Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. You look amazing in that shirt!
We were running up that hill this week to see the designer currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, Iris van Herpen, in the exhibition Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses. Her work often looks less like traditional couture and more like living systems captured in motion — borrowing from coral formations, jellyfish, skeletons, water currents, insect wings, cellular structures, and fractal geometry. With the breezes blowing the newly arrived green leaves on the trees in front of the museum, we left feeling that the systems of nature merged with art, and that the city was in natural motion on the street.
Brooklyn-born artist Keisha Scarville has transformed the exterior street-facing walls of the Brooklyn Museum with large-scale photographic works that layer fabric, portraiture, memory, and fragmented identity into immersive public images. Like Iris van Herpen’s couture inside the museum, Scarville’s visual language draws from organic structures, repetition, translucency, and flowing forms that dissolve boundaries between materials and atmosphere. Both artists build intricate systems inspired by natural growth patterns and transformation, creating works that feel simultaneously intimate, sculptural, and almost biologically alive.
A few blocks away, the community wall project called Washington Walls is newly refreshed for the season, and many artists are again in touch with nature, or their inner nature anyway.
Here is our survey of the streets, this week featuring Aaron Metzger, Barbtropolis, Ben Keller, Calicho Art, Furmero, Homesick, Jason Naylor, Kams S Art, Keisha Scarville, Lady DJay, Le Crue, Luch, Minhofofa, Phetus, Praxis, Question Marks, Sarkism, Savior El Mundo, and Slut Puppy.
This latest intervention by Lapiz, painted inside the crumbling shell of an abandoned electrical substation near Chemnitz, lands somewhere between bitter social observation and deadpan advertising parody. Painted amid the remains of East Germany’s industrial skeletons — relics of a promised workers’ utopia that gave way to a turbocharged free-market reality after reunification — Lapiz gives us a satiric scene only slightly exaggerated from those now familiar across much of Europe: elderly citizens rummaging through trash for returnable bottles and cans to supplement pensions that no longer cover the cost of survival.
Germany may still project the image of continental stability and economic muscle, but beneath the polished surfaces of luxury storefronts and political speeches, some say that the sight of pensioners digging through public bins has become common enough to barely interrupt pedestrian traffic anymore.
Lapiz, whose stencil-based practice often merges political critique with the cold visual language of advertising and institutional graphics, frames the scene with a parody of luxury-brand patterning that unmistakably echoes the logo-crazed theater of designer fashion houses. The symbols woven into the repeated motif are not, however, monograms celebrating wealth and exclusivity but references to the bureaucratic architecture of poverty: job centers, food assistance, recycling systems, and welfare programs.
Here the performance of conspicuous consumption collides head-on with the fear of not meeting your family’s basic needs; the old scavenger carrying gold-plated deposit bottles becomes a darkly elegant contradiction. Even the title, “Retirement (is about exploring your wide open future),” is lifted from a corporate retirement campaign for an automotive executive. It twists the knife with the polished optimism of advertising campaigns and Davos-style prognostication.
As with other works by LAPIZ, the location matters. Painted during the small but steadily growing festival at Kulturnetzwerk Etzdorf, inside a former GDR-era energy substation in rural Saxony, the work occupies a landscape where the promises of competing economic systems have both aged poorly in different ways. The abandoned industrial structures surrounding the mural are not merely atmospheric ruins for photographers and festivalgoers; they are physical reminders of labor histories, collapsed ideologies, privatization, migration, and widening economic precarity.
Italian-Argentinian art director and illustrator Nacho Valentini spends much of his professional life moving through the polished worlds of branding, motion graphics, illustration, and commercial visual identity. But on the streets of Pescara, where he lives along Italy’s Adriatic coast, another side of his practice has quietly emerged in recent years.
