Barcelona’s Can Batlló is one of those places where street art makes immediate sense. A historic nineteenth-century textile factory in the working-class neighborhood of La Bordeta, the industrial complex has gradually been reclaimed by local residents and transformed into a lively community hub. Filled with workshops, artists’ studios, performance spaces, a library, gardens, cooperatives, and cultural organizations, the place always feels in motion—mid-step, en route. The murals here are part of that larger ecosystem, where culture is understood not as decoration but as something people make together.
Courtesy of photographer Lluís Bulbena Olivas, we bring you recent walls organized through La Fábrica Rarita (F.R.U.T.A.), a creative collective based inside Can Batlló. Their recent “Anti-Aniversary” gathering brought together graffiti writers, muralists, illustrators, tattoo artists, musicians, and printmakers for a full day of collaborative painting, workshops, performances, and conversation.
A look through their Instagram quickly reveals that painting walls is only one part of what they do. Workshops in lettering, printmaking, illustration, music, and community arts sit comfortably alongside exhibitions and mural jams, reflecting an interest in building an active creative community rather than simply producing outdoor artworks.
That community-minded approach may also explain the remarkable variety of characters appearing across these walls. Instead of straightforward portraiture or overt political slogans, artists imagine futuristic androids, cartoon eccentrics, graphic poster figures, and fantastical personalities that borrow from graffiti, comics, animation, manga, science fiction, tattoo culture, illustration, and graphic design.
Together they create a cast of invented inhabitants rather than documenting the neighborhood literally. There are political concerns close at hand—Barcelona continues to wrestle with questions of affordable housing, development, and the preservation of independent cultural spaces—but here those conversations often unfold indirectly. The emphasis is on creating a place where artists, neighbors, and visitors can gather, experiment, and contribute to a shared cultural life.
That spirit extends beyond Can Batlló itself. La Fábrica Rarita is connected to Cultura de Base (Grassroots Culture Barcelona), a coalition of independent cultural organizations advocating for stronger support of community-led culture. Their recent Model de Cultura? working sessions brought together artists, associations, and neighborhood groups to tackle practical questions: how grassroots cultural spaces survive, how they can be governed transparently, how cultural rights can be strengthened, and how public policy might better support citizen-run initiatives.
Rather than staging another conference, the organizers structured the event as a series of working sessions intended to produce concrete proposals for Barcelona’s political leaders—a reminder that, here, culture is viewed not only as artistic expression but also as a form of civic participation.
When you consider the time, talent, commitment, and sheer nerve required to create Repainting Subway Art, you hope that, at least once in your life, you have been as thoroughly possessed by an idea as Tripl, a.k.a. Furious. To undertake something on this scale requires the devotion of a monk, the discipline of an archivist, and the alertness of someone who knows that a light may flick on suddenly, a train may move, or a security guard may appear at any moment. What began as a joke in 2013 somehow became an obligation, then an expedition, then ten years of returning to the same nearly impossible proposition: repaint every work in Subway Art, photograph it, restage its scenes, and somehow make the whole unwieldy puzzle hold together.
TRIPL. REPAINTING SUBWAY ART. Tripl a.k.a Furious. Ryuzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. December 2024.
The original 1984 book by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant has been carried across continents in backpacks, studied in bedrooms, circulated in photocopies, and worn ragged from repeated use. According to long-standing graffiti lore, more than a few copies were also “borrowed” from bookshops and libraries and never found their way back. Its photographs are inscribed in the visual memory of generations of writers, many of whom still name it as the first door that opened onto a life of nocturnal reconnaissance, railway yards, letterforms, and paint. Writing about the project in Nuart Journal, Dutch author and researcher Daniël de Jongh notes that Subway Art is commonly called “the Bible of Graffiti”; the phrase conveys its stature, but perhaps not the intimacy with which people have lived beside it. For many, it was less a commandment than an internal map.
