New York, for us, is at least three things right now: the Knicks, FIFA, and the streets.
The city is dreaming of a championship for the first time since 1999. If the Knicks win Game 3 tomorrow night at home, it may be pandemonium. We even caught Spike Lee in front of a Knicks mural by Zimer this week (see below). You’ll hear even more music by Prince in the streets than you have in the last two weeks, as his anthem “1999” serenades you from bars, radios, and TV news segments covering the story. Also, happy birthday to Prince, born on this day in 1958. See you at the Prince party tonight on the roof.
Secondly, the World Cup begins any minute now, and athletes, organizers, media crews, and fans have already started pouring off planes. Daily news reports exhort all of us to do one thing or another in preparation for the arrival of thousands of visitors from around the globe. New York does this sort of thing regularly, so most of us remain focused on doing the laundry and paying the rent. Still, discussions of fan zones, shuttle bus routes, transit plans, gridlock alerts, waterfront gatherings, and neighborhood festivals are everywhere. Once again, New York is negotiating who gets to use public space—and how.
Speaking of the ’80s (the decade, not her age), Madonna popped up live in Times Square this week, turning it into a dance floor to unveil new songs, including an ode to Gotham called “I Love NY,” a pleasant way to kick off Pride Month. City Hall also hosted a Pride Ball—a ballroom culture celebration featuring voguing, runway competition, and performance. Meanwhile, Queens Pride and Brooklyn Pride are already underway.
And the walls, the murals, the street art, and the graffiti are all abuzz with news of pop icons, sports, cartoons, equality, love, masters of war, fear of inflation, fear of surveillance – it’s a whole ball of its own.
You may call it chaos.
We call it Wednesday.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this time including AIC Mosaic, Atomiko, Chris RWK, Crancept, D7606, Gush, Homesick, Huetek, Little Ricky, Mike King, Nexas, Nite Owl, Puntz, Ratchi, Shane, Silent, Sluto, Staino, Stop Men, and Zimer NYC.
At Harman Projects on the Lower East Side, Chris RWK and Friends opens April 18 and runs through May 9, 2026, bringing together a wide-ranging group of artists connected through Chris RWK’s long-standing personal and professional network. The list spans generations and approaches: John “Crash” Matos, a foundational figure in graffiti; Dain, whose collage-based portraits bridged fashion and street culture; Alice Mizrachi, moving between mural programs and institutional contexts; and Skewville, with their self-built trajectory of coded street humor and solid craft.
Chris RWK. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Around them is a broader circle of collaborators, illustrators, ceramicists, and object-makers—names that trace a scene that has shifted over time, expanding beyond its early street foundations into studio and gallery systems. For those who have followed this community closely—including earlier group exhibitions curated by Brooklyn Street Art in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when New York’s street art star was rising alongside a global swell of interest—the show reads as a continuation of those relationships, even as some participants have faded or moved in different directions.
Chris RWK. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Rather than presenting a tight curatorial thesis, the exhibition rings as a scene check-in—a snapshot of who’s still active and who’s in love. Chris RWK has long emphasized collaboration and friendship, and here that becomes the structure of the show itself. The inclusion of a CollectedCon component, with artists like Tara McPherson and Alex Pardee, extends the presentation into collectible objects, reflecting how this network now overlaps with editions, figures, and small-run works alongside paintings. It’s a shift many have made: what once moved through streets and small project spaces—trading stories and skateboard decks—now circulates through galleries and collector networks.
Ernie Parada. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Meanwhile, outside the gallery, New York remains as unpredictable as ever—new walls going up, new styles turning over, and a fresh set of players rewriting the script before the paint dries. Seen in that light, Chris RWK and Friends is less about staking new ground than about taking stock—those OG relationships, forged over time, gathered again on the walls.
CHRIS RWK & FRIENDS Featured Artists:Michael Banks | Zered Bassett | Ezra Brown | Ryan Callisto | ChrisRWK | City Kitty | Danny Cortes | John “Crash” Matos | Dain | Albert Diaz | Eye Sticker | Mike Gallo | Frank Gonzales | Blake Jones | K-NOR | Tim Kowalczyk | Koz | Danny Martin | Alice Mizrachi | MUMBOT | nite owl | Peter Paid | Ernie Parada | Skewville | Herb Smith | TRAP IF | Zimad
CollectedCon NYC Featured Artists:Alex Pardee I Tara McPherson I Sad Salesman I Yutoos I Ezra Brown
Chris RWK. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)Nite Owl. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)Skewville. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Opening Night Reception: Saturday, April 18th 6pm to 8pm Open to the public, no appointment needed
Harman Projects 210 Rivington Street New York, NY 10002
Street artist/kinetic artist/commercial artist Felipe Pantone debuted his“Visual intensification: Focus” installation on the XO/Art Exosphere project at Sphere in Las Vegas,and it is blowing minds and stopping traffic (video below).
Another Sphere alum, Shepard Fairey has a new exhibition, Modular Frequency, opening this week in LA that distills three decades of modular geometry, street-campaign punch, and layered mixed-media into a tight visual rhythm drawn from Constructivism, propaganda graphics, and pop-culture overload.