In his ongoing urban intervention project “Enelgumeni,” Valentini transforms ordinary electrical utility cabinets into cartoon-like characters drawn from sports, cinema, celebrity culture, mythology, neighborhood archetypes, and collective memory. Looking at the boxes, he realized many already resembled figures with oversized heads, tiny bodies, and exaggerated feet; rather than imposing imagery onto the city, he describes the process as “revealing what is already there.” More than 50 painted cabinets now appear throughout Pescara and nearby neighborhoods, turning overlooked infrastructure into playful interruptions in the rhythm of daily urban life.
The project sits somewhere between street art, character design, and public-space psychology. Valentini approaches the cabinets less as blank surfaces for self-expression than as dormant personalities waiting to be activated. The figures range from lifeguards and fishermen to Maradona, Serena Williams, Harry Potter, Frida Kahlo, the Pope, and neighborhood workers whose identities often echo the spaces around them. The work carries the warmth and accessibility of illustration culture rather than the territorial language of graffiti, yet it still participates in the essential street-art impulse of reclaiming ignored urban surfaces and giving them new meaning.
BSA: Which city do you transform the electrical boxes in? Nacho Valentini: The project takes place in Italy, mainly in the area where I live, Pescara City, along the Adriatic coast. It’s an ongoing urban intervention that continues to expand as I discover new boxes.
BSA: Do you have permission from the municipality, the city authorities, or the electricity company to paint them? NV: Most of the boxes are painted in agreement with e- Distribuzione, the Italian electricity distribution company and a local cultural association. For many others, I’ve asked for permission, while in some cases the intervention has been more spontaneous.
BSA: What sort of paint do you use to paint? NV: I mainly use water-based spray can, specifically Montana Water-Based. I like them because I can mix the colors to create new tones, they are very versatile and high-quality and do not pollute the environment.
BSA: Why do you think painting the boxes is a good idea? NV: Because these objects are already part of the urban landscape but are usually ignored, often dirty and visually neglected. At a certain point, I realized that many of these boxes already follow the basic principles of cartoon character design: big heads, small bodies, and oversized feet. That intuition became the starting point of the project. I’m not really adding something new, I’m revealing what is already there. It’s a way to transform something purely functional into something playful and unexpected.
BSA: What sort of satisfaction do you get from painting the boxes? NV: The most interesting part is seeing how perception changes. Once people notice the character, they can’t unsee it anymore. It creates a small moment of discovery in everyday life.
BSA: Does the public react positively to seeing the boxes transform into characters? NV: Yes, very much. People often stop, take photos, smile, or share them. The most rewarding part is the direct feedback from people in the neighborhood. They often stop to say thank you for improving their area and their everyday routine.
BSA: How do you select the characters to transform the boxes? NV The shape of the box always comes first. One of the initial rules I gave myself was to work with internationally recognizable, almost iconic and inspiring characters. This is important because in an urban context people often pass by quickly (on a bike or in a car) so the character needs to be immediately recognizable.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Happy Mother’s Day – to all the mothers and caretakers who have watched over us. Today, we honor thank you for your love, care, determination, sacrifice, guidance, creativity, patience, and sleepless nights. For those who are no longer here with us, we remember you with love and gratitude. Everyone is doing the best we can with the light we have to live by.
We start this new collection of images by photographer Jaime Rojo: a bash of color and expression from Dae Law.
The mural feels like right now, with its tangled ribbons snaking across the wall, sprayed and brushed without hierarchy, crude symbols that emerge and disappear, drips and imperfections left visible, and clashing colors of acidic yellow, gritty white, flat reds, blues, muddy greys, and blushing pinks. This is contained chaos, with a Basquiat-style text interruption, brutish application, overlapping expressionism, you think of notebook doodling and low-volume excitement and urban anxiety at one time.
When the narratives and data are delivered by firehose, this is what we get: an information landscape nearly impossible to bring into focus. Headlines, propaganda, advertising, strangely personal appeals, subtle invective, outrage, and corn syrup – its all layered so densely that meaning begins to shift and reshape into jittery loops and disjointed slogans and artifacts of imagery.