Tripl did not merely borrow its compositions or repaint a selection of celebrated pieces. Working principally on trains in the Netherlands, he recreated all 239 individual works pictured in the original, repeatedly translating the names into TRIPL, FURIOUS, and related aliases while entering the styles, proportions, gestures, humor, and visual decisions of the earlier writers. Dutch train cars were often substantially larger than their New York counterparts, requiring changes of scale, thousands of cans, carefully arranged bags of paint, advance sketches, nights in railway yards, and hurried returns by daylight to document the work before it was cleaned. In that respect, his routine echoed part of Cooper’s own: getting up early, tracking newly painted trains, and trying to make the photograph before the buff erased the evidence.
Painting the trains was only part of the assignment he had set for himself. Tripl also pursued the photographs—the angles, clothing, backgrounds, passengers, poses, interiors, and accidents of place that gave Cooper and Chalfant’s original images their documentary force. He impersonated writers, police officers, commuters, and children; tracked down period-appropriate objects; and sometimes repainted completed works simply because the first photograph was not good enough. Martha Cooper eventually participated in several of these reenactments herself, photographing Tripl in scenes that echoed her pictures of Dondi White and Henry Chalfant.
The resulting book is not a facsimile, although its dependence on the architecture of the earlier volume is central to its conceit. The substitutions, updated details, altered names, changes of country, and movement across four decades make it a reply written in paint, risk, repetition, and stolen hours. Tripl does not answer Subway Art from a desk. He answers it in railway yards, inside an operating train system, under pressure, by submitting himself to some of the scale, uncertainty, and impermanence that shaped the original work—and sometimes answering it with humor. An anti-Koch message becomes an anti-Trump message; a newspaper-reading passenger becomes a woman looking at a smartphone; old declarations receive new answers. Tripl preserves the visual scaffolding while allowing the present to enter through the seams.
At 196 pages and 371 illustrations, Repainting Subway Art is considerably larger than the book it answers. Its additional space accommodates working images, unsuccessful attempts, reconstructed scenes, new writing, and interviews with Tripl and Martha Cooper. Rather than presenting ten years of activity as a seamless triumph, the volume allows the labor to remain visible: the planning, repetition, improvisation, missed photographs, repainted trains, accumulated materials, and improbable persistence required to carry the project across the finish line.
It is easy to admire the project simply as an endurance feat, but the book becomes more interesting when considered as a form of historical participation. Tripl could not preserve the original works; those painted trains disappeared long ago. He subjected himself instead to a version of their circumstances—speed, secrecy, scale, uncertainty, and the necessity of documentation—and then carried the resulting evidence back into print. Repainting Subway Art is homage, reply, performance, open reinterpretation, and a decade-long refusal to let the idea go. Even after the trains have been cleaned and the nights themselves have disappeared, the evidence remains: someone actually did all of this.
Selected exhibitions and events
MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, Netherlands June 10–August 27, 2023. Curated by Jasper van Es. Martha Cooper joined Tripl during the exhibition for a screening of Martha: A Picture Story and a public discussion.
Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, United Kingdom February 3–May 27, 2024. Presented in association with Bring the Paint.
Colab Gallery, Weil am Rhein, Germany June 10–November 2, 2024, as part of the group exhibition Patience.
Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany January 17–March 1, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Jasper van Es, opened with a book signing on January 17.
Museum of the City of New York, New York City April 4, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. Tripl appeared with Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, and John “Crash” Matos for Repainting Subway Art: From NYC to Amsterdam. Moderated by graffiti scholar Edward Birzin, the conversation examined the evolution and international reach of graffiti, the continuing influence of Subway Art, and Tripl’s decade-long response to it.
WallWorks New York, Bronx, New York A companion exhibition featuring work by Tripl opened April 5, 2025, following the Museum of the City of New York program.
Book details
Produced with support from the Mondriaan Fund
Repainting Subway Art — Tripl a.k.a. Furious
Published by Ruyzdael Publishing, Amsterdam
Publication date: December 19, 2024
196 pages
371 illustrations
Paperback, 21 × 27.5 cm
ISBN: 978-90-833493-2-9
Authors: Tripl/Furious, Edward Birzin, and Mikel van den Boogaard
Hidden inside a decommissioned military bunker in the Stockholm Archipelago, street artist Herr Nilsson has tucked away a new obsession. Beneath a moss-covered entrance that looks as though it belongs in Middle-earth, Gollum crouches lovingly over a football. Gone is Tolkien’s One Ring. In its place sits the world’s most popular game—his new “Precious.”
