Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The weather is tropical this weekend, like we’re expecting a hurricane – ominous and windy. Maybe its our ongoing fear of runaway inflation, which Fed Chair Jerome Powell is trying to make us forget he called ‘transitory’. That should be the word of 2021. Transitory. Like fanny packs worn diagonally across the chest, or Dua Lipa.
The city’s vaccination rate is 78, and the mayor is requiring more vaccine and mask mandates in private companies and schools. Let’s hope it works, brothers and sisters.
So here’s our regular interview with the street, this week including 4SomeCrew, Buff Monster, Calicho, DAK 907, DOT DOT DOT, Drecks, ERRE, MIDABI, Not Banksy, Paper Monster, Paul Richard, Praxis VGZ, Roachi, Swrve, Urban Ruben, and Zexor.
Nomadland won the Oscar for the best movie this year, a fact that you may not know because A. The Oscars are nearly completely irrelevant, and B. Covid era-awards programs have been the equivalent of watching your dad unclogging the kitchen drain. An unvarnished story about a growing ecosystem of Americans living in cars, trucks, and RVs in parking lots across the country, Nomadland toes a line between blaming neo-liberal vulture capitalism/ de-industrialization of the last 40 years and dipping into the American myths of people who just want to live their life free and unencumbered.
Meanwhile, in New York more people are finding the rent to be too high and are moving into RVs, according to The Daily News this week. In the article they speak with Giovanni, a first responder whom we were probably clapping for last year when he was saving lives from Covid.
In the article Giovanni says, “I was an EMT… you want to talk struggling‚ that was really rough,” he explained. “I had to have somebody rent out my living room just to be able to cover the rent. That’s how hard it was. After doing that for three, four years, I was like, I’m done with this. I quit. I’m over it.”
“I went to college, I did pretty much everything that I was told I was supposed to do in order to have a good life. And it didn’t turn out that way,” he explained.
As the moneyed Real Estate kingpins are fighting against extending a rent moratorium in the city to August 31 and to end moratoriums across the country, you have to wonder where everyone will go once the stimulus checks have dried up, inflation kicks in, and landlords evict people.
Meanwhile, we’re following the street art in a number of neighborhoods in New York this week – and wondering where the topical or political works are. The current generation who are putting work on the streets may venture into politics, but only identity politics. BLM, trans rights, that sort of thing.
New York is headed toward 70% vaccinated soon and the city is actually talking about offering to vaccinate tourists! Soon you can go to the Met, see a Broadway show, eat dinner in Little Italy, get cursed out by a homeless guy, and get a stab in the arm from Pfizer! New York, New York! It’s a wonderful town!
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: 2 Much, Armyan, Cautious5, Cekis, City Kitty, Cramcept, Denton Burrows, GIZ, Healer, Homesick, Leviticus, LNE Crew, Lunge Box, MalincheArt, MeresOne, MrBbaby, No Sleep, Paul Richard, Ponzi, Ramiro Davaro-Comas, Smart, and Stikki Peaches.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, where we are dedicated to showing the news kids on the block in addition to the more established names. It’s a simple inclusive philosophy that in some way is ensuring a more level playing field for the voices on the street, and so far you tell us that is exactly what you like. Street Art isn’t about legal murals, its about people taking their voice and their talent to the streets, sometimes by any means possible.
If you were to look at the works on the street in New York you could get a good representation of the sentiment of its people; worried, confused, proud, playful, defiant, angry, comedic. Shout out to this years’ Art in Odd Places, a reliably eclectic program of artists and performers who take to the streets to engage with the public – and if you think that is easy, I’ve got a Bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Angela Muriel, Anthony Lister, Appleton Pictures, Billy X Curmano, Carmen Rodriquez, Coco Cobre, Connie Perry, El Sol 25, Knozko, Lik, Lister, Lunge Box, Matthew Burcow, Paul Richard, Sheryo and The Yok, Stikman, Texas & Gane.
This week was full of great Street Art stories – the main one everyone was talking about was fake TV graffiti by the Egyptian Street Artists who hacked the propagandic “Homeland” drama, in the process revealing the producers’ utter xenophobia by merely writing critical messages in Arabic – the language of the land the show was supposedly so expertly depicting. No one from the show caught it before it aired.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring #364xLos43, Apple on Pictures, Damien Mitchell, Grotesk, Skeindreamz, LoSbieco, Momo, Paul Richard, Pupo Bibbito, Pyramid Oracle, Totoro, and Wane.
Street Artists have been exhibited in museums before so Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” doesn’t break ground because of its presence inside a grand institution, even if said institution also holds one of the largest collections of Egyptian art, and is also hosting the largest US exhibition of Ai Weiwei next week, for example.
What surprised us most this week as the Brooklyn Museum threw open its doors to a seven story installation that includes a tree, a gazebo, and two boats that sailed the Adriatic was the rapid rate that this artist has gone from running the streets under cover of night of Brooklyn plastering her linotypes to being invited inside to spray the walls of the Brooklyn Museum with a fire extinguisher. The total time elapsed between her first hand cut paper wheat paste on tattered walls and Friday’s opening was a decade and a half. That is noteworthy in itself, and worthy of someone’s exhaustive examination, but suffice to say that you have to have vision and commitment to pull this off.
Here are new images from the exhibit along with our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Cost, Elbow-Toe, London Kaye, Myth, Nick Walker, Paul Richard, Swoon, and Tava.
Our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Enzo and Nio, El Mac, Hargo, L.E.T., Paul Richard, Poster Boy, QRST, Retna, Skewville, Nice-One and Sweet Toof.
With photography by Carlos Gonzalez, Geoff Hargadon, and Jaime Rojo.
Our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Burning Candy, Deeker, DsCreet, Earl Greyhound, Goya, Jimmy Snatch, KARMA, Kill, Nineta, Paul Richard,Plasma Slug, Shin Shin, Skewville, Tek33, and UFO
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
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