Happy Halloweenathon! Two great events this weekend: last night’s Halloween bashes in the streets, subways, bars, and your local senior community center, followed by today’s New York City Marathon, with 60,000 runners, some still in Halloween costumes, making their way through all five boroughs. It’s a feast for the eyes, ears, and spirit.
We also had our twice-yearly clock change, gaining an extra hour overnight. With cool, sunny days and the trees in the parks blazing orange, red, and yellow, street art and graffiti have some serious competition for our attention.
You’ve heard of the Queen of Soul, the King of Pop, the King of Rock and Roll, the Queen of Salsa, the King of the Blues, the Godfather of Soul, the Queen of Country, and the Godmother of Punk. These honorifics have evolved over time from public sentiment and public relations or declared by a trusted authority. Did you know graffiti and street art have these grand titles, and as they evolved, sometimes the same titles were used twice or thrice?
BLADE has been called the King of Graffiti, and so has Cornbread. Lee Quiñones has been called the King of New York, Lady Pink the First Lady of Graffiti, and PHASE 2 the King of Style, while Dondi was the Style Master General. Martha Cooper was called the Godmother of Street-Urban Art by the University of California and is listed in the 2026 Guinness World Records for the Longest Career as a Street-Art Photographer.
Le Parisien called COPE2 Le pape du graff (Pope of Graffiti) in 2012, and Dijon Beaune Magazine recently called FUTURA 2000 Le pape du graffiti (Pope of Graffiti) as well.
This week, we realized that three artists have been called the Godfather of Street Art: the Frenchman Blek le Rat and two Americans, Ron English and Richard Hambleton. We’ll ask Blek about it this month when we’re in London, where he’ll be celebrating 45 years on the street and preparing for his new show at Woodbury House in Mayfair, featuring 45 new works.
Another honor came in September, when the five members of the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to rename a park “Don’t Fret Park” in honor of the much-loved Chicago street artist.
But back to Richard Hambleton: he’s being paid tribute on New York streets right now, as seen in our first Image of the Week, honoring the Godfather of Street Art.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, featuring CP Won, DE$, DERS, Frank Ape, Homesick, Matthew Visuals, Modomatic, MOGE, NAY, Noahh Cook, Pell, Roy Lichtenstein, SPAR, Vixen, and XN28.
New Zealand painter and muralist Owen Dippie first encountered Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work when he was thirteen, and the admiration has stayed with him ever since. Decades later, he decided to pay tribute in a way no one could miss. He financed the entire project himself, climbed high above the Bowery, and created a six-story portrait of the artist just steps from where Basquiat once lived and worked. No commercial commission, no painting crew, no assistants. Every part of the enormous undertaking, from preparing the surface to rendering the smallest facial details, came from his own hand. There are easier ways to honor an influence. Dippie apparently wasn’t interested in any of them.
At roughly sixty feet tall, the portrait at 344 Bowery is an astonishing display of technical mastery, with the precision and sensitivity of classical portraiture translated into aerosol on an architectural scale. Based on a 1982 photograph by Gianfranco Gorgoni, it captures Basquiat with a contemplative expression that has stayed with Dippie for decades. His singular feat is remarkable not simply because of its size, or the sheer New York nerve of attempting it, but because of the control required to render delicate changes in light and shadow while standing inches from a wall that can only be properly appreciated from across the street. Down below, the Bowery keeps up its usual racket of traffic and sidewalk chatter. Above it, Dippie is concentrating on the smallest shifts in a single expression. He is working at the height of his powers here, and it shows.
Long before the Bowery, there was an art room at St Paul’s Collegiate in Hamilton, New Zealand. His teacher, Mike Linklater, introduced him to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francis Bacon, and occasionally let the young troublemaker hide out in the art room when he was supposed to be attending mathematics classes. When Dippie first came to New York in 2006, one of his first destinations was 57 Great Jones Street, where Basquiat had lived and worked during the final years of his life. He has returned to that address on subsequent visits, quietly paying respects to an artist who helped shape his direction.