The face appears to borrow features from FIFA president Gianni Infantino, turning Gollum’s all-consuming fixation into a sly comment on football’s governing establishment and its grip on the sport.
It is a timely reminder that football has become far more than a sport. It is spectacle, identity, commerce, politics, and, for many, a substitute for civic engagement itself. Victories and defeats by players we’ll never meet can send millions into the streets, while issues much closer to home struggle to command the same collective energy.
Herr Nilsson doesn’t lecture about any of this. He simply replaces the Ring with a football—and suddenly Tolkien’s most famous addict begins to look uncomfortably familiar.
Unconventional is a high bar to reach, and artist Brad Downey has specialized in it for more than two decades.
An American from Louisville who has made Berlin his home since the mid-2000s, Downey has built an international reputation by treating the urban sphere as studio, laboratory, and material. His interventions in many cities have ranged from subtle “spontaneous sculptures” fashioned from everyday street furniture to larger public projects that quietly question who controls public space and how authority is expressed through the built environment.
Downey often shows that the smallest intervention can transform the meaning of a place. Rather than starting with canvas or bronze, Downey works with the city itself, repurposing everything from traffic signs and phone booths to shopping carts and paving stones into his ongoing series of “Spontaneous Sculptures.” Each begins with the same proposition: change the context, and you change the conversation. A carved wooden statue of Melania Trump erected in rural Slovenia ignited an international conversation about politics, symbolism, and public memory. Years earlier, while still a student, his documentary Public Discourse captured a pivotal moment when artists like Swoon, Shepard Fairey, and REVS were redefining what graffiti and street art could become. Downey has always occupied an unusual position between conceptual art, sculpture, and graffiti culture, rarely painting walls himself but consistently expanding the possibilities of what public intervention can be.
In a recent unveiling of a public mural in Berlin, the man who walks in those margins again is at the center of a nervy, joyful re-blending of archetypes that have become hardened over time. A wall built from the tags, throw-ups, and signatures of some of Berlin’s most respected graffiti writers—painstakingly translated into fired ceramic tiles and permanently cemented to the side of a housing block—was celebrated with a neighborhood festival that felt less like an art opening than a summer block party.
On a cheerful and warm July afternoon, children played with simple toys on the street and made ceramic artworks at activity tables while local hip-hop filled the square. Families wandered through the crowd. Older men traded stories over cups of free warm beer. Representatives from the community and the Graffiti Museum project addressed the audience.
Joachim Spurloser read aloud the names of every participating writer, while Stefan Wartenberg performed poems assembled entirely from graffiti aliases. Their remarkable collaborative book CALYBA transforms thousands of graffiti names into found poetry, proposing that the city itself can be read as one enormous collective text. One of Wartenberg’s poems appears among the photographs accompanying this story. Smiling comfortably in the middle of it all, shaking hands with the familiarity of your cousin Archie at a backyard barbecue, was Brad Downey—the devious, generous, and quietly determined conductor of the whole improbable affair.
VANDALISM – A Social Sculpture. Part 1, May 2025. Work in progress. (photo Anonymous)
“As an outsider who has called Berlin home for many years, I still hold onto the romantic tension between East and West Germany—the contrast between the socialist vision embodied in public ceramics and the city’s wild, contemporary graffiti culture,” Downey told us.
“This artwork was two years in the making, but its concept began nearly twenty years ago, when I first arrived in Berlin.”
That long incubation became VANDALISM – A Social Sculpture, an 11-by-26-meter ceramic façade covering the western side of a residential building at Mehringplatz in Kreuzberg. More than fifty graffiti writers first painted the wall conventionally, creating a dense composition of tags, throw-ups, and pieces. Every painted mark was then documented, translated into approximately 3,200 glazed ceramic tiles, fired in kilns, and installed permanently by professional tile setters. Graffiti—perhaps the most ephemeral of urban art forms—was transformed into architecture.
