End of January, beginning of looking forward to spring. With warmer, wetter weather than we’ve had in years, we also have some plants popping up from the soil that we wouldn’t expect till March or April. This week has been a good show for street art and graffiti, though.
Unfortunately, demonstrations against police brutality have begun here again due to the public release of body cam and surveillance footage in Memphis, Tennesee, on Friday that document police restraining, pepper spraying, tazing, kicking, and punching a young black guy, a citizen, at a suburban intersection. The scene is stomach-turning, devastating to his family, and psychologically damaging to the body politic. Demonstrations in Times Square Friday night were followed by demonstrations in Washington Square Park last night.
Meanwhile, we want to show you some new graffiti and murals and street art from this moment in NYC.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: You Go Girl, Rero, Huetek, DEK, Leaf, Vojtech Trocha, ZROC, DOLE, Manuel Alejandro/The Creator, Jaye Moon, CNO, Atelier Wand Art, BORU, and BOOG.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Lunar New Year 2023! Year of the Rabbit.
新年快乐！
Collabos, crew tributes, nationalist heroes, laborious illustrators, truck pieces, raised reliefs, refined extinguisher tags, absurdist collages, and a range of evolving letter styles, New York is a juggernaut of graffiti and street art every week. It’s an embarrassment of riches from a wide variety of creative talents on our streets, and we’re thankful to catch just a part of it and share it here with you.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: City Kitty, Chris RWK, Smells, Rambo, BK Foxx, Gane, Trace, Ollin, Rold, BK Ackler, HOPS, GULA SOR, Clepto, Hof Crew, 2 Mycg Gane, Zas, BAG HAS, Faile, JG Toonation, Drones, Nails, and Sanije.
Boy, that Kevin McCarthy is as popular as an STD in a bordello. After begging and paying off more and more people to vote for him so he could become Speaker of the House, it was well past midnight before he got some serious action – and it took 15 ballots over 4 days to award him into his position finally. A classy bunch too, if the pushing and shoving is any indication. Not to be outdone, our own favorite Brooklyn right-wing corporate progressive homesnack Jeffries sliced and diced his foes with some fancy alphabetics in his speech that somehow looked suddenly like a State of the Union speech via Sesame Street.
“FREEDOM OVER FASCISM. GOVERNING OVER GASLIGHTING. HOPEFULNESS OVER HATRED. INCLUSION OVER ISOLATION. JUSTICE OVER JUDICIAL OVERREACH. KNOWLEDGE OVER KANGAROO COURTS. LIBERTY OVER LIMITATION. MATURITY OVER MAR-A-LAGO. NORMALCY OVER NEGATIVITY.”
Meanwhile the BSA office game on Friday was Kevin McCarthy name-that-tune day – challenging us to find popular songs to describe the ongoing losing of votes: Winners of the contest were “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, “Big Pimpin”, by Jay Z, “Burning Down the House,” by Talking Heads, “Fool on the Hill,” by the Beatles, and “Please, Please, Please” by James Brown, “If It Ain’t Ruff,” by NWA.
Meanwhile, BSA was starting the year in Jersey City to catch some of the newer street art murals that we haven’t published, and the graffiti was on-point as well.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Nespoon, SETH, MadC, Homesick, Manik, Mack, WASP, Beset, JCMP, and Louie Gasparro.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. We begin with a series of shots from an outdoor exhibition on Governors Island right now. Timely, political, educational, and powerful; “Eyes on Iran” is an excellent opportunity to contemplate the values we say that we honor and are willing to fight for. It is also an opportunity for Iranians in New York to speak up regarding the ongoing protests in their home country to clarify what the issues are.
On a cold but sunny December day, it is also gratifying to see such visual eloquence in the public space. From the description: “Amplifying the critical movement of Woman, Life, Freedom, the exhibition ‘Eyes on Iran’ seeks to hold the world’s gaze on the unfolding revolution and human rights abuses in Iran, while continuing to demand effective action. With the installation facing the United Nations, the location of the installation calls for direct accountability required from the U.N and their respective global leaders.”
Artists include Sheida Soleimani, Aphrodite Désirée Navab, Z, Icy and Sot, Shirin Neshat, Mahvash Mostala, Sepideh Mehraban, Shirin Towfiq, JR, and conceptual artist and co-founder of For Freedoms Hank Willis Thomas. We share a few of them here with you.
And following those images we give you a few others from our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Faile, Glare, Short, Bumer, Randy, and Sidk.