For those familiar with his work, this devotion is hardly surprising. Dippie, also known as OD, has been painting in New York’s streets for two decades, building a formidable body of large-scale realist portraiture informed by graffiti, hip-hop, classical painting, and popular culture. His portraits of Biggie appeared at 5Pointz in Queens and later in Bushwick, while a 2010 portrait of Nas also occupied a wall at 5Pointz. His early work documented by Art Crimes includes more of these hip-hop tributes, reflecting an engagement with the culture that reaches well beyond the walls he paints.
In 2015, Dippie gave Brooklyn two particularly memorable examples of his ability to bring seemingly distant worlds together. His Ninja Renaissance Masters depicted Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello wearing the colored masks of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle namesakes. His Radiant Madonna placed Keith Haring’s Radiant Baby in the arms of Raphael’s Madonna. The humor and visual contrast hit immediately, but the extraordinary painting skill was equally striking. Later New York works included Biggie sharing a wall with Alfred Hitchcock and a Basquiat portrait created with Al Diaz, Basquiat’s former SAMO collaborator.
Dippie is not much for pretense. His enthusiasm for graffiti and street art and hip hop culture doesn’t suddenly switch on when somebody arrives with a microphone. He has sought out the artists, learned the histories, formed friendships, and demonstrated his respect through his own work. He painted a tribute to stylemaster Dondi White, and in 2010 created a meticulous painting of the original Subway Art cover for Martha Cooper, a work later exhibited in Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures at Urban Nation in Berlin. He and his wife Erin even married on the roof of 5Pointz, with, according to him, the rumble of the 7 train and the shaking of paint cans providing an appropriately New York soundtrack. His relationship with the culture is personal, lived, and enduring.
The new Basquiat portrait represents another level of commitment. Dippie conceived the project in late 2024 and approached the building’s occupants, Par Excellence, whose Guillaume Bouchez helped navigate the complicated requirements of city permits and historic-building preservation. The painting itself brought a different set of challenges: wind, rain, punishing sunlight, shifting shadows, and the physical demands of producing a hyperrealistic portrait at six-story scale. It is difficult to imagine a more demanding way to express admiration for another artist.
Basquiat’s spontaneous, fractured style and Dippie’s disciplined realism are worlds apart. He’s not painting like Basquiat; he’s painting Basquiat. With his wife Erin on site throughout the undertaking, Dippie worked high above Great Jones Street, just steps from the artist’s former studio.
The exclusive photographs by Jaime Rojo presented here follow Dippie through the demanding process of creating this monumental portrait, offering a closer look at a painter and muralist undertaking one of the most ambitious works of his career. It is a remarkable salute from one accomplished painter to another, made with considerable physical labor, extraordinary technical skill, and something you can’t buy by the gallon: genuine affection.
We spoke with Owen Dippie about the making of this monumental mural, his long history with New York, and the enduring influence of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
BSA: When did you begin planning this mural, and was there a lot of red tape involved in securing the necessary permits in New York City?
OD: In late 2024, I approached the occupants of the fifth floor of the building (Par Excellence) with the idea. With the help of Guillaume Bouchez, we began navigating the complexities of city permits and building preservation.
BSA:Did the community around the wall, including neighboring businesses, get involved in the process?
OD: Neighboring businesses were approached and asked if anyone was opposed to the concept, and nobody was.
BSA: When did you first learn about Jean-Michel Basquiat and his work? Was there a particular book or image that motivated you as an artist?
OD: I was introduced to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat by my high school teacher when I was thirteen, and it immediately had a massive impact on me. He gave me a book that had a photograph of Basquiat on the cover, taken by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Growing up, this image always stuck with me, so when it came time to consider a reference for the mural, this photograph was an obvious choice.
There is a beautiful innocence and a real seriousness to it that I admire deeply.
BSA:You’ve been painting in New York City—the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn—for a long time. This is your first mural in Manhattan. Why did it take so long to finally paint here?