VANDALISM – A Social Sculpture. Part 1, May 2025. Work in progress. (photo Anonymous)
“I consider graffiti one of the most democratic art forms because virtually anyone can participate,” Downey said. “Organizing and directing the painting with Akim brought together a broad spectrum of artists from Berlin’s graffiti scene. More than six generations of graffiti writers took part, their diverse styles converging into a single composition.”
The result gives an unusual sense of permanence and civic honor to an artistic language that is normally expected to disappear under fresh paint or weather within days. It also recalls art historian Raphael Schacter’s recurring argument that graffiti can function as a monument—not despite its informality, but because it records the presence, memory, and accumulated voices of a community. Downey arrives at a similar conclusion through different means: instead of preserving a single masterpiece, he monumentalizes an entire social ecosystem, and looses countless voices into the air.
VANDALISM – A Social Sculpture. Part 1, May 2025. Work in progress. (photo Anonymous)
The open square filled steadily as old friends reunited, younger writers sized up names they had previously known only from walls or train lines, and curious neighbors wandered through the crowd. Some participants preferred to remain anonymous beneath caps and sunglasses, while others posed proudly in front of the finished work.
Central to making that gathering possible was Berlin graffiti legend AKIMMIND (Akim), one of the city’s most respected second-generation writers and a pioneer of the distinctive roller-painting techniques that became synonymous with Berlin graffiti. Downey credits him with organizing and coordinating the writers for the initial painting phase. “Together we selected sixty writers we would accept, and fifty-two of them ultimately participated,” Downey explained. “I could not have brought together such a large and significant group of participants without his involvement.”
The project itself was equally collaborative behind the scenes. Commissioned by Stiftung Stadtkultur Berlin for its LOA Berlin public art initiative, the work occupies the façade of a HOWOGE residential building overlooking Mehringplatz. Bulgarian artists, researchers, ceramic specialists, the Kai Group Isperih production team, graphic designers Matthias Hübner and Julien Fargetton, project coordinator ARDOR GLASS LTD, and numerous technicians and installers all contributed to transforming sprayed paint into thousands of individually glazed ceramic tiles.
The towering result belongs simultaneously to conceptual art, graffiti history, architectural craft, and neighborhood life—precisely the sort of unlikely intersection where Brad Downey has always seemed most at home.
It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.”
Bleeker Street, Summer Derek Walcott
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Buttafly, Dan Witz, ICU463, Iena Cruz, IMK, Jorit, KAM, Magwie, Manuel Alejandro, Odette, Petit Agite, Rise, Sempri, and VK Mills.
Despite their very different visual languages, Elfo, David de la Mano, and Pablo S. Herrero share a preference for metaphor over spectacle. One works with words, another with elongated human silhouettes, the third with forests and branching forms. All three reduce their visual vocabulary to a handful of recurring elements, in monochrome. Rather than dazzling viewers with technical virtuosity and splashy iconography that screams “street art” in many modern minds, they invite a slower read, using public walls to explore ideas about community, memory, ecology, and the social fabric that binds us together.
Italian artist Elfo came up through the graffiti scene in Tuscany before developing a practice built around language itself. Concise, often wry, interventions grab ahold of overlooked walls and turn them into prompts that are equal parts philosophical observation, social commentary, and visual joke.
Spanish artist David de la Mano, from Salamanca, has become instantly recognizable for his lyrical processions of black silhouetted figures, in many an imaginative field of dreams. Spare and quietly poetic, his murals speak of migration, belonging, solitude, and fragile ties that connect people to each other and to the places they inhabit.
Also from Salamanca, Pablo S. Herrero returns repeatedly to trees, roots, branches, and forests as recurring motifs. His restrained murals draw connections. Human communities and natural systems suggest that resilience, growth, and coexistence are as much ecological ideas as they are social ones.
These works come from a recent series of collaborations created inside abandoned houses during the CVTà Festival in Civitacampomarano, Italy. Although Elfo, David de la Mano, and Pablo S. Herrero had never collaborated before, the pairings feels surprisingly natural. Happily, they tell us that after this experience, they left not only as collaborators on the walls, but as friends.
