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.
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.
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.
Graffiti has spent decades being chased off trains, scrubbed from walls, prosecuted in courtrooms, and occasionally welcomed into museums with …Read More »
TRIPL a.k.a. Furious. Repainting Subway Art. Ruyzdael Publishing. The Netherlands, 2024. Reprinted from the original review. Before opening this book, …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
