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.
At Harman Projects on the Lower East Side, Chris RWK and Friends opens April 18 and runs through May 9, 2026, bringing together a wide-ranging group of artists connected through Chris RWK’s long-standing personal and professional network. The list spans generations and approaches: John “Crash” Matos, a foundational figure in graffiti; Dain, whose collage-based portraits bridged fashion and street culture; Alice Mizrachi, moving between mural programs and institutional contexts; and Skewville, with their self-built trajectory of coded street humor and solid craft.
Chris RWK. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Around them is a broader circle of collaborators, illustrators, ceramicists, and object-makers—names that trace a scene that has shifted over time, expanding beyond its early street foundations into studio and gallery systems. For those who have followed this community closely—including earlier group exhibitions curated by Brooklyn Street Art in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when New York’s street art star was rising alongside a global swell of interest—the show reads as a continuation of those relationships, even as some participants have faded or moved in different directions.
Chris RWK. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Rather than presenting a tight curatorial thesis, the exhibition rings as a scene check-in—a snapshot of who’s still active and who’s in love. Chris RWK has long emphasized collaboration and friendship, and here that becomes the structure of the show itself. The inclusion of a CollectedCon component, with artists like Tara McPherson and Alex Pardee, extends the presentation into collectible objects, reflecting how this network now overlaps with editions, figures, and small-run works alongside paintings. It’s a shift many have made: what once moved through streets and small project spaces—trading stories and skateboard decks—now circulates through galleries and collector networks.
Ernie Parada. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Meanwhile, outside the gallery, New York remains as unpredictable as ever—new walls going up, new styles turning over, and a fresh set of players rewriting the script before the paint dries. Seen in that light, Chris RWK and Friends is less about staking new ground than about taking stock—those OG relationships, forged over time, gathered again on the walls.
CHRIS RWK & FRIENDS Featured Artists:Michael Banks | Zered Bassett | Ezra Brown | Ryan Callisto | ChrisRWK | City Kitty | Danny Cortes | John “Crash” Matos | Dain | Albert Diaz | Eye Sticker | Mike Gallo | Frank Gonzales | Blake Jones | K-NOR | Tim Kowalczyk | Koz | Danny Martin | Alice Mizrachi | MUMBOT | nite owl | Peter Paid | Ernie Parada | Skewville | Herb Smith | TRAP IF | Zimad
CollectedCon NYC Featured Artists:Alex Pardee I Tara McPherson I Sad Salesman I Yutoos I Ezra Brown
Chris RWK. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)Nite Owl. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)Skewville. Chris RWK & Friends. Harman Projects Gallery. NYC. (photo courtesy of the gallery)
Opening Night Reception: Saturday, April 18th 6pm to 8pm Open to the public, no appointment needed
Harman Projects 210 Rivington Street New York, NY 10002
In Vienna, the Klima Biennale Wien returns in 2026 with a wider civic footprint, extending its earlier conversations about ecology, urban systems, and public responsibility into the more elusive territory of “Unspeakable Worlds.” Organized through KunstHausWien and spread across institutions and public sites, the Biennale turns to the city itself as both setting and subject.
That approach aligns naturally with the long-running Calle Libre Festival, which since 2014 has built a visible network of murals across Vienna. Street Artists/muralists such as ESCIF, Okuda San Miguel, and Hyuro have contributed works that address migration, inequality, and environmental pressure in direct, legible ways. Those projects now sit in the background of the Biennale, evidence that the city has already been working through these questions in public space for years.
What shifts this year appears more structural. Instead of commissioning a few murals to support a central exhibition, the Biennale is working through existing production channels, with Calle Libre organizing artists, securing walls, and managing on-site execution for major outdoor projects like “(No) Funny Games.” In practical terms, that means the same crews who normally produce a street art festival are now producing a core part of the Biennale—identifying buildings, coordinating lifts, working with residents, and putting paint on the wall.
The murals are not afterthoughts; they are part of the main program. That raises a useful question: is the Biennale adapting to the street, or simply using its reach? Vienna, for the moment, is testing the biennial format against the street—and letting the results play out in full public view. Today we have a new mural by the duo NEVERCREW, contributing directly to that tension and dialogue.
Titled Souvenir, the mural by NEVERCREW is built like a plastic model kit spread across the side of a residential building. A large blue bear stands at the center, surrounded by disconnected parts—animal heads, fragments of landscape, a floating chunk of ice—each still attached to the thin framework that usually holds model pieces before assembly. The reference is familiar: something manufactured, packaged, and meant to be put together at home. Here, though, the subject is nature. By presenting animals and ecosystems as interchangeable parts, the piece points to a way of seeing the natural world as something that can be broken down, stored, and reassembled. The clean, almost toy-like finish pulls you in, but the logic underneath is colder: everything is separated, categorized, and ready for use. Does it all make sense?
