Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Photographer Jaime Rojo hit the ground running upon getting back to dirty old Brooklyn this week from a Berlin/Prague tour. Lots to report from there on the walls, in the gallery, and in the museum spaces – and more to come for you to enjoy. In the meantime, here’s what he found on the streets of NYC; a mash-up of handstyles, graphics, pop cues, fine-art chops, humor, sarcasm, reverence, and straight-up rebellion — cultures colliding and talking back.
We begin the show with a new portrait of the much-loved graffiti and street art photographer Martha Cooper, based on a photo by Corey Nickols and painted by Swed Oner (Mathieu Taupenas) in Bushwick with Joe Ficalora and the Bushwick Collective by his side. Born in the south of France in the 80s, a graffiti writer in the late 90s, Swed Oner is now known for his hyper-realistic, monochrome portraits of people transformed into religious icons – featuring a “halo” motif for framing.
Featuring Dzel, EAZV, EXR, Gloom, Homesick, IMK, ISB, Jodi Da Real, KAMZ, Mike King, Notice, RIP Money, Shwan McArt, Silent, Smaer, Two Five, VENG, Warios, Werds, and ZOZS.
First, some housekeeping: over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed we’ve been publishing less—and the site’s been buggier than Mayor Adam’s re-election campaign, the MTA’s subway announcement system, or a 2025 White House policy rollout. You’re right. BSA is in the middle of major technical upgrades, and it’s been a lift. Thanks for your patience. We’re entering our 18th year—more than 7,000 articles, 60,000 images, thousands of artists across six continents—and we’re focused on making our next chapter faster, cleaner, and steadier.
Keeping street art’s genesis years in view as we look at today’s evolving scene, the New York Times arts section declares the ’80s are back!—although a mostly privileged, mostly white version of the ’80s. “Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties,” staged in a Beaux-Arts townhouse at 19 East 64th Street, packages art-school cool, downtown interdisciplinarity, and a confident graffiti-adjacent chic for polite Upper East Side viewing. It wasn’t thoroughly subversive at that time; the scene was perpetually status-signaling, and getting your name on the list at the door was paramount. Yet that mid/late-Boomer, budding cappuccino crowd could still be transgressive and forward-leaning, incorporating new tech and future-minded theory. The labels arrived in a rush: Neo-Expressionism, Appropriation, Neo-Pop/Commodity art, Simulationism (Neo-Geo), photo-conceptual work, street-adjacent practice, and graffiti, – or would that be neo-graffiti?
Someone once said of the ’60s, ‘If you remember them, you weren’t there’—and everyone laughed. Bowie said he barely remembered recording Station to Stationin the 70s, and a similar collective bemusement winked at the excesses of that time as well. So as we wind up the wooden banister on the Upper East side we wonder how many memories of the cocaine-ecstasy-fueled Downtown 80s club scenes still remain. With a lot of elbow room, you are welcome to gaze upon these paintings, sculpture, photos, and works on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Guerrilla Girls, Peter Halley, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cady Noland, Ricky Powell, Richard Prince, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Haim Steinbach, Tseng Kwong Chi, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Christopher Wool. Also, another question, if we may: Where were Uptown and Downtown specifically located at this time?
This new show shares a zip code with a collector base, a certain moneyed nostalgia, but little DNA with the scrappy, cross-pollinated Times Square Show of 1980, which actually mixed uptown and downtown with gusto, drawing from born-and-bred New Yorkers and informed by the street. A few artists, such as Haring and Basquiat, were also featured in that show, but the selected significance of the decade is presented with a different focus here. Fittingly, the paper of record just ran a valentine for the new show titled “New York’s Art Stars of the ’80s, Curated by One of Their Own.”
Ever clubby, and somehow, always away with friends this weekend.
As a related corollary, it was a pleasure to hear this week a panel led by one of the original ‘Downtown’ art critics, Carlo McCormick, in what was once SoHo—the late-’80s/’90s crucible where clubs bled into galleries, DIY shows met the street, and performance tangled with protest. Sorry, it is still Soho. At Great Jones Distilling Co., a short walk from the old Tower Records, and smack in the middle of a ghostly cloud of SAMO poetic missives, McCormick underlined that “street art” is a broad field with many lineages and methods, usually without permission or gallery contacts. His guests traced that arc: Ron English, an early subvertising billboard hijacker; Lady Aiko, a later-generation artist working stencils and character-driven iconography; and DAZE, an original NYC train writer from the late ’70s/early ’80s who carried yard energy into studios and the city. The talk acknowledged a period of collaboration and volatility—experimentation, AIDs related grief, fear and rage, thumping hedonism, hip-hop and punk, a rebirthed bohemia—and a city that has drifted steadily over decades toward finance-first priorities, even as artists kept testing the edges of public space and fought to stay here.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A Presidential Parody, Adam Dare, Bunny M., Captain Eyeliner, DZEL, EXR, Fer Suniga, HekTad, HOMESICK, MACK, Mario P, MR KING15, NO MORE WARS, RATCHI, SPAR, VES & Friends, and ZWONE.
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.
Spring 2025: Growth creeps in — leaf by leaf, blade by blade, decree by decree. You barely notice the buildup, but gradually it gathers, until suddenly, you’re surrounded.
