the stunned feeling one experiences as we surf the fire-hydrant of images and videos on our screens. A tawdry spectacle of things we desire and fear, a glittering swarm of emotion and misdirection—from all directions, this golden dopamine shower never ends.
Perhaps next year, it may collectively occur to us that our media literacy is getting hammered, and we’ll learn to get a handle on it.
Most ghouls, goblins, Spidermen, mermaids, Joe Biden Zombies, and P Diddy Daycare Workers made their rounds at parties and trick-or-treat last night. But let’s be honest—the spooky, silly, absurd and ffft-up freaky fun isn’t likely to leave us soon! Costumed characters will be haunting the city all week, building up to the main event Thursday, All Hallows Eve. That’s when the East Village Halloween Parade—a true New York tradition—will bring 100,000 costumed participants and two million spectators into the streets for a wild night of celebration.
In a city that already has a bold and often experimental sense of fashion, Halloween is a chance for New Yorkers to push their creativity to the limit and bring something extraordinary to the street, subway, and club.
Because of the current tenor built and supported dark-money-funded campaigns, most people will tell you they are more afraid of Election Day this year than Halloween.
Stay safe ya’ll!
Here’s our weekly conversation with the street, this week featuring: Blanco, Degrupo, BK Foxx, Clint Mario, Manuel Alegandro, TBanbox, Raphael Federici, Joao Varela, and DZIT.
Speaking of school, one of our favorite students of life and hometown graffiti/street art/ contemporary art hero Futura 2000 is opening his new exhibition today at the Bronx Museum, illustrating that if you keep up your work, your style, your discipline, and your passion, eventually people may celebrate you in your front yard. If you meet him, Futura will be more than willing to school you on NYC graffiti culture, history, and how to spot the genuine over the fake.
Meanwhile, in New York this week, “Artists4Ceasefire launched a partnership with artist Shepard Fairey and humanitarian organizations to call for a halt to weapons transfers that violate U.S. and international law.” With the art we have seen in the streets around this city and the new campus protests that immediately commenced this week, it appears that this is turning into a grassroots movement, with a majority of Americans who want immediate action to stop the killing and achieve a permanent ceasefire.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Praxis, BK Foxx, CDRE, Alex Itin, OSK, Matt Crabe, Lady Sea Wench, Just Jud, Jobe, JM DiZefalo, PT, Fionac, CIR, 4OK, Dray, RAZL, CONZ, and 17 Matrix.
New York State Governor Kathy Hochul wants to classify some graffiti as a hate crime. The arts and culture press has been writing alarming headlines about this new proposal by the Gov, but the burden lies on the lawyers who need to prove that the intention of the graffiti writer was to target a protected class of people with a hateful screed. Wonder if they will hand out tickets for poor handstyles, too.
New York neighbors and peers of the orange man tried years ago to warn the country against him – and yet he was elected. Now Trump has to pay fines for “ill-gotten” gains totaling $453 million. He really hit the jackpot when the judge barred him and his two sons Friday from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation. Leading the country, presumably, is still fine.
A day after the verdict, he was hawking golden Trump sneakers. Let’s see, $453 million divided by $399.00…
Here is our weekly conversation with the street, this week including Stikman, Homesick, BK Foxx, Calicho Art, Werds, Goog, LA2, TBanbox, ICU463, Propa, NAY183, Bukse, Joser, Vicer, Faire, Shicks, Angel Ortiz, Mr. Doodle, and Albie.
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 2023. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays Everyone!
The rabbit is a symbol of longevity, peace, and prosperity in Chinese culture, and The Lunar New Year will now be observed in all public schools in the state of New York, following legislation signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul. Here on the wall of Dr. Sun Yat Sen Middle School 131, we see two local celebrities, Bunster and Larry, in a mural by BK Foxx and Claudio Picasso. Celebrating each other’s cultures and traditions is something New Yorkers are always given the opportunity to do, so lucky are we in this city where as many as 800languages are spoken, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world.
Back in dirty old Brooklyn from squeaky clean Norway, nothing has changed, and everything has changed. The Pokémon GO Fest is bringing 70,000 players to Randalls Island and elsewhere in the city, city government is banning TikTok from all official devices, and stabbings are up by 26% so Stay on your A-game out there people. The city is still beckoning you to Summer Streets, and we do too because wherever you go in New York, there is always a show, and sometimes you are it.
We lead the images this week with street artist Nimi’s poetic interpretation in Stavanger of Norway’s famous cliff Preikestolen, or Pulpit Rock. There are not sufficient words to describe certain examples of natural beauty, so it is more fitting that a street artist address it – in this case possibly creating a parallel between its scale and the depth of love the artist has for his family. According to online accounts, the subject is his daughter Sophia.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Praxis VGZ, BK Foxx, Snik, Calicho Art, Sonny Sundancer, Nite Owl, NIMI, Pinky, Heal Hop, and Silvia Marcon.
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground.Artistic direction by Andrea Conte …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