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. We are following, with you and the rest of the world, the negotiations between Iran and the Trumpsters. We imagine that you cannot trust anything that comes from a foreign leader who said earlier in the week “a whole civilization will die tonight” in a social media post. Meanwhile, a 2-liter Coke is $4.10 at your local deli – about the same as a gallon of gas nationwide, and all young men 18-26 are going to be automatically registered for the draft. We’re trying to think of a clever joke to insert here, but nothing is coming up.
70s/80s NYC train writer Fab 5 Freddy has been on a book tour tied to a new memoir, “Everybody’s Fly” out this spring, re-centering his role as a connector between uptown graffiti writers, the downtown art world of the 1980s, and his early hip-hop media crossover in the 90s. Meanwhile, nobody is doing trains today, as rooftops and rappelling are the current popular practices in graffiti in Brooklyn and Queens, with names like Notice + Rams (MSK), Qzar, Vods, Timer, Sokem, Sickpay, and Dase circulating again for getting up—names you’ll recognize mixed with newer hands. And of course, the murals are starting to come out in force; private, community-led, and corporately sponsored.
Here are some new shots we caught this week on New York streets, featuring Eternal Possessions, Shev Lunatic, BESRK, IMK, El Avo, STOP, CRKSHNK, DEBT, FCM, Jenna Morello, Damsel, and Charm
Los Angeles isn’t one story—it stacks, collides, layers and loops back on itself in many shades. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage understands that, from the outset, it is not about expecting a clean genealogy but about a set of parallel tracks running through decades of paint, ink, and concrete. The film supports the show, moving through writers, muralists, and image-makers who have shaped the city’s surfaces in ways that resist easy categorization. What emerges isn’t a thesis so much as a rhythm: repetition, disappearance, reappearance. A freeway wall returns as influence in a studio piece; a community mural echoes across generations, owned by everyone.
Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)
There’s a productive friction between traditions often separated by geography, politics, or intention. Chicano muralism holds the wall as a site of collective memory and visibility, grounded in histories that refuse erasure. Graffiti writing reads the city as velocity—letters traveling, scaling, measured across distance. Then there’s the Venice and South Bay lineage, where skate graphics, surf culture, and DIY print aesthetics fold into street practice without asking permission. The discussions here don’t reconcile these approaches; it lets them sit in proximity, augmenting and constructing the whole.
From left to right. Steven Sulley, DEFER, Chaz Bojórquez, and Estevan Oriol. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)
The artists are protagonists – and conduits. Chaz Bojórquez builds images that anchor a community’s presence in place, drawing from Cholo writing and calligraphic traditions to layer symbolism, language, and identity with an insistence that reads as both pride and defiance. DEFER pushes a name across the city’s infrastructure, treating repetition as both signature and survival—his letters moving through freight lines, walls, and memory, carrying the discipline and reach of a writer who understands the system from the inside. RETNA navigates between commercial and subcultural space, pulling from global scripts and devotional, opaque mark-making to construct a visual language that circulates across galleries, fashion, and the street. Adjacent and amidst, Estevan Oriol frames it through a lens—his photographs grounding some of the mythology in lived reality, documenting the people, crews, and environments that give these marks their weight. Each approach is specific—and informed by predecessors, by crews, and by the physical and social conditions that continue to shape Los Angeles itself. This is where one can find a lineage.
Chaz Bojórquez. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)
What the documentary captures is how Los Angeles sustains multiple visual languages without forcing them into one narrative. The sprawl allows it; so does the distance between scenes and histories. That separation produces distinct codes—lettering, imagery, placement—that signal belonging as much as style. These stories aren’t flattened for consumption. They’re in motion, documentation becoming part of the cycle—a current caught briefly before it moves on.
Estevan Oriol is taking a photo while a guest looks at one of his photos in the show. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)
Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage is on view at Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street in Mayfair, London, bringing together Chaz Bojórquez, DEFER, Estevan Oriol, and RETNA in a focused exhibition tracing parallel strands of Los Angeles visual culture across graffiti, calligraphy, photography, and street-rooted abstraction. Presented by Woodbury House, it runs February 27 through April 24, 2026, Monday to Friday by appointment—a format that underscores its market posture even as it frames a longer lineage tied to the streets.
Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)DEFER. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)Foreground and background photographs by Estevan Oriol. Center, painting by DEFER. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)Estevan Oriol. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)DEFER. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)Chaz Bojórquez. Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage. Woodbury House. London, April 2026/ (image still from the video)
‘Los Angeles: A Visual Lineage’ remains on view at Woodbury House, Mayfair, until 24th April 2026 — no reservation required. Be quick, there are just over two weeks left to see this in person.
Woodbury House, 29 Sackville Street, Mayfair, London, W1S 3DX, United Kingdom. Click HERE for hours of operation, schedule of events, and directions.
