The clear, crisp September days, like that one 25 years ago this week, have returned to us. Street art and graffiti have morphed over the intervening years, but the feelings from that day are still raw. There are a few narratives about what happened, and who did it, and why. But one thing is for sure: many families lost their loved ones, and ceremonies on Friday brought it all back in Lower Manhattan.
Here’s our selection of new pieces from the street, this week featuring AIC Mosaic, Below Key, Benny Bean Bag, D7606, DARA, Delude, Dissatisfied, Duality Industries, Flyless, Homesick, IMSE704, JerkFace, Mike King, MUK, Never, OH!, Praxis, RX Skulls, SAKOKA704, Slasher, Smells, and Wild West.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Many street artists and graffiti writers have stayed away from painting new works these last few months because winter has been so brutal and relentless in New York. Grey has been the predominant color so far this year.
So you have to expand your vision to discover something new if you are trekking through our dirty old town. Travel to new parts of the city, and consider how space is occupied by creativity in other ways, like the community murals full of historical heroes of the culture, and like the ‘casitas’ our photographer, Jaime Rojo, shot in Harlem this week. This city never stops surprising you, and art on the street is sometimes not what you might narrowly define it as.
We start the collection with a shot of CALDE’s piece from Caldetenes, Spain, during the FACC festival. Thanks, Calde! Perhaps this is our first sign of spring.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, including Andre Trenier, Calde, Caryn Cast, D30, Delude, Dzel, El Cekis, Garuma, Jaurelio, Living Relic, Mena Cereza, Outer Source, Peak, Qzar, Rams, and Zwon.
In New York, casitas are small, Puerto Rican-style structures built inside community gardens—part porch, part clubhouse, part cultural anchor—created by residents who reclaimed vacant lots and remade them as places for music, meals, dominoes, gardening, and neighborhood life. They also belong to the world of folk and vernacular art: handmade, improvised, often built with recycled materials, and carrying memory, pride, and everyday aesthetics rather than formal architectural polish; that is one reason photographers such as Martha Cooper have been drawn to them for decades.
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime set tapped into the same visual language by placing a brightly colored “casita,” modeled on traditional Puerto Rican homes, at the center of a mass-media spectacle, turning a humble form of domestic architecture into a symbol of cultural identity and belonging. Some are protected here in New York, but not all: Casita Rincón Criollo in the Bronx became nationally recognized through historic preservation efforts, while many other casitas remain vulnerable unless they have specific legal or community-based protections.
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 State of New York is under a State of Emergency due to the storm, which made it a good decision to get out earlier this week to document new street art and graffiti. This is typically a slower period for artists and writers, but in this city, the street is never static. There’s always an ongoing visual discussion unfolding in public, often reflecting the moment back at us.
As the weather intensifies, attention turns to those most affected—especially people without shelter and neighbors who may need help. If you can, check in on people nearby and offer what you’re able: a blanket, food, or a small bit of assistance can make a real difference.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Acet, Dah Face, DASH, DELUDE, DIKS, DINK, FLASH, Hal Merick, Homesick, Kane, Mike, No Normal, Os Gemeos, Quaker Pirate, Trisan Eaton, Uwont, and Xara Thustra.
It looks like Xara Thustra is the artist behind the “STOP MEN” installation (sometimes interpreted as part of a larger, ongoing tag) on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. The letters are painted on a high, visible spot on the bridge structure, reportedly over several nights.
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!”
The beat on the street is washed in autumn sunlight, cooler nights, and traffic jams. If you hear cars honking, you know its New York in the fall. Street artists and graffiti writers are still hard at work, or play, and we like to capture their work here, before it is gone.
And here we go boldly into the streets of New York to find new stuff from: Shepard Fairey, C215, Obey, Homesick, Queen Andrea, Steve the Bum, Boom, Pumpkin, Exiled, Stytte, Delude, Fader, and Aise.
For decades, graffiti, street art, and contemporary art have spoken with one another, exchanging ideas, aesthetics, techniques, and attitudes along …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
