Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The masks are coming out this week, and not just for the ICE agents. Costumes will be everywhere, and cosplayers will suddenly blend into the crowd. Exaggerated lips, hair, and boobs will no longer be the exclusive domain of drag clubs and Mar-a-Lago parties. Thousands of mini-Spider-Men and a million princesses will be knocking on doors and turning up on Ring cameras across the land.
Here in New York, we’re accustomed to extremes in fashion and personality, despite the dulling effect of gentrification on so many neighborhoods. We like our graffiti and street artists to get in on the act, entertaining us with Halloween creatures, ad hoc horror stories, and colorful personalities on the street. It all adds to the buildup to next Saturday, when thousands will descend on the Village for the annual Halloween Parade.
Hope your days are crisp and sunny, and your nights are spooktacular.
Here is our weekly interview on the street, with Andre Trenier, BK Foxx, Chaz, IMK, NYC Kush Co, Optimo NYC, Ski, Too Fly, and Wooley Nick.
The United Nations showed its disunity this week—and the limits of its power against oligarchy, demagoguery, resource grabs, and the machinery of war. Then came the steaming pile of speeches, dissembling, and B-rate political theater, with one speech prompting 77 delegations to walk out. So unifying. Congratulations, us.
Cheering and reassuring proof that phones are not hypnotic to everyone, Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair returned to MoMA PS1 this week and was flooded with celebrants of its 20th anniversary, displaying hundreds of independent publishers, artists, zine-makers, and small presses together in Queens.
Also a fall tradition, the city is ablaze with art fairs at the moment, including The Armory Show, with some 230 galleries and a strong Caribbean focus; Independent 20th Century, spotlighting overlooked and under-recognized artists of the last century; and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the curator-driven fair that takes over unconventional spaces and has long felt closer in spirit to street art and graffiti — provisional, site-responsive, independent, and comfortable operating outside the polished white-cube model.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring City Kitty, COEY, Dan Bunn, Egore, Gasy, IMK, Jerkface, Jimbo is God, Jorit, Kuba, Lee Holin, Nimek, Ninja Turtle, Obey, Praxis, Slow, and Toofly.
And now to the current interview with the streets – mainly New York, some Berlin – this week featuring works by AH Cru, D7606, Dan Witz, Drecks, Duality Industries, Gats, IMK, Irak Crew, MKCV Lucy, My Dog Sighs, OXY, Por La Vida, Spockman, Universal Humanity, and Y.E.R.K.E.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. We’re happy to see you.
Labor Day Weekend in New York—traditionally the last exhale of summer before school begins, the Art World and the art world start throwing open their doors, and the “important” fall movies, plays, and exhibitions begin arriving on cue.
This year, though, there’s another frequency running underneath it all. Markets shudder, political alliances rearrange themselves, wars grind on, corruption becomes ordinary, rights are being trampled, and the vibrations travel all the way down to the sidewalk. The stories you hear on the street can be alarming. Everyone, it seems, is waiting for something to give—for some kind of collapse, correction, rupture, reckoning.
Street art may or may not reflect any of this. But it catches the refractions: images and messages bouncing through the blinking, flickering, blinding light of a city trying to see what comes next.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Camaleon, IMK, OG King 157, REVS, Sever She Posse, Stikman, Timothy Goodman, Tom Bob, and Turtle Caps.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week – and the end of the summer is closing in on us, as we linger here on this spot for one hour more. Street Artist TV BOY is in town and has done some personal tributes to iconic figures familiar to street art, with the exception of the inclusion of the current New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose image does not show up as often as you may think. The beaches on Coney Island are still packed, the frisbees are still flying in Prospect Park, and dogs are still off the leash everywhere, because why not. The skirts are skimpy and the tennis bods are buff at the US Open in Queens this week – which you can follow up with a big bowl at Yunnan Rice Noodle House – open 24 hours, yo!
Allen Ginsberg fans can celebrate all week with Allen Ginsberg at 100, featuring a Thomas Bartlett-curated program at Little Island with Rufus Wainwright on Sept. 2, Bill Frisell on Sept. 3, Taylor Mac on Sept. 5, and Marc Ribot on Sept. 6, with Laurie Anderson appearing on several nights throughout the run — a fitting occasion to remember Ginsberg’s enduring invocation: “Holy! Holy! Holy!”
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 4EZZKA, Bulldog, IMK, JMB, NACE, Peter Paid, Question Marks, Sara Lynne Leo, Skegs, Turtle Caps, and TV Boy.
The penalties for painting in gang territory are steeper than you may expect in El Salvador, but mural festivals like PigmenTrip Muralism Festival has been slowly taking over walls for the last 8 years. Controversial human rights accusations against President Nayib Bukele since his war on gangs began in 2022 aside, this news story says people are happy to see these new murals on walls and are breathing easier these days. Festival founder Isaac Sosa says in Barron’s that “art a “magical tool” for “social transformation”.