Also, check out Say She She, a Brooklyn trio of female singers who are part of a larger 70s disco and soul revival a la Nigel Rodgers and Chic. They played at Greenpoint’s Warsaw last night, followed by an afterparty at Williamsburg’s Baby’s Alright. Video at the end of this article.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, including RnO, City Kitty, Chris RWK, ZOVER, KRS, The Postman, DELUDE, TwoFive, OH!, RIBET, HELCH, WILD WEST, and Robinson Moreno.
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.
The city of New York is hot, clammy, steamy, and caked with grime. It smells like fish, marijuana, musty A/C exhaust, curry, piss, fresh-cut grass, melting pavement, aerosol spray, watermelon, cucumbers, mint, fried zeppole, Axe body spray, laundromat detergent, and pizza. With this oppressive heat, the ‘crazy’ dial seemed turned up – some people on the street appeared to be delusional with baked brains and insufficient hydration. In its chaotic way, the street never stops moving. People are herded onto our crowded, damp, and sticky subway system with its pumping kinetic energy and no coherent schedule, our new airy modern electric tandem buses with chilly automatic voices, our electric bikes and scooters of every design with big puffy tires or small bagel sized ones, our statement cars and bloated SUVs with dark windows, our swerving and sleek skateboards, and our white box trucks slaughtered with wild aerosol sprayed styles and family business-named signage like Dragon Good Luck Delight and Bayridge Appliance Repair.
Graffiti and street art keep popping up and accompany New Yorkers to their next stoop sale, pickle ball game, house party, dinner party, or dog’s birthday party. If this visual feast disappeared, we would all be confused, a piece of our cultural DNA excised. For us, this is the proper visual language of New York, certainly better than most of the new architecture popping up like middle fingers, a rash of uninspiring rectangles formed by mediocrity, their design potential sapped by greed and spreadsheets.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring City Kitty, Chris RWK, Homesick, Degrupo, Kooky Spook, Muebon, Epic Uno, RX Skulls, MCA, EXR, CKONE, RZB, BILX, JEMZ, Joshua Montes, and Soupy.
Welcome to BSA’s Images of the Week. We decided to dedicate this weekly survey to the artists of “Return 2 Burn”, its organizers, and the streets that brought us here.
The new “Return 2 Burn” exhibition at the old train station in Hunts Point, Bronx, serves as a modern continuum of pivotal artistic moments from New York’s vibrant past, echoing the groundbreaking energies of the Fun Gallery, The Times Square Show, and initiatives by Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab) and Fashion Moda. These seminal venues and events of the early 1980s, such as the Fun Gallery (1981-1985) and The Times Square Show of 1980, were instrumental in merging the diverse cultural and artistic energies of “uptown” and “downtown” scenes. They featured artists whose names would become prominent, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura, Rammelzee, Crash, Jenny Holzer, and many others whose work intertwined and intersected with the emergent graffiti and street art movements against a backdrop of punk, hip-hop, and an unprecedented cultural fusion that was happening across the city.
This week, the art world mourned the loss of Patti Astor, the trailblazing founder of the Fun Gallery and a pivotal character in Charlie Ahearn’s iconic film “Wild Style.” Her legacy, which has deeply influenced the intersection of hip-hop, graffiti, and urban culture, remains a testament to her visionary impact on New York City’s vibrant art scene.
“Return 2 Burn” builds upon this legacy by featuring contemporary and enduring artists from those earlier movements like Skeme, Tkid 170, Martha Cooper, John Fekner, and Al Diaz—who notably co-created SAMO tags and cryptic texts on the street with Basquiat—linking the historical narrative of New York’s street art from its inception to the present. These artists’ work stood alongside others such as Chris from Robots Will Kill, Indie, Buff Monster, UFO907, and Wane for the vibrant opening night, celebrating an ongoing narrative of experimentation and discovery in the street art/graffiti scene today across this city’s boroughs. The atmosphere was electric, charged with the energy of fans, collectors, storytellers, and historical figures of the graffiti and street art scene.
This collection of photos was shot while the exhibition was still being assembled—”work in process” shots. Their sometimes raw quality signals that the exhibition is a living entity produced by many hands; curator Robert Aloia says it is expected to evolve throughout the spring and summer.
The opening night crowd underscored the exhibition’s role as more than just a collection of artworks but also a gathering place for the community and a hopeful signpost for our collective creative future as we enter such uncertain times. It is a testament to the evolution of graffiti, street art, conceptual art, sculpture, public art, and muralism and their enduring significance in urban culture and public dialogue. The installed pieces—captured before the doors officially opened—are a diverse and dynamic reflection of the art movement, a snapshot of this moment at this location that recognizes the hundreds of artists whose work is on New York streets at any moment.