Street art festivals have evolved dramatically over the past two decades. Many of the earliest events grew directly out of graffiti jams and street art culture, bringing together artists, photographers, curators, writers, academics, a handful of adventurous gallerists and collectors, and eventually a few local politicians who discovered that art unveilings make for excellent public appearances, to debate questions of authorship, public space, illegality, and the right to the city. And, of course, to get high, paint, and listen to music. Festivals such as Nuart became known not only for the walls they produced but for the conversations they fostered, pairing murals and installations with symposia, publications, lectures, institutional critique, and prickly discussions that situated contemporary street art within broader artistic and social histories.
Today, many newer festivals operate through a different model. Rather than emerging from artist-led initiatives or grassroots scenes, they are sometimes organized through partnerships between municipalities and professional mural producers. The emphasis shifts from examining public space as a contested arena to delivering ambitious, well-managed, and attractive public art projects that contribute to civic identity, cultural programming, and urban regeneration. In marketing parlance, the term “placemaking” inevitably arises. These festivals are capable of producing excellent work, but their priorities and institutional structures are distinct from those of the earlier generation.
Pintalis Fest fits comfortably within this newer approach. Produced by the Barcelona-based mural company Pintalis in partnership with the city of Mollet del Vallès, it combines mural production with family activities, workshops, and community celebrations, presenting public art as an accessible civic experience. It is also worth noting that these categories are no longer rigid. Even Nuart—long regarded as one of the movement’s most intellectually engaged festivals—has evolved through its long-running partnership with Aberdeen City Council, becoming part of the city’s cultural strategy while continuing to surround new public artworks with conferences, essays, walking tours, and some critical debate. The result is a reminder that municipal partnerships and intellectual inquiry need not be mutually exclusive, even as different festivals continue to emphasize different aspects of what public art can be.
Today we travel to Mollet del Vallès, about 25 kilometers northeast of Barcelona, to take a look at six new murals created for the 2026 Pintalis Fest. Our thanks to photographer Lluís Bulbena Olivas for generously sharing these images with BSA readers.
The people of NYC and the rest of the country are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US independence this weekend, with plane flyovers, tall ships in the harbor, barbecues on the sidewalk, packages of tube socks for sale on card tables next to bootleg Knicks t-shirts, loud music blasting out of car windows, overbearing heat, and an occasional thunderstorm. The ideas about democracy, equality, and individual liberty that we are celebrating are not fully in effect at the moment, and most people know it. But that’s no reason not to talk about it over a hot dog, a beer, a game of volleyball or frisbee – and to walk barefoot through the grass in the park with your friend, your mom, your son.
This week, we split our time between Europe and the US, and you can feel the heat and stress on the streets in both cities. The specific worries may vary, but there are certain similarities around the world today, almost everywhere, including increasing financial pressures on everyday people while corporations have just recorded record profits, a growing right-wing targeting of immigrants that doesn’t really solve any problem, and a strange but steady global drumbeat for war that is not coming from the people.
We looked for some of these anxieties reflected on the walls this week, but street art rarely behaves like an obedient political commentator just to please your agenda. It’s more like the neighborhood cat: independent, occasionally affectionate, impossible to instruct, and perfectly content to ignore the crisis everyone else is talking about. Just when you expect a manifesto, it offers a cartoon character, a nostalgic vignette, or a syrupy poem. Then, when you least expect it, it scratches you with something unexpectedly sharp.
Here is our regular interview with the street – this week mostly from Berlin, and you can make your own divinations. This week features CKMRS, Copy Cat, Don John, El Bocho, Jan Bauer, Kids These Dayz, Kstell, Obey, PichiAvo, and VOLK.
Swoon. “Walkie 2023”. (photo courtesy of Woodbury House)
While a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn around the turn of the century, Swoon began wheatpasting her hand-cut portraits onto walls around New York, developing a visual language that quickly became one of the most recognizable in the emerging street art movement. Drawing equally from printmaking, portraiture, and direct engagement with the street, her work brought an unusual sense of intimacy to public space. Rather than relying on spectacle, it invited viewers to slow down and spend time with the faces and stories quietly unfolding.
More than twenty-five years later, Woodbury House presents The Life of the Work, the first survey of Swoon’s practice in the United Kingdom, on view from 2 July through 13 August 2026 at the gallery’s Mayfair space. The exhibition follows the thread that runs from those early wheatpastes to paintings, sculpture, installation, and more recent narrative work, revealing a practice that has expanded in form while remaining rooted in the same enduring interests.