OD: I guess the red tape involved with creating such a significantly sized mural. For example, in the film industry, Manhattan is known to be difficult. Directors will shoot in other cities, even countries, and make their scenes look like Manhattan rather than try to shoot here. I always dreamed of painting the Bowery/Houston wall. To follow in Keith’s footsteps, and in those of all the other great artists who contributed to the history of that wall, would have been unbelievable. (I had a killer idea, too.)
BSA:This is a particularly meaningful location for a Jean-Michel Basquiat portrait. His former studio is only a few feet away. What feelings and emotions came to you while painting so close to where he lived and worked?
OD: I first visited and painted New York in 2006. One of the first places I came to was 57 Great Jones Street. I have always considered it sacred ground, given that Jean-Michel both lived and died there. I have since visited and painted the city numerous times and begin each visit the same way—with a quiet pilgrimage to number 57 to pay respects to an artist who unknowingly helped shape my path. To paint at this location is a huge honor for me.
BSA:Did you find painting in Manhattan particularly challenging? Did people show you kindness and hospitality?
OD: New York City throws everything it has at you (both good and bad), but the good always outshines the bad.
BSA:How long did it take you to complete the mural? Did it take longer than expected? Was the weather particularly challenging?
OD: The mural was a massive undertaking. From preparing the surface to painting the portrait, it all came from my hand alone. No team, no assistants. It sounds kind of idiotic to do something like this by oneself, but that’s just how I do it. Painting in any exterior environment always comes with its challenges. From wind to rain, blinding sun to drastic shadows, it’s ever-changing and always unique.
BSA:Was this a commissioned project, or was it self-financed?
OD: This mural was entirely self-financed. Jean-Michel made a lot of money for people while he was alive and a lot more since he has been gone, so the fact that this project was self-funded makes it feel pure in a way. Something just for Jean, you know, something from the heart.
BSA:Is there a particular story or experience you had while painting the mural that made a lasting impression on you, good or bad?
OD: I have had so many great experiences and have met so many beautiful people. From ex-girlfriends to art dealers, friends, colleagues, collaborators, collectors, contemporaries. People who lived in this neighborhood, people who still live in this neighborhood. So many people were touched by Jean’s spirit during his brief time on earth. I feel blessed to be able to keep that spirit alive.
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground. Artistic direction by Andrea Conte (Andreco).
One more project above the streets before it snows! Italian street artist and environmental engineer Andreco has a natural talent for bringing together people, ideas, and disciplines, and his latest project installed last week in Rome is another tribute to the natural world—this time, an imaginary lake spread across an elevated pedestrian plaza and its connecting walkways, large enough to be seen from the sky. Titled Lago sospeso (Suspended Lake), the sprawling pavement painting brings aquatic life to the Vigne Nuove neighborhood, where a formerly neglected public space has acquired fish, algae, corals, mollusks, and other fanciful inhabitants. No snorkel required.
Andreco, also known as Andrea Conte, has spent more than two decades developing an artistic practice that moves between street art, environmental science, installation, public performance, and ecological activism. His visual vocabulary of rocks, plants, rivers, geological formations, and scientific symbols reflects his training as an environmental engineer and his ongoing interest in the relationship between human activity and natural systems. Whether painting a wall, planting a living installation, or organizing a collective intervention, he has a knack for making environmental concepts tangible in public space. A recurring thread in his work is turning ecological knowledge into public experience, and public experience into ecological action. Just as importantly, he seems to enjoy getting other people involved in the process.
For Lago sospeso, Andreco worked with Futurecologies, his studio team, students from Liceo Artistico Bramante, participants from local disability and developmental health services, and neighborhood residents to imagine an aquatic landscape winding through the former market square and elevated pedestrian walkways of the Vigne Nuove public housing complex. The design emerged from workshops and conversations about the neighborhood, its inhabitants, and the emotions people associate with different environments. Water, lakes, and rivers surfaced repeatedly as images of serenity and transformation.
The result is less a monumental artwork than a shared experiment in how a public space might feel and function differently. Children jump between painted shapes to avoid getting their feet wet. Others navigate improvised routes on bicycles, scooters, and wheelchairs. They even invented a rule about losing a turn if you touch the jellyfish. Beyond the playful imagery, the project explores how participation, imagination, and improvements to neglected public spaces might contribute to a greater sense of connection and well-being. The surrounding plaza and walkways were also renovated as part of the initiative, giving the neighborhood something more lasting than a new coat of paint.