Vik Muniz’s Perfect Strangers, installed at the 72nd Street station on the Q line train as part of the MTA Arts & Design program, meets you with a clarity of purpose that can feel disarming underground. It’s rare that people outside the city refer to New Yorkers as “normal people.” That is not in alignment with the mythology that fuels the imagination about us—and yet that is exactly what Muniz said he was aiming for: “I wanted them to be normal people. I know lots of normal people. I kept thinking: Who would make the perfect stranger?”
In a system built to move millions efficiently, the work interrupts your trip just enough to spark recognition—yourself, Doreen from the library, that nameless stud from the club last week, the woman who owns your building, or someone you passed on the stairs five minutes ago.
This collection of people is not a narrow definition of “normal,” of course. A polycultural city like New York requires a wide spectrum of fashion, profession, posture, attitude, and lifestyle to even begin to reflect who lives here. Muniz cast a large net, and the fish he caught are wide-ranging indeed: sharply dressed commuters, kids in costume, workers, wanderers, couples, and characters who feel both specific and archetypal. The MTA’s description of the work likewise emphasizes the “unique and quirky kinds of people one encounters on the subway,” and that breadth is part of what makes the installation feel true to the city.
Technically, the works carry Muniz’s familiar sleight of hand. At a glance, many of these portraits read as photographic—crisp, immediate, almost casual—but they resolve into mosaic as you draw near. The project was made from photographs of more than three dozen figures, then recreated in glass mosaic and installed throughout the mezzanine and entrance areas, with laminated glass also used at street level. The tension between realism and material construction is central to Muniz’s practice, and here it serves the public especially well: the images are legible in passing, but richer the longer you stay with them.
More than decoration, Perfect Strangers understands its audience. It doesn’t monumentalize or flatten; it observes. In a setting where anonymity is the default, Muniz offers recognition without sentimentality, reflecting back a city that is at once familiar and strange, ordinary and highly specific. Its success lies in that balance.
Happy Easter to all our readers who celebrate it, and pray for peace.
This week, we give light to some of the recent panels from a community wall project that consistently refreshes the view for people in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Founded in 2015 by artist and curator Jeff Beler, who developed the site after securing permission to transform construction fencing around a fire-damaged, long-abandoned building into an open-air mural space. The project, initially organized with curator Frankie Velez, operates as a recurring, theme-based installation refreshed roughly twice a year, bringing together a mix of established and emerging muralists to produce site-specific work across multiple panels. A community-based initiative, Underhill Walls has grown into a visible neighborhood fixture and a broader hub for mural production, emphasizing collaboration, accessibility, and artist “chemistry” in selection for the rotating roster.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, today featuring Anna Faris, Barbtropolis, BC NBA, Bunny M, Calicho Art, CAMI XVX, DG Millie, Drones, Fumero, Georgia Violett, Kams S Art, LeCrue Eyebrows, Luis Valle, Majo, Margarita Howls, Metamorph, Minhafofa, and Peachee Blue.
New Humans: Memories of the Future at the expanded New Museum, New York
Steven P. Harrington
Right on time for a global stage display of man’s inhumanity to man, the New Museum reopens on the Bowery — two years after closing for an $82 million expansion that missed its 2025 target and landed in early spring 2026. Under longtime director Lisa Phillips, the institution returns much as it has always been: ambitious, fast-moving, and still unusual in one key way — it doesn’t collect art. It stages arguments.
The new building, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, sleekly, streetly, serves its function. Circulation — once the museum’s quiet, persistent headache — is solved. New elevator banks, a central staircase, and cleaner movement between old and new galleries make it easy to see the work. The glass façade opens small slices of the city, static yet jarring — a fortress framed in streaming HD clarity — and once inside, the transitions are seamless enough to blur where the old ends and the new begins. Strip away the poetry: the architecture does its job and gets out of the way, which reads as a mature team of designers and theoreticians.
That restraint matters, because the opening exhibition, New Humans, doesn’t hold back from clobbering you with big ideas — and other subtle, darker, compelling ones. With more than 150 artists across multiple floors, it’s an ambitious, possibly overwhelming attempt to map what humanity looks like under all of this pressure — technological, political, biological. The thematic sections read like a checklist of current anxieties and obsessions: Mechanical Ballets, Prosthetic Gods, Hall of Robots, Postapocalyptic Creatures, The City. You can feel the curators tracking how we got here — and where we might be headed as things continue to build, and unravel.
At its best, the show traces a clear throughline across time, pushing earlier experiments to speak directly alongside contemporary work to show these questions didn’t just arrive with AI hype. They’ve been building for a century, at least. You may say it is overpacked — a clattering din of voices — and even with all this new space, we humans still need more room for all our profound ideas to land. Would the Earth be large enough to contemplate what we are, with our exaggerated sense of self and appetite for exuberance and waste?