On a different note, it looks like Instagram continues its purge, or rather, algorithm anarchy, as overnight we just lost 2K followers. We have lost more than 50K followers since the introduction of a new algorithm, years ago, that was designed to drive content to followers. It makes no sense at all, as BSA continues to travel around the world, bringing stories to tens of thousands of people every week. The new followers are not enough to offset the lost ones. Just sayin’.
Here is our interview with the street, this week featuring 1440, AIC Mosaic, Bukus One, Dae law, Dirty Bandits, HASH, Jappy Agoncillo, Jodi Da Real, Merck, Miss 17, Muck Rock, NOVA, Ragae, and Wigs.
New photos today from HKwalls, one of the global standouts on the street art festival circuit, in part because of how it integrates the cultures of hip-hop, murals, graffiti, and street art within 2026 Hong Kong itself. Set against a city that is dense, fast-moving, and tightly managed, the festival brings these threads together in a way that feels considered, not improvised. Unlike a graffiti jam or open call that welcomes arriving artists who suddenly appear, this is not a free-for-all; it is a structured event that understands its environment and works fluently within it.
HKwalls knows the audience and knows its artists. You might say that it has always functioned as a negotiation rather than a confrontation. High property values, strict regulations, and a sensitive political climate define the terrain, and the graffiti/street art culture evolved outside of, sometimes in spite of, those considerations. Blending and winning is the challenge, and this festival finds a way to contribute meaningfully to the city’s visual and cultural life – and provide opportunity to artists from here and afar.
The HKwalls platform places its work directly into neighborhoods that have an opportunity to see fresh approaches and techniques and to encounter them on their own terms. The murals are discussed and selected, and by clever routes and hybrids, the field continues to expand. This year’s painted box trucks and installations are a telling development—mobile surfaces that carry work through the city while also functioning as temporary galleries and classrooms. It’s a practical evolution in a place where fixed space is limited: if walls are scarce, the exhibition moves. The result is a broader form of engagement, one that extends beyond the static image into circulation and interaction.
Call it a new golden age, if you like—but one built on agreements with trusted partners. Artists gain visibility and access; the city accrues new cultural capital; communities that don’t typically go to art galleries or glitzy art fairs are invited into the exchange. At the same time, some may tell you that a tension remains visible. A segment of graffiti writers and street artists has long resisted participation in organized festivals or sanctioned jams, wary that civic, commercial, or institutional support can dilute the anti-establishment credibility of graffiti’s origins. That concern still carries weight, but the development of new formats in street art festivals doesn’t deny the roots- it often creates new routes forward.
HKwalls, however, occupies its own lane—openly shaped by a mix of commercial backing, community presence, and institutional partnership. Founded in 2014 and now in its eleventh year, it has involved well over 300 artists from more than 30 countries, with the 2026 edition bringing together 20+ artists from 14 countries across murals, trucks, and digital works. Led by Jason Dembski, Stan Wu, and Maria Wong, the project continues to evolve as a hybrid platform—one that works within the system while still making space for talented local and international artists to be seen.
Participating artists in HKwalls 2026 (as identified in the program): Fabio Petani (Italy), Hardthirteen (Indonesia), Enoch Wong (Hong Kong), Asbestos (Ireland), Leho (Taiwan), Mooncasket (Hong Kong), Saïd Kinos (Netherlands), Yubia (Spain), TAXA (Japan/Hong Kong), Awie (Canada), Ondřej Rakušan (Czech Republic), Anomalit Kate (Russia), Seohyo (South Korea), Chaaya Prabhat (India), Eggshellsea (Hong Kong), Chow Kai (Hong Kong), V3RBO (Italy) .
Mural Program The 2026 mural program centers on a focused group of international and local artists working across Central and the Western District, with walls selected and developed in coordination with property owners and local stakeholders. This year’s muralists include Fabio Petani (Italy), Hardthirteen (Indonesia), and Enoch Wong (Hong Kong), alongside performative interventions by Irish artist Asbestos, whose roaming character brings a live, unscripted element into the street environment. The emphasis remains on large-scale, publicly accessible works created in real time, reinforcing the festival’s role as a visible, process-driven platform.