One of the pleasures of seeing this body of work together is recognizing how coherent it has remained. Swoon has continued to explore portraiture, storytelling, memory, and community without feeling the need to reinvent her artistic identity every few years. The materials, scale, and settings have evolved, but the work still rests on close observation and a genuine curiosity about the people who inhabit it. That steady commitment has secured Swoon a singular place in the history of street art—an artist whose influence reaches well beyond the walls where many first encountered her work.
Swoon. “Neene 2021”. (photo courtesy of Woodbury House)Swoon. “Paulie 2019”. (photo courtesy of Woodbury House)Swoon. “Bethelem Boys 2016”. (photo courtesy of Woodbury House)Swoon. “Girl from Ranoon Province 2021”. (photo courtesy of Woodbury House)Swoon. “Alixa & Naima 2024”. (photo courtesy of Woodbury House)
EXHIBITION DETAILS PRIVATE VIEW Thursday 2nd July 2026 | 18:00 – 21:00 | Champagne reception and live music, with the artist in attendance. PUBLIC VIEWING From 3rd July 2026 | Monday to Friday: 10:00 – 17:00. VENUE Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 3DX.
The Pride parade comes down 5th Avenue today – a rebellious and celebratory parade that arose in the late 1960s in a hostile and oppressive political atmosphere toward LGBTQ+ people. After it became socially safe and financially profitable, corporations jumped into the parade during the 90s and 00s and pretended that they were friends of queer folks all along – while selling them shampoo and beer, or whatever else they could slap a rainbow on. With the retrogrades making war on people across the US today and many of those same corporations withdrawing their support of DEI initiatives in obedience to political winds, it is good to remember that the pride parades across the world are just not about go-go boys and drag queens; It’s simply about equal rights.
This week, we take you down the East Coast about an hour and a half south to Asbury Park, New Jersey, to see what’s happening on the boardwalk this summer. Often a good place to catch street artists who have painted murals, we also share this project from photographer Mike McLaughlin.
For decades, he has been quietly chronicling the people who give Asbury Park some of its soul. With one foot in documentary and the other in portraiture, McLaughlin has built an expansive visual record of a city that continually reinvents itself, from the music scene at Asbury Lanes to the artists, entrepreneurs, and everyday characters who animate its streets.
Below is one of his most memorable public projects, Art Lives Here, which turns the boardwalk into a gallery. Local musicians, tattooists, artists, bartenders, and other familiar faces were cast as the protagonists of celebrated paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, Grant Wood, Edvard Munch, René Magritte, Vincent van Gogh, Norman Rockwell, and others. The result is a playful art-history exercise – and a reminder that every city has its own living masterpieces—ordinary people whose personalities, histories, and creative energy deserve a frame as much as any museum icon.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Amberella, Anna Mraz, Ant Carver, Chelsey Luster, Dan, Gianni Lee, Hyland Mather, Mike McLaughun, and Vitale Bros.
Rafael Schacter: Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City.
Reprinted from the original review.
In Monumental Graffiti: Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City, Rafael Schacter proposes a reconsideration of monumentality through the lens of graffiti and street-based practices. Rather than approaching monuments as fixed, permanent structures, Schacter frames them as acts—gestures that remind, advise, or warn. Drawing on his research as an art historian and curator of urban art, the book examines how graffiti and monuments can illuminate one another, offering a way to understand public memory that is grounded in community, embodiment, and the acceptance of transience.
Using images and examples from streets around the world, Schacter explores how graffiti can function monumentally without relying on scale, legality, or durability. He argues that monuments do not need to be grand or permanent to carry social meaning, and that graffiti, through its visibility and public presence, can demand attention in ways comparable to traditional monuments. In this framing, monumentality becomes conceptual rather than material, rooted in action and participation rather than physical endurance.