Lago sospeso was developed under the artistic direction of Andrea Conte (Andreco), with Futurecologies and Studio Andreco, in collaboration with ATER Roma, Municipio III Roma Montesacro, and Roma Tre University, as part of the European Urban Initiative’s WE-Z project.
The collaborative process included students from Liceo Artistico Bramante, service users from Polo Lumière of ASL Roma 1’s Adult Disability Service, participants from TSMREE ASL Roma 1, and residents of Vigne Nuove.
Participants in the creation of the street painting: Alessandro, Alex, Arianna, Bianca, Carlotta, Elena, Elena F., Elena R., Ludovica, Manar, Marta, Martina P., Martina S., Matilde C., Matilde L., Rita, Sarah, Susanna (Liceo Artistico Bramante); Valerio Pignataro, Yrma Antonella Tito Ayma, Sara Sampaolese, Andrea Conte, Daniele Cimaglia, Elisa Veronelli, Luisa Fioravanti, Cecilia Daniele, Fabiola Postacchini, Alberto Scipioni, Fabio Bravetti, Valerio Butteroni, Federico Mariani, Matteo Monarchi, and Simone Evangelista.
The co-design workshops were coordinated by Andrea Conte with Daniele Cimaglia, Cecilia Daniele, Luisa Fioravanti, and Sebastiano De Angelis.
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.
Barcelona’s B-Murals has never been particularly interested in treating urban art as a matter of filling empty walls with attractive pictures. Based at Nau Bostik, the former industrial complex in La Sagrera, this project has spent years making room for graffiti writers, street artists, muralists, and practitioners whose work doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.
They have provided room for exhibitions, experimentation, research, publishing, and the occasional argument about what belongs in public space – that’s part of their identity too. For those familiar with the project’s history, including exhibitions that examine graffiti culture and the less commercially convenient corners of urban art, this broader approach is hardly a surprise.
The 2026 B-Murals Fest, held October 7–10, continue in that spirit, turning Nau Bostik into a working laboratory and public gathering place rather than simply an outdoor gallery – or platform for a gallerist to show their stable and call it “community”. Artists painted new murals while visitors tried their own hands at graffiti, stickers, paste-ups, and other forms of image-making.
Colectivo Monday organized a collective paste-up, Clara Nubiola led a laboratory investigating how people observe and interpret public space, and projects such as Can Safari, Revorn, Malicia Walls, and RavaleArt joined the program. There were discussions, publications, video installations, music, and an exhibition by XPIELLAX titled WHY YOU MAD?, accompanied by a live performance.
What distinguishes B-Murals from many of the increasingly familiar mural-festival circuits is its willingness to keep the process visible, the categories open, and the audience involved. The finished walls matter, certainly, but so do the conversations, experiments, improvised collaborations, and sometimes awkward questions that surround them. In a field where urban art can easily become a promotional backdrop or branding vehicle, B-Murals continues to argue for the culture’s less predictable possibilities.
This selection of photographs of new walls from BSA contributor Lluis Olive Bulbenas gives a look at what this year’s gathering offers – something that happens when artists, visitors, and a former factory complex share the same creative territory.
Asbury Park has always had a taste for spectacle. From its late-19th-century beginnings as a seaside resort to the vaudeville performers, amusement rides, carousel music, carnival attractions, and rock-and-roll legends that followed, this stretch of the Jersey Shore has long invited people to become part of the show.
The old boardwalk architecture still carries some of that theatrical swagger, and the salt air supplies an atmosphere that no stage designer could quite reproduce. This September, with the Sea.Hear.Now music festival brought thousands to the beach for performances by the Strokes, Pixies, Fontaines D.C., and others, the city once again became a gathering place for music, public art, and the magical, quirky, spontaneous street-level encounters that make seaside towns particularly entertaining.
