This week’s BSA images pull together some of the stronger graffiti writers we’ve seen lately, cutting across the range of lettering styles, holding weight on the street right now. From hard-earned handstyles and burners to sharper, more graphic approaches, they sit next to illustrators and pop-culture–driven characters that know how to travel beyond the sketchbook. Sharpened and smart, this work made for public space, shaped by repetition, risk, and a clear sense of visual authority.
So here is our interview with the street, this week including Atomiko, Dirt Cobain, DJJS1, Elena Rose, Jamie Hef, Jest, Keds, Klonism, Mena Ceresa, Meres One, MUL, PHYBER, Queen Andrea, Skewville, Souls NYC, TOPAZFTR, and Zulimar Mendoza.
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.
NYC’s 55th annual Pride March down 5th Avenue kicks off today, themed “Rise Up: Pride in Protest,” taking on a decidedly defiant stance on equality for all. Suppose you are in the subway, dance club, or park in Bushwick, Chinatown, or midtown. Like every June, it’s a lavender parade all weekend, with all members of the LGBTQUA+ communities from around the country and the world laughing, dancing, fighting, posing, and canoodling.
Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani clinched the Democratic nomination here this week after defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, possibly igniting a polarized reaction across NYC politics. Hm, wonder if anyone will mention his religion in the next few months. What do you think? But, de facto, he’s going to be the next mayor – unless Bloomberg wants to blow more money before the November election.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Andre Trenier, Dirt Cobain, Drones, Dzel, Fear Art, Jappy Agoncillo, Jason Naylor, Jeff Rose, Kam S. Art, Manik, Modomatic, Par, Riot, Senisa, Tom Bob, Werds, and Zimer.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring City Kitty, Degrupo, Eternal Possessions, Dirt Cobain, RX Skulls, Le Crue, IMK, Outer Source, Sluto, ICU463, Manuel Alejando, Sule Cant Cook, Cheer Up, Jacob Thomas, Urban Ninja, 613 Hawk, and LeCrue Eyebrows.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Set your clocks forward an hour!
Guess you can’t bite a graffiti artist and expect to make bank – without getting bitten. This new Nekst campaign on the Manhattan streets appears to have Claudia Schiffer and Anna Nicole Smith putting their best face forward, aside from the streams of wrinkles caused by the wet wheat paste. Time is a cruel mistress, even as our nostalgic memories of the 90s are suddenly aflame when seeing these large-scale posters and images on the catwalk named New York.
This takes the fashion labels’ accused theft of Nekst’s tag to a new level – and back to the street, where the best fashion houses traditionally find creative inspiration. The deceased graffiti writer was bold in his command of high-profile spots, and his output was profligate, giving him a reputation that current writers still pay homage to a decade after his passing. With the fashion label Guess, Inc. publicly traded, one wonders if this restyling of their brand in a fashion capital will hit them in the ticker, especially when it appears they directly ripped their style from a self-made artist/vandal and took it to the cash register.
This act highlights the ongoing debate about the street’s raw, authentic creativity and the fashion industry’s appropriation tactics. The situation questions the consequences for a major brand like Guess, primarily when the originality in question stems from the underground art world.
As Daniel Cassady from ARTNEWS and Deborah Belgum from WWD illuminate, the recent uproar in the street art/graffiti community is not merely about the misuse of street credibility but a deeper infringement on street artists’ intellectual and cultural property. Cassady discusses the blatant replication of Nekst’s signature by Guess, bringing to the forefront the fashion industry’s recurrent pilferage from street art’s raw, unfiltered energy without due homage or consent. Meanwhile, Belgum adds a familial and emotional layer, highlighting the distress caused to Nekst’s family by the unauthorized commercialization of his legacy, an act they describe as “horrifying.”
In a city where the lines of art, fashion, and identity blur, these incidents prompt us to question the ethics of inspiration versus theft. As we showcase these charged visuals, we invite our readers to ponder the fine line between tribute and exploitation in the ever-evolving narrative of street art. This is not merely about images on a wall or polished cotton; it’s a testament to the indelible impact of artists like Nekst on the fabric of urban culture and the complexities of their posthumous relationships with the commercial world.
Meanwhile, artists are still getting up and we must continue living even if we have to take extra precautions and listen to the science and to those who care.