Trucks Program (“Art on the Move”) A newer development, the trucks program extends the festival beyond fixed walls into the flow of the city itself. In partnership with a logistics platform, artists including Leho (Taiwan), Mooncasket (Hong Kong), Saïd Kinos (Netherlands), Yubia (Spain), TAXA (Japan/Hong Kong), and Awie (Canada) transform working vehicles into mobile artworks. These trucks operate as both moving murals and temporary interiors—housing small exhibitions, installations, and workshop spaces—effectively creating a circulating network of encounters that brings the work into everyday transit routes.
Digital Program The digital component expands the festival into large-scale public screens and architectural facades, extending visibility beyond the street level into the skyline and harborfront. Featured artists include Ondřej Rakušan (Czech Republic), Anomalit Kate (Russia), Seohyo (South Korea), Chaaya Prabhat (India), Eggshellsea (Hong Kong), Chow Kai (Hong Kong), and V3RBO (Italy). Presented on major LED installations and public-facing screens, the program translates elements of street art and graffiti into motion-based, immersive formats, reaching audiences across multiple districts and timeframes.
In Street Art World, criminologist and cultural theorist Alison Young brings two decades of field research and observation to one of the most visible, contested, and misunderstood forms of contemporary art. Published by Reaktion Books, the volume extends her earlier inquiries into graffiti, legality, and public space to provide what is a comprehensive sociocultural study of street art at date of publication.
The book reads like both travelogue and academic analysis, combining first-person encounters in cities from Melbourne to London and New York with interviews, case studies, and photographs. Young’s narrative is grounded in her background in criminology and law, but she writes with the curiosity of an ethnographer and the eye of someone who has walked the laneways and backstreets where this art breathes.
Street Art World is organized into seven chapters that trace the practice from its beginnings in graffiti writing to its institutional and digital transformations. “Beginnings” revisits graffiti’s early codes and gestures, setting up the argument that street art diverged not simply in style but in how it engages public space. “Streetness in Art” defines the characteristics that distinguish street art from its studio or mural counterparts—its ephemerality, its negotiation with risk, its intimate relationship with the urban fabric.
Text Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Fotos Eveline Wilson
Title: Alison Young. Street Art World Published: Reaktion Books, 2016 Author: Alison Young Language: English
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Yo, don’t sleep on New York – we’re still setting an eclectic standard of outlaw graffiti and street art and out-of-your-mind people on the street, in the clubs, concerts, and parks. When the weather warms like this week, all the subcultures emerge again on the streets, out of their apartments after a long winter, looking for action, and thankfully, there is plenty – 5-Borough bike rides, Smorgasbord, Shakespeare in the Park, cherry tree festival at the botanical gardens, LES skatepark, Union Square Market, Washington Park gatherings, Fleet Week. Yes all the prices are going up, but a lot of New York can be enjoyed for little or no money – just go outside.
Let’s see how the Met Gala sidesteps its Bezos-era funding this week during the annual craven catwalk of shallowness and hot air. The usual procession of “stars” will take the carpet—plenty of spectacle, putting very little at stake beyond the attention it generates. As a street art campaign heated up to boycott the event this spring, Hyperallergic’s article from mid-April nailed the gist of it. More recently, bus stop installations hit the message directly by stating “Amazon Powers ICE”. The Met doesn’t know how to do people-powered revolt – unless it can be pulled completely out of its original context (or happened 300 years ago). Remember the thorough de-boning of punk culture for the “punk” themed event in the twenty-teens? It was like a tasty punk Filet-O-Fish.
Surprisingly, corporate media didn’t pick up this new anti-corporate Amazon/Met story. See the video of a street poster installation at the end here.
So here is our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Depoe, Dirt Cobain, Frank Ape, Gane, Guila, Gushe, IMK X, Jorit, Love X, Miss 17, Modomatic, Ollin, Pear, Qzar, Rems, Sonni, Stikman, Tuney, and Want Pear.