Finally, in the ongoing debate about who controls the wall, who gets to redefine public space, and whose claim to it has more power, Glasgow brought 23 international and local artists to paint columns under Kingsbridge last year, but the wealth of one more (yawn) Batman movie has painted over all of them suddenly. Some were pretty fresh paint, having been completed in the last few months. In their rush to report the stars of the movie, the breathless Scottish press doesn’t bother to mention the artists’ names or credit their work. Here you are: The “Art Under the Bridge” installation comprises 23 painted pillars by these street/graffiti/mural artists: Phill Blake, Mr Cenz, Conzo Throb, Mikhaela Martin, Vernis, Molly Hankinson, Erin Bradley Scott, Robert Cook, Good Night Vienna, Wee Thistles, Frodrik, Emsky, Ikul, Keiti Forbes, Gillian Law, Christian Kerr, Kitsa, Nitram Joke, and Aroe.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Cern, Dan Bunn, Delphinoto, Homsick, IMK, Jaek El Diablo, Ratch, ROMAK, Sinclair, and of course San Francis of Assisi. Go forth.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! New York has endured a week of choking smoke from Canadian wildfires, 98-degree (37°C) heat, and pounding summer thunderstorms. Today, the FIFA World Cup Final arrives, briefly transforming the city once again. Bars in Argentine and Spanish neighborhoods are overflowing with fans, an estimated 50,000 people will gather before giant screens in Central Park, and across the Hudson, 83,000 will pack MetLife Stadium. The match has also turned the region into a temporary diplomatic capital, drawing President Trump, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Spain’s King Felipe VI, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Yet New York has a way of absorbing even the grandest spectacles. While the sporting euphoria fills many spaces, someone in Jackson Heights is comparing the price of canned beans and reaching for the store brand, another is watering tomatoes at M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden on the Lower East Side, someone else is doing the week’s laundry at Ludlow Laundromat, while another is stretched out beside a rooftop pool in Williamsburg. As they say on Broadway, come hell or high water, the show must go on.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring CRKSHNK, Debt, Hops Art, IMK, JerkFace, Little Ricky, Makatron, Sara Lynne Leo, SOOBEK, and Worst Timer.
It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.”
Bleeker Street, Summer Derek Walcott
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Buttafly, Dan Witz, ICU463, Iena Cruz, IMK, Jorit, KAM, Magwie, Manuel Alejandro, Odette, Petit Agite, Rise, Sempri, and VK Mills.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Yo, don’t sleep on New York – we’re still setting an eclectic standard of outlaw graffiti and street art and out-of-your-mind people on the street, in the clubs, concerts, and parks. When the weather warms like this week, all the subcultures emerge again on the streets, out of their apartments after a long winter, looking for action, and thankfully, there is plenty – 5-Borough bike rides, Smorgasbord, Shakespeare in the Park, cherry tree festival at the botanical gardens, LES skatepark, Union Square Market, Washington Park gatherings, Fleet Week. Yes all the prices are going up, but a lot of New York can be enjoyed for little or no money – just go outside.
Let’s see how the Met Gala sidesteps its Bezos-era funding this week during the annual craven catwalk of shallowness and hot air. The usual procession of “stars” will take the carpet—plenty of spectacle, putting very little at stake beyond the attention it generates. As a street art campaign heated up to boycott the event this spring, Hyperallergic’s article from mid-April nailed the gist of it. More recently, bus stop installations hit the message directly by stating “Amazon Powers ICE”. The Met doesn’t know how to do people-powered revolt – unless it can be pulled completely out of its original context (or happened 300 years ago). Remember the thorough de-boning of punk culture for the “punk” themed event in the twenty-teens? It was like a tasty punk Filet-O-Fish.
Surprisingly, corporate media didn’t pick up this new anti-corporate Amazon/Met story. See the video of a street poster installation at the end here.
So here is our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Depoe, Dirt Cobain, Frank Ape, Gane, Guila, Gushe, IMK X, Jorit, Love X, Miss 17, Modomatic, Ollin, Pear, Qzar, Rems, Sonni, Stikman, Tuney, and Want Pear.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. We are following, with you and the rest of the world, the negotiations between Iran and the Trumpsters. We imagine that you cannot trust anything that comes from a foreign leader who said earlier in the week “a whole civilization will die tonight” in a social media post. Meanwhile, a 2-liter Coke is $4.10 at your local deli – about the same as a gallon of gas nationwide, and all young men 18-26 are going to be automatically registered for the draft. We’re trying to think of a clever joke to insert here, but nothing is coming up.