Into that atmosphere came Dennis McNett’s fourth annual March of Medusa, a glorious and somewhat unruly procession of fantastical creatures, handmade masks, flags, and mythological characters brought to life by artists and community participants. McNett, whose Wolfbat creations draw on woodcut traditions, folklore, and the communal rituals of carnival, was joined by artists Swoon, Adam Wallacavage, Jodi Rice, Steve Olson, Jude Harzer, and others who contributed masks and sculptural works. Ben Venom supplied flags, and the Ocean Avenue Stompers kept the procession moving. Swoon’s involvement was a natural fit for an artist whose work has long crossed between the street, immersive installations, and collaborative public projects. The art had legs, occasionally horns, and plenty of company as it made its way along the boardwalk.
Meanwhile, the surrounding streets and beachfront architecture offered another kind of performance. Portuguese street artist Add Fuel brought his intricately patterned Carnival Nautical mural to the First Avenue Pavilion, weaving references to Asbury Park’s maritime architecture into his signature blue-and-white tile vocabulary. Shepard Fairey returned to the city with portraits of Chuck D and Joe Strummer, alongside tributes to punk icons and a restoration of his earlier megaphone mural, connecting the city’s musical inheritance to dissent, independence, and the democratic possibilities of public expression. With rock music spilling across the beach, enormous painted creatures moving through the crowd, and murals occupying the walls, Asbury Park offered a lively reminder that street art doesn’t always stand still. Sometimes it marches, dances, makes a racket, and invites everybody else to join in.
Thanks to photographer Martha Cooper for sharing her fantastic photos that capture the heart of Asbury Park.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Yesterday, New York’s streets filled with protests, marches, performances, and signs—you might even call some of it art.
From Columbus Circle through Times Square and across the boroughs, the No Kings march moved with swing, swagger, rage, humor, and a street rhythm that feels like NYC at its best. Hand-lettered signs and flags bobbed above the crowd like fresh ink on a city wall, while chants carried down the avenue, through the parks, up the blocks. “Regime change begins at home” stood out among the messages, mere weeks before the country’s mid-term elections, expected to change things, at least in some measure. Police counted tens of thousands in New York City; organizers put the citywide turnout at more than 350,000.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring AESOP One, Albertus Joseph, Barb Tropolis, BG 183 Tats Cru, Bio Tats Cru, BLUME, Call her Al, CRKSHNK, Danie, Kam S. Art, KENOS, Kobra, Miss Lushy, Pazzesco Art, Phetus88, Pyramid Guy, Sebi Sketch, SHUX, SOZE527, Sue Works, The Butchers Cru, and Vers
Here is Part 2 of our look at Mural Ruzyně, an epic 700-meter wall project in Prague 6 that presents the work of 30 Czech and international artists across roughly 1,800 square meters. Part 1 let you see the scale, structure, and curatorial logic of the project; this second group makes the scope of it clearer.
What is striking across the wall is not simply the number of artists, but how many distinct visual languages can coexist without the project losing its footing. As you roll, you’ll find polished realism, cartoon figures in all their personality, graphic reduction, painterly portraits, surrealism, dense and detailed illustration, architectural fantasy, comic-strip mayhem, and work that somehow still emits the pulse of graffiti culture at its root. The range is broad, and overall the level of execution stays unusually high for a project this long.
This second section pushes variety into the end zone: Kreda288 moves into a monochrome, architectural-surreal register; Zmoka goes intensely intimate, photographic; EMIC folds portraiture into something darker, more atmospheric. This Lux Easy strips birds down against a hard graphic field, Vincent Chignier packs the wall with a feverish illustrated cast, and Tom HRVB brings an overtly graffiti-inflected cartoon language. Michal Škapa, a.k.a. TRON, builds an entire techno-urban universe, while X Dog, Bona Berlin, KRAM, Denis Dendy, Obraz Akrobat, Lukas Kladivko, Mandi Oh, David Lejsek, and Juanjo Surace each push the wall in still other directions.