This year’s Welling Court festival in Queens took place under the same health measures as last year. There wasn’t a big block party. The artists painted at their own pace and time sometimes only one alone at the compound – sometimes two at a time.
For the moment, the big gatherings and week-long shenanigans are gone due to Covid. Here are some selections of this year’s proposals and some from previous years that we missed either due to weather, traveling, or simply because those darn cars are always parked in front of the murals.
Welcome December! Welcome final month of the decade!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week with 1 Up Crew, Bergero, Dirt Cobain, Disturbanity, Goal, Felix Gephart, Konozco, Lego Party, Leonardi, Lik Mi, HOAC, LOL, Phetus, Rice, Traz, TWC Krew, and Yard5 Festival.
Stomping through the streets of New York Friday looking for new Street Art and graffiti, the cold and the wind reminded us of a saying we learned from the Norwegians during recent trips there: “There’s no such a thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”.
Cold comfort perhaps, but an apt metaphor for weathering the storms. Prepare!
These photos draw from that frozen urban exploration we embarked upon to the hinterlands of places not typically known for a Street Art scene like Sunnyside, Queens and places now slaughtered with murals and some smaller illegal pieces like the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Hope you are as impressed by what we found as we are as Gen Z is making some of those Millenials look like old grannies out here! Real Talk.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring A Cool 55, Alex Andre, Damien Mitchell, drsc0, Alexander Evans, Ardif, Angry Red, Arrex Skulls, Below Key, Dede, Dirt Cobain, Gongkan, Keith Haring, Praxis VGZ, SacSix, Sean Slaney, Special Robot Dog, Teg Artworks, Thrashbird, and Voxx Romana .
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Adnate, Ben Angotti, Cekis, Cesism, Damien Mitchell, Danielle Mastrion, Dirt Cobain, Evan Paul English, Gongkan, Li-Hill, MeresOne, UFO 907, Vince Ballentine, and You Go Girl!
New York’s jewel of free theater in Central Park is actually trending on Twitter, believe it or not. The production of Julius Ceasar features a Trumpian-looking lead character and it has inflamed people who haven’t heard of Shakespeare – which means a large swath of pretty/handsome bobble heads on US TV. The cautionary story actually has referenced modern leaders in productions historically in theaters in recent years and as a rule. There is even a story about Orsen Wells directing a version with actors in Nazi uniforms in the 20s or 30s.
More recent productions have included an Obama lookalike (“Caesar is cast as a tall, lanky black man” ) and a Hillaryesque woman in a white pantsuit, so why people are scandalized we don’t know. Two protesters actually stormed the stage Friday night during the performance, and lily-livered brands like Delta Airlines and Bank of Russia have pulled their financial support of the production. This is what happens when the Arts are cut out of a generation of schools, sisters and brothers.
And in other polarized news, the planned protest (and performance piece) in front of the Houston-Bowery wall is still scheduled for this afternoon. Artists and organizers have been reaching out to tell us about the protest along with possible other demonstrations which have been kick-started by the controversial choice of artist David Choe by Goldman Arts to paint the wall. Rape, Rape Culture, the normalization of sexual abuse, predatory behavior and attitudes toward women, and related issues will be in the discussion due to Choe’s own involvement in a possible rape scenario by his own account and his subsequent muddy explanations about it. Choe’s public apology yesterday via Instagram may have altered the calculus slightly but the bigger issues still prevail and many opinions on social media still question Goldman’s silence on the topic. Meanwhile, the wall has pretty much been dissed completely.
Finally, the drama of the Welling Court mural festival, which we actually do not know any drama about and which brought all sorts of community murals to this Queens working class neighborhood for the 8th year last weekend. We got out there to shoot a number of the walls without the crowds for you this week, and here’s a selection below.
So here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring A Visual Bliss, ASVP, Below Key, Cey Adams, Crash, Daze, Dek 2 DX, Dennis McNett, Dirt Cobain, Eelco Virus, Eyez, EZO, Ghost Beard, I am Eelco, John Fekner, Jonny Bluze, LMNOPI, NYC Hooker, Patch Whisky, Queen Andrea, Ramiro Davaro-Comas, Rob Sharp, Sean 9 Lugo, and Toofly.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