Shirin Neshat. A stark black and white photograph of the artist’s eye inscribed with farsi calligraphy with an excerpt from the Iranian female poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem “I Pity the Garden”.
Icy and Sot created “Bricks of Revolution” to “represent the strength of the activists who are currently risking their lives, inside and outside prisons, to fight oppression. This installation is an homage to political prisoners and all those paving the way to revolution in Iran.”
Aphrodite Desiree Navab’s installation is appropriately timed with the Winter Solstice. On this night, Shab-e-Yalda, meaning “Night of Birth” in Farsi, Iranian girls tie colorful ribbons to trees, making wishes. As an Iranian-born, NYC-based artist and activist protesting in solidarity with Iranian women, my one wish is for women to live life in freedom. The bandanas are the colors of the Iranian flag -green, white, and red. However, they do not have symbols of either theocracy or monarchy at their center, but instead have one word in Farsi: meaning woman.
A splendid selection this week of very entertaining pieces across the city. As we enter December, you can see that graffiti and street artists are going full-steam ahead into the new year – with personal, political, philosophical, and even romantic sentiments.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Faile, SRKSHNK, Modomatic, Sara Lynne-Leo, Molly Crabaple, Cope, Riisa Boogie, Ollin, Short, Rezones, Asker Uno, Danielle BKNYC, McManiphes, Kojo Hilton, Rad Bio, Duster, My Name is Annie, and The Jolly.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Winston Tseng, Mike Makatron, Maker, MFK, Ollin, Slue, KEZ5, Big Ash, D30, 2Much, and Sekt.
Leading up to Thanksgiving this Thursday, we can say that we are thankful to you for your support and encouragement. Thanks to the artists for the inspiring ideas and the loosely woven ecosystem that keeps them going – gallerists, festival organizers, brands, museums, curators, and fans. We’re happy to bring you more fresh stuff this week too.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Stikki Peaches, Homesick, Drecks, Rime MSK, Bust Art, Le Crue, Sinclair, Duel1, La Nueva Era, Hugus, and Aine.
One of the hardest weeks of our lives. But we’re still here to give you another posting of new shots of street art and graffiti on the streets. Thank you for your support, and thank God for the creative spirit that keeps us inspired, our cities alive, informed, and in-touch with the common person.
The so-called ‘Red Wave’ (red tsunami, red hurricane, etc.) didn’t materialize in the mid-term elections Tuesday despite the drumbeat on corporate media. On the other hand, the Democratic party can’t be too proud of their “squeaker” win – or their incremental moves to the corporate right for four decades. Nothing to sing and dance about.
In other NYC news, do you ever feel like a slowly boiling frog? NYPD is talking about partnering with Amazon’s Ring network; the New York Times explains that all those 5G network towers going up on the streets around the city are really just upgraded cell phone equipment, the police will begin a “Drone Unit” to fight crime– “said to be equipped with night vision technology,” this article says, they “won’t be weaponized,” and the NYPD digi-dog program from Boston Dynamics has been discontinued for right now and drones patrolling streets soon, right? Also on Friday the New York Federal Reserve announced plans for a new Fed digital dollar – a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and the new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is all in favor of completely digitized money. Meanwhile, it looks like NYC schools are going to be a lot safer with new initiatives to put biometric screening in them including maybe facial recognition. Nothing to worry about, right?
The city pays tributes to its heroes in different ways, and NYC street art loves Biggie Smalls more than anyone, along with folks like Spike Lee and Jean Michel Basquiat. This week we spotted a few new ones among the bevy of new street art beauties we discovered below.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Jason Naylor, Homesick, Savior El Mundo, King Baby, Mutz, Glare, Banksy Hates Me, Ashley Hodder, Raisa Nosova, Qzar, Spin, INU, Cheatz, Ultraboyz, Humble, Carlos RMK, and Yuzly Mathurin.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Halloween
Enjoy this Halloween parade of art on the streets of NYC. Stay safe!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Adam Fujita, Lunge Box, Entes, Clint Mario, CMYK Dots, Font 147, Laurier Artiste, Nathan Nails, Lin Feitel, Spit, Eyeball Crew, Minvske, Gigstar, and Lou Hugus.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Chris RWK, De Grupo, Eternal Possessions, J131, ToastOro, Dapo Da Vinci, Mai Gai, SRF, ANSO, NANA, Deepo, BEOR, A Very Nice, Master Moody Mutz, Vers 718, and Love Notes.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
