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.
New York, for us, is at least three things right now: the Knicks, FIFA, and the streets.
The city is dreaming of a championship for the first time since 1999. If the Knicks win Game 3 tomorrow night at home, it may be pandemonium. We even caught Spike Lee in front of a Knicks mural by Zimer this week (see below). You’ll hear even more music by Prince in the streets than you have in the last two weeks, as his anthem “1999” serenades you from bars, radios, and TV news segments covering the story. Also, happy birthday to Prince, born on this day in 1958. See you at the Prince party tonight on the roof.
Secondly, the World Cup begins any minute now, and athletes, organizers, media crews, and fans have already started pouring off planes. Daily news reports exhort all of us to do one thing or another in preparation for the arrival of thousands of visitors from around the globe. New York does this sort of thing regularly, so most of us remain focused on doing the laundry and paying the rent. Still, discussions of fan zones, shuttle bus routes, transit plans, gridlock alerts, waterfront gatherings, and neighborhood festivals are everywhere. Once again, New York is negotiating who gets to use public space—and how.
Speaking of the ’80s (the decade, not her age), Madonna popped up live in Times Square this week, turning it into a dance floor to unveil new songs, including an ode to Gotham called “I Love NY,” a pleasant way to kick off Pride Month. City Hall also hosted a Pride Ball—a ballroom culture celebration featuring voguing, runway competition, and performance. Meanwhile, Queens Pride and Brooklyn Pride are already underway.
And the walls, the murals, the street art, and the graffiti are all abuzz with news of pop icons, sports, cartoons, equality, love, masters of war, fear of inflation, fear of surveillance – it’s a whole ball of its own.
You may call it chaos.
We call it Wednesday.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this time including AIC Mosaic, Atomiko, Chris RWK, Crancept, D7606, Gush, Homesick, Huetek, Little Ricky, Mike King, Nexas, Nite Owl, Puntz, Ratchi, Shane, Silent, Sluto, Staino, Stop Men, and Zimer NYC.
The 66th Annual Puerto Rican Parade will loudly, buoyantly, exuberantly traverse and sway along the iconic 5th Avenue in Manhattan today. Subsequently, numerous Brooklyn neighborhoods will burst into a party with lively street festivities and impromptu fiestas adorning sidewalks, sitting on stoops, and hanging out on window ledges. A collective joy and relief are in our hearts across the city this weekend, stemming from the restoration of clear air in the city; after a disheartening episode of a Dystopian Orange haze that tainted our skies for days this week.
Forest fires in Canada had blown smoke down the Hudson River to surprise everyone, and flummox many. The consequences forced people to illuminate their homes during daylight hours and drive their car with headlights on. This extraordinary event posed a threat to both the well-being and livelihoods of countless individuals, with people working outside at great danger. However, for those who turned to our local National Public Radio (NPR) station for insight, rather than talking about construction workers, municipal employees, or street food vendors, their primary concerns were remote work arrangements, ordering from Doordash, and worrying about the smoke’s effect on dogs during their daily walks. The poor and working class are routinely erased from public discourse, which is why unmediated street art often does the work.
Currently, the cityscape is adorned with captivating street art and mesmerizing murals, offering a wide array of entertainment, education, and aesthetic gratification. We hope you take pleasure in exploring photographer Jaime Rojo’s compilation.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Maya Hayuk, Below Key, Little Ricky, Mint & Serf, Billy Barnacles, Homesick, David Puck, Panic, IMK, Aidz, Robert Vargas, Salo Panto. Artistcjg89, Herman, Gabe, Tank, FLWR, and Sasha Colby.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! So much to say, such brief attention spans. Looking around at the chattering masses on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan this week, the excitement of beautiful weather and a sense of liberty sends youthful hearts aflutter. The gams! The biceps! The colorful plumage and sartorial flair all wend and weave down the street and subway steps past you, ahead of you, inside you. Also, check out the peonies and lilacs!
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: City Kitty, Praxis VGZ, Little Ricky, The Postman Art, Homesick, Calicho Art, Cramcept, OH!, Kevin Caplicki, Toe Flop, Miki Mu, Tess Parker, Mr. Fou, El Cono, RatchiNYC, and AweOne.
Welcome friends! Shout out to Joey, owner of the Village Works bookstore, whose new location opens this weekend on St Marks Place in Manhattan. Friday night the river of people flooded the banks in this pantheon to New York culture, history, and stylish bravado – and special guests Homesick were in the house to welcome the hundreds of excited streetwise Gen Z’ers to flip through and ponder these curious paper things that you cannot scroll through or zoom in with your fingers, but which are strangely satisfying and enriching non-the-less. If anyone wonders if Covid decimated New York, you have to witness the throngs of people walking, running, riding through a beery haze on the weekend at St. Marks, to know that this city is in full effect, bro.