70s/80s NYC train writer Fab 5 Freddy has been on a book tour tied to a new memoir, “Everybody’s Fly” out this spring, re-centering his role as a connector between uptown graffiti writers, the downtown art world of the 1980s, and his early hip-hop media crossover in the 90s. Meanwhile, nobody is doing trains today, as rooftops and rappelling are the current popular practices in graffiti in Brooklyn and Queens, with names like Notice + Rams (MSK), Qzar, Vods, Timer, Sokem, Sickpay, and Dase circulating again for getting up—names you’ll recognize mixed with newer hands. And of course, the murals are starting to come out in force; private, community-led, and corporately sponsored.
Here are some new shots we caught this week on New York streets, featuring Eternal Possessions, Shev Lunatic, BESRK, IMK, El Avo, STOP, CRKSHNK, DEBT, FCM, Jenna Morello, Damsel, and Charm
In New York, the New Museum has reopened with its expansion by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, pulling in steady lines of architecture watchers and contemporary art pilgrims. The opening exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,”sets out to parse what it means to be human as technology redraws the terms, gathering more than 200 contributors across art, science, and film—an experience that is by turns enthralling, overwhelming, poetic, and brutal.
In a display of the classic New York tension between preservation and redevelopment, a canonical piece of early street culture history—a 1987 mural by Keith Haring—is at risk. The City says it will preserve it, but many remain unclear how—and are openly skeptical.
At the mural festival called The Crystal Ship 2026 in Ostend, Belgium, a cleverly named exhibition “Subway Art”—curated by Alice Gallery—revisits the origins of graffiti culture, tracing its roots in the subway systems of New York and other early writing scenes. Presented alongside the festival’s citywide program, it anchors the broader theme of Curiosity by grounding it in the movement’s unsanctioned beginnings and writer-driven history.
Coming up in April, “Martha Cooper: A Retrospective” opens at the Bronx Documentary Center Annex in the Bronx, New York, offering a comprehensive survey of her five-decade career documenting urban life and creative expression. On view from April 9 through June 14, 2026, the exhibition brings together decades of work that helped define the visual record of graffiti and street culture.
César Chávez, long honored as a leader of the farmworker movement, has also been the subject of grave allegations reported in recent accounts, including statements by Dolores Huerta, who said publicly that he raped her twice in the 1960s and that she bore two children as a result. In recognition of the labor, sacrifice, and leadership of women in the movement, we call for Huerta’s name to replace his on parades, holidays, streets, schools, libraries, parks, post offices, vessels, monuments, murals, and other public institutions or commemorations that now bear his name.
¡Viva Dolores Huerta!
Here is our weekly photographic interview with the street, this time featuring: Carlos Alberto, City Kitty, Hanimal, Homesick, IMK, Le Crue, Mickalene Thomas, Queen Andrea, and Vesod.
Spring is arriving, but conversations around the city keep circling back to the war—bombings, deaths, oil prices, and the prospect of boots on the ground. At bars, clubs, and bagel shops, the mood turns serious quickly. There’s little joking in today’s daily discourse. Mostly, people wonder how this war began when so few seem to support it; recent polls put approval around 29%. People don’t feel like they were consulted, or considered.
Across news agencies as days pile up, the stories grow of governments in more than 50 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas have calling for a ceasefire, de-escalation, or a return to diplomacy. It is a widening conflict involving the United States, Israel, Iran, and every contry in the region- with threats to Turkey and Europe. In New York—home to neighborhoods and communities from many of those same countries—the conversations are personal, and the tension is easy to notice.
The famous yet anonymous Banksy has finally been revealed—at least according to a lengthy new piece in Reuters. Over the years, the elusive street artist has weighed in on the plight of Palestinians, Ukrainians, and African and Syrian refugees, and has often returned to the images of children as a symbol of hope, innocence, and loss. At the moment, as events around the world turn darker by the day, few seem to be talking about his wry interventions.
In Washington public space, a satirical sculpture that appeared on the National Mall has been drawing laughs—and, for some, feelings of nausea. The piece depicts Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in a Titanic-style pose and is titled “King of the World.” Reuters reports that the installation was created by the anonymous collective called Secret Handshake. The Epstein scandal has been mentioned in some circles as a possible motive for distraction in launching the war, though others argue the drivers are more likely rooted in geopolitics—namely oil, and the petrodollar that runs through it.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Alice Mizrachi, Calicho Art, City Kitty, Clark, Crash, Fun Quest, Humble, IMK, Inphiltrate, Manuel Alejando, Must Art, OSK, Outer Source, Rats, REPO, REVOLT, and TOWER.
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground.Artistic direction by Andrea Conte …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