Seen together with Part 1, the project feels like a long-form survey of what mural practice looks like right now – when artists are given real space, time, and support. Some sections are slick and highly designed, others strange, rougher, funnier, more pictorial, or more rooted in graffiti and character culture. The breadth is what keeps the wall alive over such an extreme distance.
It is rare to see a project of this scale maintain this much stylistic range without flattening everyone into a house look. Mural Ruzyně does the opposite: it lets the differences remain visible, which is what makes the project worth walking all the way through.
Prague has no shortage of handsome walls, but this one takes a little of your stamina to fully experience. Stretching roughly 700 meters along Vlastina Street in Prague 6, Mural Ruzyně brings together 30 Czech and international artists across some 1,800 square meters of concrete. Unusually long, it remains visually alive, and the project’s strength lies in the work’s consistency across it. Rather than thirty unrelated commissions competing for attention, the mural is curatorially organized as a continuous sequence, with one visual language handing off to the next.
The project is the latest large-scale public-art effort from The Chemistry Gallery and its founder and artistic director, Petr Hájek, whose earlier mural work included the WALL STREET festival in 2022. That work now continues under Urban Pictus, the biennial festival and public-art platform founded the same year. Mural Ruzyně is the centerpiece of its third edition in 2026, bringing together 15 Czech artists and 15 international participants from Spain, Austria, Romania, Italy, Ireland, France, Germany, and Poland.
The announced theme, “City, Motion, Beauty,” is broad, and this first group of works shows how many directions it can take. Dozy Doss combines carefully rendered birds with looping graphic bands of red and blue; RAME13 reduces birds, cyclists, and movement into the cleaner economy of contemporary illustration; Chemis plays directly with the material of the wall through a trompe-l’oeil scene of cracking concrete. Elsewhere, YBR SHC builds a mechanical insect into a miniature urban ecosystem, while MATE brings a polished, almost airbrushed surrealism to cars, architecture, and oversized forms. These approaches share little formally, which may be the point.
The differences become sharper as the wall continues. Toy Box works narratively, using figures and episodes that feel closer to editorial illustration and graphic storytelling; Pauser breaks the surface into compact comic-like scenes and symbols; Luca Ledda builds a strange sequential passage of hands, flowers, eyes, planets, and repeated circular forms. RUIN turns toward crisp modernist geometry, David Strauzz uses the repeated pedestrian pictogram almost like a visual beat, and Tim Marsh pushes athletic bodies through angular, faceted fields of color and architectural space. Taken together, they show how far contemporary mural practice now travels beyond any single definition of “street art” — absorbing illustration, comics, graphic design, realism, surrealism, abstraction, signage, – and fragments of graffiti vocabulary along the way.
What holds the project together is not a common style but a high level of finish and a certain clarity of intention. These are not hurried interventions or walls dependent on confrontation for their charge; the artists have been given the room, materials, and organizational support to work at scale and to complete their ideas properly. The result is approachable without becoming generic, polished without becoming uniform, and useful as a snapshot of the many influences currently moving through mural and street-art practice. In this first of two parts, the pleasure is partly in seeing just how many different ways 700 meters of concrete can be persuaded to move.
Trees are turning, politicians are jamming your phone texts with election slogans, Comic Con 20 is celebrating Coney Island, and hundreds of murals are in full effect this fall in every borough of New York City. We’ve been riding bikes through the streets to find new stuff and give you some of the best that makes this NYC.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, legal and otherwise, this week featuring Cram, Ejek98, El Cekis, Hektad, Jappy Agoncillo, Jim Power, MCY, Minhafofa, Mosaic Man, Motomichi Nakamura, OG King 157, Optimo NYC, and WC.
Mr. Power is a well known ceramic tiles artist whose work can be found primarily in the East Village neighborhood in Manhattan, NY. The Mosaic Man as he’s better known has been working on his installations in the East Village since the early 1980s creating a trail of tiles installations on urban furniture and the bases of street lamp posts. We were surprised that some of his work has been vandalized and in some cases completely destroyed. We can’t make any sense of why and who is responsible for the destruction of public art that contains an oral and visual history of the city and contributes to the dynamism of the city.