With its smooth-to-the-touch pages and oversized, flapping format, this Black Book is a working object—a collection of shared memories stabilized just enough to be shared. Not quite a memoir, Shoe’s Black Book sits somewhere between a journal, a field manual, a scrapbook, and a massive piece of evidence of one guy’s path—specifically a tight window between 1985 and 1987, when everything was still forming. Pulled together from the remains of an actual collection device, it reads as an artifact that was never meant to be read cleanly, now presented with enough framing to make it legible without smoothing its rough edges.
Niels Shoe Meulman. SHOE’S BLACK BOOK: Graffiti in the 1980’s. Ruyzdael Publishing (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
The contents move like much graffitied memory does: not chronologically, not cleanly, but by association. A Montessori school reference sits not far from a story about racking paint; a meeting with Dondi in a hotel room opens into a muddy anecdote about losing that same drawing under a bridge; a Munich S-Bahn throw-up becomes a gateway into prison, Polaroids, and the unwritten rules of not confessing. Techniques appear in passing—line weight, tool precision, color choices—alongside notes about locations, near-misses, and the quiet passing of knowledge “mouth-to-mouth and hand-to-hand.” Shoe accumulates rather than overexplains, cataloging encounters, rushes of adrenaline, disappointment, styles, influences, and a thousand small turning points—without insisting on hierarchy.
Like most people’s black books, that accumulation is the point. Your blank volume gradually fills, accompanying the writer not as a finished object but as a constant companion—something to carry, to show, to trade, to lose, to recover. It absorbs time and is battered by it. Influence becomes visible in real time: a handstyle shifts after meeting someone, a logo gets reworked into something personal, an “S” becomes a problem to solve repeatedly, and possibly worship. Shoe gradually reveals the obsessive nature of this process—the fixation on color, style, and technique, and the thrill of cat-and-mouse with the cops. Now the obsession reads less as nostalgia than as a working condition and a possible formation of character.
The identity keeps shifting: vandal, decorator, designer. Shoe pushes back on the soft language applied to graffiti early on—“Oh, such nice colors”—with the blunt assertion of VANDALISM, and later reflects on the terminology with pragmatic clarity: “What all graffiti writers have in common is their GSD (Get Shit Done) and DIY (Destroy It Yourself) mentality.” It’s a useful correction. The book doesn’t present graffiti as an aesthetic category first, but as a behavior and connective culture—repetitive, driven, and often indifferent to how it is received. This collection, though, doesn’t feel indifferent. It has been gathered, protected, and now carefully presented—suggesting that even the most committed posture of not caring has always carried an awareness of being seen.
What gives this particular black book additional weight is not only who passes through it—Dondi, Haring, Angel, Bando—but how those encounters are recorded. Shoe doesn’t pitch them all as monumental events, but as moments: a drawing made casually in a hotel room, later water-damaged and forgotten; a nickname given; a lesson absorbed. Carlo McCormick frames this well in his introductory essay, calling it “a travelogue, scrapbook, sketchpad, and diary” that doubles as “a book-shaped treasure chest of memories.” The book never resolves into one thing. It remains plural. Each spread pairs original pages with later notes and images, reinforcing that split between what happened and how it’s remembered.
This is also a constructed narrative. Pages were lost, removed, damaged, returned—some literally cut out and resurfacing years later in places like Christie’s. The decision to unbind the original and treat each page as an individual work shifts the object again, from private tool to displayable archive. Memory fills in gaps; certain stories get sharper over time. The theft itself marks a break—pushing him, at least for a time, out of graffiti and into design. McCormick’s aside—that when a veteran tells these stories “you can be sure they’re full of shit, but… it’s solid gold”—isn’t dismissive so much as accurate, and told with a certain pathos. This is lived history, shaped in the telling.
What emerges is not a definitive account of a scene but a close-range view of how one forms—through repetition, proximity, and exchange. Amsterdam and New York fold into each other here, not as competing origin stories but as Shoe’s overlapping circuits. The book shows how styles move, how ideas travel, and how a localized practice becomes something shared across cities. Intelligence and aspiration pass through pages like these—handled, carried, traded, sometimes stolen, sometimes returned.