We say ‘bro’ in the hood way, not the privileged apathetic way – although both are intermingling in the LES right about now with Brooks Brothers boys in camel suits huffing up the sidewalk while a muscled spandexed guy with a six-foot set of wings on his back weaves through the street. It’s not that NY is so liberal, it’s that we really don’t care what your look like or who you’re doing it with – let’s have fun and hang out.
The pumping music from the bars in this neighborhood reflects this moment, of course, with two Mexican pop hits blasting out to the streets in many locations – Grupo Frontera x Bad Bunny’s hit “Un x100to” and Peso Pluma’s “Ella Baila Solo.” A fusion of corridos, banda, urban music, trap, and reggaeton? Porque no? The popularity reflects the influence Latino culture has had on the youth this spring while old white men are busy militarizing the southern border and treating regular people like criminals for seeking a better life.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Dan Witz, Adam Fujita, Adam Fu, Winston Tseng, SacSix, Little Ricky, Roachi, Alicho Art, Chupa, Huetek, A Visual Bliss, Riisa Boogie, Ideal, Rezones, WEKUP, KIRSE, SMOR, Italo Causa, Georgia Violet, Jenna Leigh, and Never Satisfied.
“Ramadan Kareem” to everyone celebrating it this month. Also in April the Jews will be celebrating Passover and the Christians will be celebrating Easter and the Hindus are celebrating Chaitra Navratri. New York has the most diverse assembly of amazing and beautiful neighbors and we are all richer as a result.
In Hollywood and elsewhere people are celebrating/mourning the events surrounding Will Smith. In street art style, his infamous act shows up on a wall this week already (below).
It’s been cold in NYC this week! Fingers are cold, noses are cold, and migrating geese are humming the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go”. The Cyclone at Luna Park in Coney Island, opened yesterday and assures New Yorkers that Spring is already here even if you don’t feel it yet.
We’re excited to see the new exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure opens here this week. Congratulations to his family for bringing this enormous undertaking to fruition, especially Jean-Michel’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux and his stepmother Nora Fitzpatrick.
Also, don’t sleep on the Whitney Biennial, opening Wednesday! Curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards say they have had a guiding principle; “It’s got to be buck wild.” That’s enough for us. Hopefully, some people will be buck naked at the show. A special shout-out to Biennial artist Jane Dixon. Her paintings and photographs of New York in the 80s captured its electricity and unpolished promise – during the time when she lived with filmmaker Charlie Ahearn in an apartment overlooking the tawdry excitement of Times Square. She say the city was, “burning, broke, and dangerous.”
Gentle people, start your stopwatch! Let’s see how long it takes for news items and pundits to begin likening our new Staten Island Amazon warehouse union workers to terrorists.
We’ve allowed companies to become richer than nations, so you can imagine what resources they can summon; the most comprehensive campaign to malign, discredit, impugn the character of workers, and thugs to intimidate them. This is the biggest victory for organized labor in a generation, born in a time of unprecedented income disparity across the city and country. Most citizens would be pleased if corporate behemoths simply paid their fair share of taxes.
The street is still one of the best exhibition spaces, never to be recreated fully.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: AJ LaVilla, Clown Soldier, Little Ricky, Sticker Maul, Michael Alan, Dragon76, Diva Dogla, CP Won, Savior El Mundo, Acro, Jennifer Pod is Dead, and Masnah.
Sometimes it is a talisman who is having adventures on the behalf of an artist, a part of him/herself who stays behind and watches the area.
At other times it is a character seen through a mirror, an alter-ego who represents a fictional part of their inner world who has been set free onto the street to interact. It may be a branding element, a logo, or signature that lays claim to the artwork it is attached to. By itself it is often a form of marking territory; a practice begun by graffiti writers decades ago.
Whether it is a symbol or a figure, it is undoubtedly a personification of some part of the artists id, one that is so individual that you can spot it from a distance and if you are a fan, you’ll smile in recognition.
Many street artists have a discernable style, that is true; a hand-style, a recurrent motif, color palette, a topic that reappears, a technique of application, even a likely location in the urban landscape where they are most likely to appear.
Of that number, fewer have developed a character or a motif so well defined in our minds that it can stand alone, but we have found a few over the decades. Each is imbued with memory, with place, with personality, with character.
A pause. It’s unusual to feel this sense in this city – but it’s there – on a sunny day where the sky is clear of clouds and a flock of geese still waddles and honks in the tall weeds and garbage by the Wallabout Channel. Is it a pause of satisfaction at the end of a summer full of fun, or perhaps a calm resignation before a storm as businesses are staying closed or operating at reduced staff. And while the Federal Reserve and ECB and World Bank insist there is just a smidgen of temporary, transitory inflation, tell us why a pound of butter is $6.00 at the local deli, the average price of a used car is $25K, and shipping container prices have soared to $20K?
There is a steady number of new street art pieces going up on doorways, power boxes, and concrete walls, but they are competing all of the triumphal purple and blue and pink Morning Glories flooding fences and walls and garden gates in neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn – a most generous overflow that summer gives as a parting gift.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Cssh4, Cheak, Clown Soldier, Diva Dogla, Drecks, ERRE, Fat Jak, Font 147, Goblin, Goog, JerkFace, Little Ricky, Mort Art, Praxis, Rambo, Seibot, Sinclair the Vandal, and Smetsky.