Graffiti has spent decades being chased off trains, scrubbed from walls, prosecuted in courtrooms, and occasionally welcomed into museums with a glass of champagne. This November, BEYOND THE STREETS returns to London’s Saatchi Gallery for a six-month occupation of more than ten rooms, bringing together over 100 international artists and cultural troublemakers. Curated by Roger Gastman, the exhibition promises a sprawling look at six decades of street-born creativity, from subway writing and punk graphics to feminist activism, fashion, photography, and the music that accompanied it all. The numbers can impress – organizers estimate more than 150,000 visitors to its previous London outing in 2023, and this time the lens grows wider.
The lineup has some serious mileage on the odometer, and the acknowledgment of contributors from outside the scene, or at least its outer margins, is what gives it intellectual punch. FUTURA 2000, LADY PINK, and ZEPHYR represent New York’s more traditional subway-writing history, while GOLDIE, KAWS, Kenny Scharf, Shepard Fairey, Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls, and Damien Hirst suggest just how far the definition of street culture can stretch – of course there will still be arguments by some, but relatively few.
Other highlights include a reconstructed section of a New York subway car, an examination of graffiti on London’s Underground, early hip-hop Polaroids, the archives of Hip-Hop Connection, and a tribute to Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art, the book that helped put New York graffiti into the hands of aspiring writers around the world.
Gastman also pays tribute to the hosts, giving Britain’s own history of cultural rebellion its due, from 2Tone’s unmistakable black-and-white graphics and ska soundtrack to its multiracial cultural politics. To fully realize the scene and its tenor, the exhibition includes photography by Janette Beckman and Normski; radical feminist printmaking from the See Red Women’s Workshop; Jill Posener’s documentation of feminist graffiti; and an archive of English football firms’ calling cards. Add Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, Black Panther photographer Neil Kenlock, and 35 covers from The Big Issue, and the exhibition continues to examine in greater detail the conversation about who gets to occupy public space, who gets heard, and what happens when dissent becomes collectible.
We’re looking forward to seeing how BEYOND THE STREETS brings these histories together, particularly the less familiar material that challenges a tidy but shallow narrative of graffiti’s journey from subway tunnels to museum walls. Hopefully we won’t forget the irony of celebrating cultures built on trespass, dissent, and disregard for authority inside any institution that now recognizes their cultural and commercial value. A more interesting question is whether the exhibition can examine the contradictions of street culture — its independence and commercialization, its political convictions and opportunism, its outsiders and newly minted insiders — without sanding off the rough edges that made it matter to so many in the first place.
List of featured artists
A-ONE · Aida Wilde · Alexis Ross · André Saraiva · BANDO · Barry McGee · BLADE · CAINE 1 · Chantal Pinzi · Conor Harrington · C.R. Stecyk III · CRASH · Damien Hirst · David Storey · DEFER · DONDI · Drift · Duncan Weston · Bart Simpson as El Barto · ERIC HAZE · Estevan Oriol · FAFI · Fátima de Juan · Felipe Pantone · FUTURA 2000 · GG The Illustrator · GOLDIE & Metalheadz · Guerrilla Girls · Gus Coral · HELCH · Henry Chalfant · Hip-Hop Connection · Hunt Emerson · HuskMitNavn · Invader · IZ THE WIZ · Janette Beckman · Jenny Holzer · Jill Posener · John “Teflon” Sims · JR · Julio Anaya Cabanding · KAWS · KC Ortiz · Kenny Scharf · LADY PINK · LEE 163rd · Lucy Sparrow · Mark Bodē & Vaughn Bodē · Martha Cooper · MEAR ONE · MODE2 · MOSES TAPS · MR B. & KIX · Nadya Tolokonnikova · Neil Kenlock · NOC 167 · Normski · Okuda san Miguel · Ozzie Juarez · Patrick Martinez · Paul Insect · Pauline Black · PHASE 2 · PHLEGM · PREF · PRIDE · QUIK · RAMMELLZEE · RAMS · Richard Reyes · RISK · Rocco and his Brothers · Roger Perry · ROIDS · Roy Reed · SABER · See Red Women’s Workshop · Shepard Fairey · SHIRT KING PHADE · SHOK 1 · SCRIBLA · SNAKE 1 · STAY HIGH 149 · Stephen “Buddha” Leafloor · TAKI 183 · TEACH · The Big Issue · Tim Conlon · Timothy Curtis · Todd James · TOX · TRACY 168 · Trevor Jackson + Donald Christie · TRIPL FURIOUS · VHILS · WILSONBROTHERS x LWL · ZAKI DEE 163 · ZEPHYR
