BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
Snowy. Hard to see through right now. The physical temperature here in NYC is low, but the rhetorical temperatures are spiking across the land. The battle for freedom is in the courts and Congress and in the streets again, with the demonized and disenfranchised reeling back on their heels. When pressure like this builds, it surfaces everywhere at once—across institutions and culture, on ballots, in courtrooms, and eventually on the street—because culture absorbs, and sometimes rejects, what power attempts to normalize.
Humans never tire of this story—our story—the one where autocrats punch down, reign briefly, and are eventually upended by resistance. Otherwise, why does it recur across centuries, across societies and school districts and states and strata and Shakespeare? Silly and careless as we are, immigrants and the descendants of immigrants let our guard down again, and those who mistake domination for virtue rise again, attempting to strip us all of liberty, to fracture us, to manufacture narratives of the “other.”
One thing people don’t tire of is what keeps reappearing on walls and signs in cities nationwide: reminders of our ideals of welcoming the stranger, embracing difference, and becoming stronger because of it. Walls—often instruments of exclusion—remain contested surfaces for street artists and rebels, carrying rebuttal, invoking memory, and thrashing out dissent in public view. Immigrants are the heart of New York, our DNA melded through toil, competition, and chutzpah. We know tyrants, many of us, as did our parents and grandparents—having escaped them, named them, and fought back against them.
Lo, beware of those who forget where we came from: everywhere.
From “The New Colossus” (1883), by Emma Lazarus:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring ACE, Caryn Cast, CRKSHNK, DELUDE, Dieka, Garret Wasserman, Homesick, Jibz, Jim Power, Mosaic Man, Naiver, Qzar, Rae, Salami Doggy, and Welinoo.
BSA: What are you doing?
DUDE: It’s performance art.
BSA: Are you fundraising?
DUDE: Yeah, for a ring for my girlfriend.
BSA: (We couldn’t hear his answer clearly) Why does your girlfriend need money?
DUDE: Sorry?
BSA: Your girlfriend needs money?
DUDE: No, it’s just to buy an engagement ring for her.
BSA: OK. How much money are you planning to raise?
DUDE: Whatever I raise with the project goes towards the ring.
BSA: Do you want a diamond?
DUDE: Yeah.
BSA: A lab one, or a real one?
DUDE: A real one.
BSA: OK. Good luck.
DUDE: (Shivering)Thank you very much, have a good day.
Update: A commenter on the BSA Insta post wrote that he’s been fundraising for this project for over six months.