For someone unfamiliar with why a black book matters, this one answers without overexplaining. Here is the process before it is resolved, the work before it is framed, the evidence before the story hardens around it. Shoe’s Black Book is not simply a record of what graffiti became. It shows how it moved and how it was bound before anyone decided what it was worth.
Niels Shoe Meulman. SHOE’S BLACK BOOK: Graffiti in the 1980’s.
Ruyzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, Netherlands. December 2025.
Welcome to BSA’s Images of the Week. Hey ho, let’s go!
Half a century since the Ramones bolted onto the New York music scene with their debut album, they helped supercharge popular culture from the subculture side, defining an anti-institutional DIY ethos that pushed back against the bloated arena-rock appetites of the sleeping masses. At least that’s what the self-styled historians of the time like to riff on. More plainly, they were smart and awkward guys in their mid-20s from Queens who created a category for themselves to fit into—one that expressed the angst and disgust of one Baby Boomer slice who were content to sit in the margins of a culture they saw as hypocritical, self-indulgent, corrupt, and mindlessly consumerist.
The Ramones emerged from a very specific geography—downtown Manhattan, especially around CBGB and the Bowery—and, in ways that ran parallel to graffiti and DIY culture, they flourished in marginal spaces defined by cheap rents, abandoned buildings, and overlooked infrastructure. Graffiti writers used the city as a moving canvas on trains, and as a static one on walls and rooftops across neglected blocks. Punk occupied the same zones for rehearsal, performance, and distribution. Both cultures redefined “wasted” urban space as active cultural territory. In time, those same conditions were recast as opportunity—real estate interests learning to treat anti-culture less as resistance than as a precursor to investment.
Later unpermissioned street art inherited much of this logic—site-specific work that responds to the rhythm and wreckage of the street, holding up a broken mirror for passersby to catch their reflection. Like the Ramones’ blunt statements, much of it avoids metaphor-heavy storytelling in favor of direct hits.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this time featuring Alanas Sharif, Some MSK AWR, Big Bank Tate, Bio, Datt Face, FY, Hanimal, Just, RTWO, and Zoot.
But in Philadelphia last week, a freshly painted façade in Fishtown managed exactly that, as the King and Queen of the Netherlands were guided through a new residential development to view Songlines for the City, a site-specific mural by Dutch tattooist and visual historian Henk Schiffmacher. The building itself—designed by Concrete—served as a convenient stage for a diplomatic visit highlighting Dutch–U.S. collaboration, with architecture and art presented as parallel languages of exchange.
Curated by Peter Ernst Coolen, founder of the STRAAT Museum and editor of Street Art Today, the mural draws a clear line between tattoo culture, graffiti, and street art—not as separate disciplines, but as overlapping systems of mark-making. Schiffmacher’s visual vocabulary—hearts, daggers, swallows, compasses—sits comfortably alongside the coded symbols and repetitions familiar to graffiti writers and muralists, each carrying meaning across bodies, walls, and time. The reference to “songlines” reinforces that continuity: a way of mapping experience through images that move from one surface to another. In that sense, the wall operates less as a singular artwork and more as a ledger of shared visual languages—tattoo flash, street iconography, and vernacular signs layered into a single composition.
The location matters. Fishtown didn’t become a destination because of new construction; its reputation took shape over the past fifteen years through a concentration of street art, murals, graffiti, music venues, and independent businesses that gave the neighborhood cultural visibility well before large-scale development followed. Organizations like Mural Arts Philadelphia formalized a mural presence across the city, while nearby artist-run spaces and studios—including Crane Arts and NextFab—have supported a broader ecosystem of artists, fabricators, and small creative enterprises. Alongside them, generations of graffiti writers and street artists—many working without permission—contributed to a visual language that still moves fluidly between walls, storefronts, and industrial surfaces.