Through the visionary efforts of curators like Robert Aloia and Jennifer Giraldo of Outlaw Arts, and their collaboration with Majora Carter and James Carter of Bronxlandia, “Return 2 Burn” reminds us how exhibitions can serve as cultural synthesizers. The dedication of independent curators and organizers ensures that the legacy of New York’s unique art scene not only persists but also adapts and thrives, engaging new generations of artists and audiences alike. Moreover, the vital role of those who document, write about, and archive these events is crucial; without their work, such exhibitions’ rich history and transformative impact would not be preserved.
New York City has consistently nurtured subcultures by providing ample space, resources, and an environment conducive to growth—a spirit deeply embedded in the Punk D.I.Y. tradition. This creation of spaces for artists truly captures the essence of the city. And while we appear to be losing gallery spaces, we always have the streets. In New York City, D.I.Y. isn’t just a concept—it’s synonymous with NYC itself.
Skeme creating his latest for “Return 2 Burn”. Skeme, known as “Skeme the 3 Yard King,” is a prominent graffiti artist, celebrated within the graffiti community for his work in New York City during the movement’s early days. He was featured in the documentary “Style Wars,” a seminal film directed by Tony Silver and produced in collaboration with Henry Chalfant. The film is significant because it was one of the first documentaries to capture the graffiti subculture of New York City in the early 1980s.
The lineup includes: Aiko, Al Diaz, Austin Pinon, Basie Allen, BlusterOne, Buff Monster, Camella Ehlke, Cassandra Mayela, Chris RWK, Dr. Revolt, Faust, Ghost, Giz, Indie 184, JJ Veronis, John Fekner, Jon Burgerman, Judith Supine, Kade198, Lamour Supreme, Martha Cooper, Matt Siren, Modus, Peter Paid, Pork, Queen Andrea, Roycer, Saman & Sasan Oskouei, Sheryo & Yok, Skeme, Tkid, Totem, UF0907, VFR, and Wane One
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! A great week, minus the loss of Queens-born singer Tony Bennett Friday at 96, the sweeping of new immigrants out from under the BQE without regard for their few belongings and papers, and our general awareness of increased poverty on the streets, the introduction of the CBDC FedNow program with no fanfare in the press, and the gruesome news of the alleged serial killer suspect Rex Heuermann. On the other hand, we had some bright sunny days with lower humidity that pushed New Yorkers out in the streets and our parks to play games and read books and sashay in short shorts and strike up conversations with one another.
In street art and graffiti news, we appear to have entered an era of low-brow nouveau naive hand styling that has taken over characters and letters. Perhaps it is an attraction to the guileless or a need for clarity amidst the clutter – or that Gen Z doesn’t buy the bulls**t. Whatever it is, our art in the streets has a childlike quality that charms without being charming. So, drop the pretense, Pasqual. We all somehow know we are living in the eye of the hurricane so reach out and re-connect. And our street art is dazzling, entertaining, and has a sense of humor forged through sheer determination.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Faile, Chris RWK, Smells, Captain Eyeliner, JJ Veronis, Homesick, Neckface, Panic, Timothy Goodman, OH!, Aidz, Toe Flop, Wizard Skull, Emilio Florentine, Jakee, Tiny Hands Big Heart, RH Doaz, TobBob, Lucky Bubby, She Posse, Eww Gross Ok Fine, Carlton, Skiti, Five Gold Stars, Ekem 132, Rah Artz, 3Modes, Mdot Season, Luce Bokes, Words on the Street, Okina Cosmo, Alex Itin, and TomBob NYC.
Two decades in the can for Chris from Robots Will Kill, and he’s just as solid as the day you met him. His steady dedication to developing his character has made him one of the most reliable names on New York streets, no matter how many artists he collaborates with and how many new situations he puts himself in.
One of the few street artists who is community-minded, ChrisRWK’s actions over the years to help his peers and to express gratitude to those who have helped him may also explain his staying power as a commercial artist, fine artist, and street artist. Tonight he hits another first: his debut solo exhibition with Harman Projects on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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.
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.
“It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Jackson said in a speech outside the White House.
“But, we’ve made it. We’ve made it, all of us,” Jackson said.
We’ll be looking for her face to pop up on the street soon!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: City Kitty, Chris RWK, Adam Fujita, Icy and Sot, Clint Mario, Gane, Irak, RX Skulls, Smells, Bublegum, Acroe, Bertstit, and Eric John Eigner, Lawrence Weiner.
And now we don’t know what other topic can follow that one, so…
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Abby Goodman, BLAZE, Captain Eyeline, Chill, Chris RWK, City Kitty, CRKSHNK, Fake Hambleton, Faust, Invader, JJ Veronsis, Konart Studio, Lunge Box, Mad Town, Matt Siren, Modomatic, Royce Bannon, The Velvet Bandit, and Who is Ponzi.
The series of #fakehambleton “Shadow Man” that have been appearing on the street of Manhattan (and in London) are attributed to a guy who goes by the name of Pablo who runs a mystery Hambleton “foundation”. He’s admitted to painting the fake Hambleton iconic figures on the streets of NYC. We believe this to be a marketing campaing. More on this @bkstreetart on Instagram.
A Jahru portrait rarely stops at resemblance; it searches for character, purpose, and presence. His reputation for revealing the character …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