A central focus of the book is the role of memorial practices within graffiti culture. Schacter examines how community-created walls, tributes, and tags operate as grassroots monuments that commemorate loss, mark affiliation, and address social concerns. He distinguishes between spraycan memorials—often visible, collective, and broadly respected—and memorial tags, which he describes as more intimate and cryptic gestures, legible primarily within the subculture. Both forms, he suggests, function as living monuments shaped by shared understanding and repeated acts of writing.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Photos Diana Paun
Title: Monumental Graffiti. Tracing Public Art and Resistance in the City Published: MIT Press, 2024 Author: Rafael Schacter Language: English
Call it a landmark cultural exchange marking the 15th Anniversary of the Bushwick Collective and the 35th Anniversary of the Taipei Cultural Center of New York, artists, neighbors, and visitors gathered at LOT 45 in Brooklyn for the first-ever Bushwick Collective Artist Talk. Presented in partnership with the Taipei Cultural Center and hosted by Brooklyn Street Art, the evening brought together five of Taiwan’s leading contemporary street artists for a conversation about muralism, graffiti culture, illustration, public art, and the evolving visual language of Taiwan’s streets.
In attendance were Bushwick Collective founder Joe Ficalora and Taipei Cultural Center representatives Linda Lu and Jack Kuei, with Brooklyn Street Art founders Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington serving as moderators.
Before introducing the artists, the panel provided context for Taiwan’s urban art movement, tracing its roots to the late 1980s and its growth throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Shaped by hip-hop culture, skateboarding, manga, animation, graphic design, and the global rise of graffiti and muralism, Taiwan’s scene has developed a distinctive identity centered in Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Taichung.
Unlike many graffiti scenes elsewhere, Taiwanese artists often move fluidly between murals, illustration, design, commercial projects, and contemporary art practices, creating work known for dense visual storytelling, strong character design, and a willingness to blend local influences with international urban art traditions.
The evening’s featured artists represented several generations and directions within that scene. ALL0, part of Taiwan’s younger generation of muralists, discussed a practice influenced by manga, comics, graffiti, and contemporary street culture, producing energetic works rich in movement and narrative.
VASTAR, widely regarded as one of the central figures in Taiwan’s contemporary graffiti movement, reflected on two decades of work that bridges graffiti writing, muralism, mythology, and fine art. Candy Kuo, born in Taipei and now based in Austin, Texas, spoke about navigating identity, memory, and emotional distance through public art, while maintaining strong ties to both Taiwanese and American creative communities. COLASA explored his improvisational approach to painting, pushing graffiti energy toward abstraction and expressionism through spontaneous mark-making and experimental techniques.
Also in attendance was the highly regarded Taiwanese artist Black Zao, who spent the week painting alongside ALLO. Known for his technically accomplished style and his ability to weave together graffiti, music, folklore, spirituality, and contemporary Taiwanese street culture, Black Zao is regarded as one of the key figures of Taiwan’s graffiti generation. His work moves fluidly between walls, illustration, design, and installation, carrying a distinctly Taiwanese visual language wherever it travels.
Questions from the moderators and audience ranged from the characteristics that make Taiwanese street art distinctive to the role public art plays in contemporary cities and how visual cultures continue to evolve through travel, collaboration, and exchange. A sharp crowd of artists, writers, photographers, and fans kept the conversation lively with thoughtful questions about process, influences, and cultural differences.
The artists spoke candidly about both the opportunities and challenges they have encountered along the way, while pioneering artist Mr. OGAY drew laughs with reflections on how the psychologically rich characters he brings to the street have become a hallmark of his work and an important part of Taiwan’s emerging graffiti and street art identity. Throughout the evening, the artists also reflected on their experience painting in Bushwick during the preceding days, comparing Taiwan’s urban art culture with New York’s storied history of graffiti and public expression.
As the audience lingered at LOT 45, continuing conversations long after the formal discussion had ended, the evening served as another reminder of the role the Bushwick Collective has grown into over the last fifteen years. Beyond the murals, it has become a place where artists, communities, and ideas from around the world intersect in real time.
The gathering celebrated a shared belief in creativity, public space, and the power of art to connect people across languages and borders. For the Bushwick Collective, it represents another step in its tradition of international exchange; for the Taipei Cultural Center, it offered an opportunity to introduce Brooklyn audiences to the depth, diversity, and evolving character of Taiwan’s contemporary urban art scene.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
