Happy Easter to all our readers who celebrate it, and pray for peace.
This week, we give light to some of the recent panels from a community wall project that consistently refreshes the view for people in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Founded in 2015 by artist and curator Jeff Beler, who developed the site after securing permission to transform construction fencing around a fire-damaged, long-abandoned building into an open-air mural space. The project, initially organized with curator Frankie Velez, operates as a recurring, theme-based installation refreshed roughly twice a year, bringing together a mix of established and emerging muralists to produce site-specific work across multiple panels. A community-based initiative, Underhill Walls has grown into a visible neighborhood fixture and a broader hub for mural production, emphasizing collaboration, accessibility, and artist “chemistry” in selection for the rotating roster.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, today featuring Anna Faris, Barbtropolis, BC NBA, Bunny M, Calicho Art, CAMI XVX, DG Millie, Drones, Fumero, Georgia Violett, Kams S Art, LeCrue Eyebrows, Luis Valle, Majo, Margarita Howls, Metamorph, Minhafofa, and Peachee Blue.
Handmade and hand-slapped stickers operate in the city the way cells operate in a living organism. Individually, they are small, fragile, and easily removed. Taken together, they form a dispersed system of signals—drawings, slogans, jokes, IDs (a writer’s tag repeated again and again), confessions, quotations—each carrying intent.
Some are one-off images, painted or drawn as if on miniature canvases. Others are produced in runs, repeated, and distributed across the city. One may deliver a political demand, a poetic longing, or a non-sequitur legible mainly to its author. None of them can claim permanence, yet their accumulation suggests a continuity of commentary.
Seen up close, these stickers may resemble genetic material from society scattered across an urban surface. They are bits of cultural DNA, replicating with variation as they move from hand to hand and place to place. Certain motifs recur—icons, phrases, styles—mutating slightly with each appearance. Others fail to reproduce and disappear.
Together, they encode what the city is thinking, worrying about, resisting, or celebrating at this precise moment. Lamp posts, post office boxes, and the doors of rehearsal studios become sites of transcription, where ideas are copied, miscopied, promulgated, and reimagined.
A single sticker rarely tells you much, but through visual collection, comparison, and pattern recognition, meaning begins to emerge. Clusters form. Absence matters as much as presence. Humor can signal resilience; repetition can suggest anxiety; aggression may indicate a stress response.
In this way, sticker culture functions less as decoration or commentary than as diagnosis. The product of many pens, thick tips, brushes, and printers, these marks offer a way to read a city’s condition from the inside out. Outside.
When discovering a series of currency-themed street art in the city this week, we were reminded of the relentless daily pressure there is today to make ends meet—and of the regular headlines showing how the big players run their own schemes to squeeze the public. It also calls to mind the 1980s hip hop track “What People Do for Money” by Divine Sounds, with its sly reminder: “They’ll sell their soul to the devil, just to make a dime.” (See video at end of posting)
Whether it’s war profiteering, scamming public programs, turning charities into piggy banks, buying up public goods to squeeze ratepayers, or preaching salvation from the cabin of a private jet, corporations, banks, and street hustlers only differ in scale, not intent.
From the street perspective, this may look like the same hustle that they do – but with a press release accompanying it.
Here’s a survey of our weekly interview with the street, featuring Atomiko, Cash4, Drones, Grouchy, Jappy Agoncillo, Rene Lerude, Skewville, TFP Crew, and Zexor.
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 street: this week featuring Faile, Stikman, Elle, Queen Andrea, CRKSHNK, Shiro, Espo, Homesick, DeGrupo, Michael Alan, Dark Clouds, Gats, Manik, Drones, ICU463, El Chalvo Del Ocho, Saxgraf, Smart RIS, Bianca Does New York, Uloang, and Chespirito.
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.
With its smooth-to-the-touch pages and oversized, flapping format, this Black Book is a working object—a collection of shared memories stabilized …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