That earlier wave of street work—legal and otherwise—helped define the neighborhood’s identity and drew attention to a part of the city long overlooked. What’s changed since is not the presence of art, but the context around it. Projects like this now arrive in a neighborhood where the aesthetic language of street culture is already established, even as the economic and social conditions continue to shift. In that sense, the mural sits inside an ongoing transition—less a starting point than another marker along the way.
At the Bronx Documentary Center, Martha Cooper: Streetwise doesn’t read like a rediscovery—it feels like a homecoming. And in a room like this, there was only one homecoming queen: someone half the crowd had crossed paths with on a corner, in a yard, or along a train line, and the other half had come to know through the images that made those encounters part of the culture’s memory.
Billed as “a comprehensive survey of Martha Cooper’s six-decade career documenting urban spaces, community life, and creative expression,” the exhibition folds graffiti, breaking, BMX, casitas, and global detours back into the Bronx, where much of this visual language first took hold. The line stretched out the door on opening night—many waiting for a poster of one of Cooper’s now-canonical Dondi photographs—while inside, the room read less like a retrospective and more like a reunion.
Co-curated within the BDC program, the show leans into Cooper’s long view without over-explaining it. As Itzel Robles Sandoval wrote in Blind Magazine, Cooper “brought the streets she photographed into a single room,” a simple line that lands because it’s true. The installation underscores that point with material presence—books, cameras, decades of images—while the crowd fills in the rest. Members of TATS CRU painted exhibition signage, and during remarks, Bio noted, “There is a lot of love in the house tonight for Martha,” which felt less like a ceremony than a description.
The room itself carried that sentiment. John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres were on site giving a live demonstration of their signature South Bronx plaster casting practice—pulling faces and bodies directly from the community, as they’ve done for decades. Among those spotted: Futura, John “Crash” Matos, Jeannette Beckman, Charlie Ahearn, COSE TDS, Trap 167, and others moving through the crowd. In one of those full-circle moments that only happen with time, Bob—the police officer on the right in Cooper’s photograph of the NYC Subway #1 line, Harlem 1981—was also in attendance, stepping out of the frame and back into the room.
Bob—the police officer on the right in Cooper’s photograph of the NYC Subway #1 line, Harlem 1981—was also in attendance, stepping out of the frame and back into the room.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Yes, the Trump war on Iran drags on, months after he declared victory. Unipolar has gone up in flames, and multipolar is the world reality when it comes to power, geopolitics, and solving problems, contributing to the news headlines feeling bi-polar from one day to the next.
Did you see the new graffiti-on-a-subway-car-themed Brooklyn lapel pin sported by Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso? 17-year-old born and raised Brooklynite Mellina Melezhik won the first-ever “Brooklyn Pin Design Competition”. Remember when political leaders upbraided and threatened teens for spray-painting the subway? Clearly, the lines between mural appreciation and illegal vandalism are unclear now.
We got down to the City of Brotherly Love this week to see the King and Queen of the Netherlands checking out a graffiti- and street art–inspired façade (more on that soon), and took the opportunity to photograph both the legal and illegal walls around Fishtown. This Philadelphia neighborhood is in the throes of gentrification, as street art and murals often arrive alongside the process—followed, as ever, by tech and hedge fund bros, designers, portfolio managers, and a steady wave of young, affluent transplants from New York and Boston looking for better real estate prices. Naturally, there is the violence of economic displacement of longtime resident families.
What we found was an amazing mix of styles and influences; this is a neighborhood where legacy graffiti culture, global street art aesthetics, and institutional muralism are all stacked on top of each other—sometimes in dialogue, sometimes in competition. Take a look below and decide who the winners are.
Artists and writers this week include 2DX, AESOP ONE. Angurria, Betsy Casana, Calor Rosa, Celso Gonzalez, DanOne, Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, Invurt, Jason Andrew Turner, Jes Paints, Josh Sarantitis, Mike Hawthorne, Sabrina Cintron, Symone Salib, Taina Sisters, Vanessa Vega, and Vurt.
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A Jahru portrait rarely stops at resemblance; it searches for character, purpose, and presence. His reputation for revealing the character …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