On New York walls right now, you’ll spot a mix of collage-style cut-and-paste work, aerosol rendered full fantasy – and a surge in vertical graffiti done while hanging from ropes. This high-risk approach echoes Brazil’s Pixação scene, where writers have been scaling buildings since the ’80s to get their monikers out there running north to south; a technique later amplified by crews like 1UP and Berlin Kidz in Europe. Now, numbers of New York graffiti writers are embracing this daring vertical style — a radical shift that some see clearly, while others barely register. Across styles and mediums, there often appears a recurring presence of scarlet, crimson, rose, magenta, purple, pink, and fuchsia. These grab attention an resonate at deeper undercurrents — power, sacrifice, passion, and perhaps even the stirrings of revolution.
Here are some images from this week’s visual conversation from the street, including works from Werds, Humble, EXR, Great Boxers, Dzel, Meres One, Go, Man in the Box, DK, Luch, 1440, Fridge, El Souls, Natural Eyes, Lisart, Ilato, YOSE, Miki Yamato, HypaArtCombo, Senator Toadius Maximus, HOH22, Hound, Mr. Must Art, Lucia Dutazaka, and Tess.
The White House is running a masterclass in rapid-fire policy moves, deploying a ‘shock and awe’ strategy that keeps everyone—reporters, analysts, and politicians alike—scrambling to keep up. This week alone, the administration launched a ‘Faith Office’, proposed a federal task force to tackle anti-Christian bias,slapped sanctions on ICC officials looking into U.S. and Israeli military actions, floated the idea of turning Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’, and sent Congress a $7 billion arms sale notification for Israel.It’s a policy blitzkrieg that leaves no time to process one move before the next headline drops. Some of these proposals will gain traction, and others will fizzle, but the message is clear: the news cycle belongs to them. We haven’t heard a lot of policy changes that repair the holes in the social safety net and help the poor and struggling middle class yet, but we’re sure those are just around the corner.
Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams is catching heat to clarify a contentious ICE memo. Critics say it gives federal immigration agents way too much leeway, potentially endangering city employees and immigrant communities alike. We’re not cracking any jokes here because it’s too serious, and too many people living in New York are impacted. The anti-immigrant fever that has infected parts of the US has thus far not surfaced here in any appreciable quantity, perhaps because New York has traditionally been proud to be a city of immigrants.
While you won’t find murals explicitly tackling these new and rekindled political firestorms (yet), the chaotic, overlapping narratives on NYC’s walls feel like a fitting reflection of the moment. Confusion, authority, resistance, chaos, cats—it’s all out there, spray-painted and wheat-pasted for anyone paying attention.
Here’s our weekly conversation with the street, this week featuring Shiro, Sticker Maul, Werds, One Rad Latina, Dzel, George Collagi, Jocelyn Tsajh, Quaker Pirate, Guadalupe Rosales, and Lokey Calderon.
Well, the world ended this week—again. Yet here we are, still standing, and so are you. It turns out Donald Trump has successfully rallied the resentment of those feeling abandoned by the system, and they now firmly believe he’s their champion. Meanwhile, disbelieving technocrats and exasperated suburbanites are left shaking their heads at the audacity of those who elected this populist strongman. Twice. With another election loss under their belts, will anyone soften their stance enough to find common ground? Probably not. In fact, if everything goes according to plan, they won’t. For some, the longer we keep fighting one another, the better.
Look, the pigeons in New York do not care about all of that noise. As long as those pizza crusts keep coming, bro.
Here’s our weekly conversation with the street, this week featuring: Nick Walker, City Kitty, IMK, JEMZ, STOMP, Yevgeniya Shevchuk, Mendoza, PAR, SNIPE, DZEL, OPTIMO NYC, Lorenzo Masnah, ZOOT, and Iván Argote.
Happy St. Patricks Day to all our Irish brethren and sisteren (?) — unless you are unlucky to be a gaylesbitrans Irish resident of Staten Island: their official Saint Patty parade bans all of those other types. Our 5th borough always complains that it doesn’t get enough attention because Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens hog the spotlight. So bigotry, because why not? But Manhattan shouldn’t bray too loudly; we’re old enough to remember the LGBT bans by The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) at the beery 5th Avenue parades for decades.
And now images from our ongoing conversation Specter, Cern, Homesick, Peter Phobia, Dzel, REW, Folk, Appear 37, BRK. Nover NYC, GUS, Hand of Tess, 1krlOs, Pirdb!, Kool Hand, Croke, Regae, Nova44, and Spyee.
It comes as no surprise that the explosion of new graffiti in New York is evident across the river in Jersey City, where we have been hanging out the last few day for the Jersey City Mural Festival. And for those who know their history, it will also come as no surprise that we always dig the illegal unapproved organic graffiti and street art as much as that which has received official approval from our city fathers and mothers.
So here’s new pieces and tags from under the bridges, passageways, and inside the abandoned buildings in JC. The looseness of line and exuberance of color combinations tell us that graff kids are feeling at liberty to get up wherever necessary to get out their name. In the oceanic metaphor of ebbs and flows – this wave is flowing, bro.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Acro, Amore, Carbo, Chaos, Chees, Dzel, Gear, Hugo Girl, Jinx, Loser, Manik, MES, Nate Paints, Pesco, Reato, Rozr, Sean 9 Lugo, Serbo, Short, Sophie Xeon, Sugar, and Visit.
Born outside Sydney and based in Glasgow, Sam Bates—SMUG—began the way many graffiti writers do: skateboards, hip-hop, and late-night missions …Read More »
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