Including:
Freestyle ‘85 · History of Spray Paint & Infinity Room · Subway Art · Tube Graffiti History · Londonz Burning Archive · 2Tone Fashion & History · BreakBeat Lou – Ultimate Breaks & Beats · Hip Hop Polaroids, Fashion Posters & Flyers · Rubbish Stuff Puppet Shop · Pedestrian Graffiti · Chrome & Black: DIET, FATSO, TEACH, TIME, TOX, VEXZA, WISE & ZOMBY
Curated by Roger Gastman with Raoul Shah, Nichole Procopenko, Kim Stephens, Evan Pricco, Dante Parel, Aurora Fisher-Kendrick, Sky Gellatly and Don Letts
Historical Research & Curation Rob Fever, Andrew Hayes, Toby Mott, Claw Money, Pete Nice and Paradise Gray
Artistic Direction Paul Insect
Exhibition Design Studio Bloomer
Supported by Rifflandia
Partners Amanda Bessette, Craig Shapiro (Collaborative Fund) and ICNCLST
Before opening this book, try to imagine what it would take for one artist to recreate a publication so deeply embedded in graffiti culture that it has been called its Bible. Talent and painting skills are only the beginning. Add discipline, logistics, nerve, physical stamina, photography, styling, train knowledge, and an almost unreasonable willingness to keep going. That is essentially what Dutch graffiti writer TRIPL, a.k.a. FURIOUS, set out to do with Repainting Subway Art: recreate all 239 works pictured in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Subway Art, then reconstruct the photographs, situations, and ultimately the book itself. What began as a joke among friends developed into a project that consumed roughly a decade.
Published in 1984, Cooper and Chalfant’s Subway Art became one of graffiti’s defining documents. Its influence traveled far beyond New York, introducing generations of young writers to painted subway trains, letter construction, names, characters, techniques, and an entire culture that many readers had never encountered firsthand. Copies were carried in backpacks, studied until the bindings failed, photocopied, shared, and — according to persistent graffiti lore — sometimes liberated from bookstores and libraries. Dutch author and researcher Daniël de Jongh titled his 2024 Nuart Journal review of TRIPL’s project “A Reincarnation of the Bible of Graffiti in Slow Motion,” which gets close to the peculiar devotion at work here.
Recreating, however, is not simply copying. TRIPL did not select a few famous pieces and repaint them in his own style. He took on the entire proposition, primarily using Dutch and other European trains while adapting the original compositions to different rolling stock. The original writers’ works became the structure for new versions, with TRIPL working through their proportions, gestures, colors, characters, jokes, and letterforms while introducing his own names and substitutions. Each completed page became another piece in an enormous puzzle.
The painting was only part of it. TRIPL also reconstructed the photographic world surrounding the trains: angles, poses, close-ups, portraits, action shots, clothing, passengers, backgrounds, and other details that gave Cooper and Chalfant’s original images their character. He styled and staged scenes, stepped into different roles, found props, and recreated circumstances that had occurred four decades earlier on another continent. One of the most difficult was DONDI’s whole car, for which Cooper had photographed both the painting process and the completed train in motion. TRIPL had to reproduce not only the piece but the circumstances of the photographs themselves.
Text: Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos: Diana Paun
Title: Repainting Subway Art. TRIPL a.k.a. FURIOUS Published: Ruyzdael Publishing. The Netherlands, 2024. Author: TRIPL a.k.a. FURIOUS, Dr. Edward Birzin, Mikel van den Boogaard Language: English
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