Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
New York is slamming, as ever, when it comes to new street art and graffiti popping up in expected and unexpected places. Here’s our weekly conversation with the street, this week featuring: The Yok, Sheryo, Lexi Bella, Calicho Art, Humble, IMK, Manuel Alejandro, EXR, Zoot, Great Boxers, Thobekk, Aaron Wrinkle, OTOM, Poor Rupert, Paige Bowman, Elena Ohlander, MUSKA, Motomichi Nakamura, and TABBY.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
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 Images of the Week!
Societal norms and entertainment ethics change, sometimes radically, as time progresses. It would be fantastic if you could determine which era is more shocking and if its behaviors indicate a golden age or a declining one. Just look at New York history at Coney Island, which may seem barbaric and beyond the pale by today’s standards, alongside oddly similar occurrences in contemporary Western society.
Earlier examples of entertainment that New Yorkers found compelling at Coney Island included freak shows that drew on unusual physical characteristics, human zoos, an Infant Incubator Exhibit, and the electrocution of Topsy the elephant. These were considered normal a hundred years ago, and religious people of good conscience allowed them, much like they did with whites-only water fountains and children working in factories. Women first competed in the Paris 1900 Olympics (22 women, 975 men), but only in five competitions: Tennis, Sailing, Croquet, Equestrianism, and Golf.
On Friday night, during the opening ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, X was all atwitter with self-proclaimed Christians expressing outrage over a small segment of the three-and-a-half-hour show that featured a few well-known French drag performers doing a campy modern homage to The Last Supper paintings of the Renaissance. Decades of austerity budgets have starved our education system, and it shows, as many were scandalized by this portrayal of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and other ‘disgusting’ scenes referencing French history, such as the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, World War I and II, the Industrial Revolution, and the Cultural Renaissance. And that depiction of Marie Antoinette holding her head under her arm? There’s a story behind that.
Meanwhile, in very modern history, we have a president out of the race, a former president who said yesterday that we wouldn’t need to vote in four years, his VP choice who once called him “America’s Hitler,” and, according to The New Yorker, a presidential candidate who sparked a reported 700-percent increase in voter registrations. July has been a ride, y’all! This week, we welcome August with hope and possibly some trepidation.
And here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Aiko, Adam Fujita, Homesick, Degrupo, Optimo NYC, Werds, DEK2DX, Lee Holin, Snoeman, NAY 281, Bogus, EXR, Uwont, Jacob Thomas, Chido, Smooth, Kasio, Wild West, JDI, and FAQ COP.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
As the graffiti and street art high season draws to a close, we remark on the stunning array of new faces on the New York scene this year, as well as a large crop of maturing talents from the last decade or so. The length of the cycle for artists working on the street varies some, but we’ve been around enough to see many of the early 2000s stars fade away or move on to other things. The voice of this new generation is as challenging as ever and perhaps more savvy in many ways. Still, it’s good to see the re-appearance this month of folks like Hera in New York – a talent whose global and studio escapades have made her a revered street artist over about two decades.
Our thanks to all the artists of all persuasions and longevity for giving voice and character to our public spaces.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Queen Andrea, Praxis,CRKSHNK, Lexi Bella, Danielle Mastrion, Homesick, Hera, Panic, Seo, Insane 51, Habibi, Didi, Keops, OSK, AAA, EXR, RJG Rock, L.O.U.R.S., Nohemi, Hazard One, and Emesa.
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BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