For all the flooding of our street art consciousness by the mural movement during the last handful of years, we’re still impressed by the completely organic personality of New York’s scene. New York has the ability to absorb countless graffiti and street artists from around the world and still retain its own particular attitude regardless. Prickly, preening, pensive, or ready to throw a punch, you are never quite sure what you will end up with the art on the streets here. However, you are guaranteed to see something unique — and you’ll never have time to be bored.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Al Diaz, Alex Ferror, ATOMS, Billy Barnacles, Brooklsey Dark, Carlitos Skills, Don Rimx, Drecks, Duel1, Gane, Hiss, Jowl, Little Ricky, London Kaye, Lucky Rabbit, Praxis VGZ, Skewville, Smells, and UFO907 .
We like findings spots that feature walls slammed with street art in a most organic way, the aesthetic signature of a current ecosystem mid-evolution. These spots are often a magnet for street artists to get up in NYC, L.A., Berlin, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Barcelona, Mexico City, Miami, Boston, London, and beyond. Usually illegal, they allow the artists a quick way to safely leave their imprint on the chaos of the city, a welcome to international artists on their spraycation as well as locals who relish the feeling of standing among peers. The art is usually limited to small original pieces, stickers, and posters, wheat pastes.
We call them “magnet walls” – and NYC has had its share of them. Now, however, they are increasingly endangered because of Gentrification and the voracious real estate market in the city with its apparent never-ending appetite for building new soaring soul-free glass towers. One spot is still welcoming artists to its walls: Freeman Alley. This favorite enclave, composed of two long walls along a narrow corridor in the Lower East Side, is constantly updated in an organic way with contributions by local and international artists. We have surveyed it for years, often publishing our findings in the popular “BSA Images Of The Week.”
Last week we rolled by the alley again and to our surprise, we discovered a gate ajar; one that leads the lobby of a relatively new hotel. Usually locked with a code, this secret Bowery spot instructs guests to enter through the alley. Once inside, they’re greeted with a nicely landscaped, small-scale courtyard leading to a lobby. Surprisingly, it is now bursting with new stickers, posters, stencils, paintings, collages, wild imaginings. Technically, this is a legal magnet wall – but most of the artists whose work is on display here can also be found illegally on the walls of the alley. Here’s a fresh selection just for you:
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week as we head into Passover and Easter. If street art reflects society, and we know that it does, Governor Cuomo is in hot water and may not keep his job. But then, we thought the same about the war criminal George Bush and the grifter Trump, so never mind.
Thank you to reporter Jim O’Grady for interviewing us for a story on WNYC radio this week – along with our colleague Sean Corcoran who is the Curator of Prints and Photographs and a graffiti historian from the Museum of the City of New York.
“As Covid Ravaged New York, Street Artists Fought Back” is the name of Jim’s eight-minute exposition – and his storytelling adds so much to our appreciation of the city and the environment that gives life to our street art and graffiti scene here. Thanks for including us Jim.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: Chris RWK, CRKSHNK, Dwei, Hope Hummingbird, I Heart Graffiti, Little Ricky, Peachee Blue, Raddington Falls, Rambo, SacSix, Sara Lynne-Leo, Sticker Maul, and Technodrome.
Street art in the last five years has been lit on fire with politically themed illustrations, installations, slogans, opinions, and insights that implore passersby to take action and to be engaged in the direction that society is leading.
The once-consolidated TV-print media system has had many challengers in social media and websites, though those now too are being censored, demonetized, and throttled by the corporations and certain state actors who have infiltrated and hampered the free-flow of opinions and political discourse under various “honorable” guises.
Because major political machines and the corporate media don’t typically use the streets as a communication platform in US cities, aside from the occasional poster campaign for a candidate, the rather unfiltered collection of views and voices come through.
The inheritor of the historically revered “soapbox”, a physical and metaphorical location in a public square where people put forward their opinions, beliefs, philosophies, and ideologies in an impassioned voice, street art currently thrills, perplexes, informs, and annoys. It reaches the tech-savvy and the greater majority of our neighbors who are not on social media.
Given that these opinions could be easily buffed or blighted by any passerby yet are permitted to stay, there is an argument that art on the street is the present Vox Populi, a truer representation of the voice of the people.
In the city that knew him first, Donald Trump is given special scrutiny and particular invective for his actions, inactions, behaviors in the role he has occupied as president of the country since 2016. His official opponent in the race is a career politician, an historically right-wing version of a left-wing party, is somehow positioned as a better alternative for an electorate who is desperate for something, anything better than what they have.
By night’s end (or week end, or year end) we will know who is the winner of today’s election; Trump or Anti-Trump. No matter who prevails, street art will undoubtedly weigh in with its opinion.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