For us — maybe because of New York street art history — one of the clearest voices in this brain noise is Rammellzee. His work doesn’t ask whether we’re post-human — it assumes we’re already in a struggle over what being human means. His armored figures and self-built cosmology — part graffiti theory, part science fiction, part raw invention — imagines with his sense of swagger — the body as a force in motion, adapting, encoding, defending itself. His is not a retreat from humanity; It’s a push deeper into it, through language, conflict, imagination, and dope style.
One thematic subtitle names it plainly: Postapocalyptic Creatures. In this moment of wars and rumors of wars, it’s hard not to bring the outside in when you see the scepters—and those who carry them—bent on our collective debasement. If we fuck things up beyond repair—what then? What sharpens, what falls away, what regenerates? Your niece wonders, quietly, “Would we still have TikTok?”
Speaking of tension, the language of “post-human” suggests we’ve moved beyond ourselves, but nothing here supports that. The artists aren’t post-human. The audience isn’t post-human. The concerns — war, control, care, survival, identity — are as familiar as ever. If anything feels outdated, it’s the idea that we can step outside these conditions rather than work through them. Right now.
The New Museum excels at staging big questions without pretending to resolve them. New Humans continues that tradition. It’s messy, frustrating, sharp. It asks what we are becoming, but the stronger moments suggest a different task: not imagining a world beyond the human, but figuring out how to live with one another inside it — repairing damage, recognizing each other, deciding what we carry forward.
The building works. The show jars the brain and heart. And the strongest parts don’t point to some distant future — they point right back at us.
Interlocutor #1: ”The future isn’t what it used to be.” Interlocutor #2 “Yes, we have a great future, behind us”.
~ overheard at opening
Thematic subtitles of the exhibition’s main galleries; Reproductive Futures, Mechanical Ballets, Prosthetic Gods, Leviathans, Dream Machines, Automatic Women, New Images of Man, Postapocalyptic Creatures, Human Animal, Homunculus, Animacies, Hall of Robots, and The City.
The New Museum. New Humans: Memories of the Future is now open to the general public. For a full list of artists, tickets, directions, schedule of events, and hours, click HERE.
In these recent street photos, the painted tributes read less like “artworks” in the gallery sense and more like public messages—meant to hold their place long enough for the neighborhood to recognize itself in them. The visual grammar is consistent across New York’s “Rest in Peace” walls: the portrait (often larger-than-life), the name set like a headline, the dates, the short dedication, and then the personal details—favorite colors, a car or bike, a sports logo, a prayerful phrase, a few chosen symbols—that insist on a whole life rather than a police report or a death notice. Accounts of these murals emphasize that they frequently avoid explaining the cause of death; the point is the person as they were loved, and the fact of absence as it’s felt on the block.
What these memorial walls do socially is as important as what they show visually. They create a fixed location for grief that otherwise may have difficulty finding its place, standing still in a fast, loud city. Ethnographic descriptions of New York memorial walls note that the act of painting can itself function as a public event: neighbors stop, watch, and talk; family members sometimes come by to share stories with the artists; and once the image is up, the wall can become the backdrop for offerings—candles, photos, flowers—left by friends, relatives, and passersby.
Folklore scholarship on spontaneous shrines helps name what’s happening here. As Jack Santino writes in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, these are public forms of mourning that invite participation from those who encounter them.
There’s nothing sentimental about it when you’re standing there. It’s direct. People come, they look, they leave something, they say a name out loud. The wall holds it.
RIP Lies between Graffiti, Educational Murals, and the Ad-Saturated City
These painted “RIP” walls sit squarely in the overlap zone between illegal graffiti practice, street-art portraiture, and longer community-mural traditions. New York documentation explicitly links them to graffiti aesthetics while stressing a crucial difference: unlike name-writing for fame, the name that matters here is the deceased person’s. You can place their growth in late-1980s/1990s city life—an era marked by the AIDS crisis, crack and drugs, police and neighborhood violence, alongside the displacement of writers from trains to walls.
At the same time, community mural histories frame wall painting as civic pedagogy. As Janet Braun-Reinitz and Jane Weissman write in On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City, community murals “beautify, educate, protest, celebrate, affirm, organize, and motivate residents to action.” Memorial walls sit inside that lineage without asking permission. They are not advertising, but they push against it, taking up space in the same visual field and replacing the city’s usual sales language with something harder to ignore: remember this person. They were here.
Published work on this practice now gives a clearer sense of both its visual consistency and its function. The anchor remains R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra, still one of the most direct documentations of New York’s memorial murals as a public form. More recently, I’ll See You On The Other Side by Omar Hamdoun and Michael Brewer gathers hundreds of examples across the boroughs, reinforcing how embedded the practice has become.
The longer arc—how wall painting operates as cultural memory, public pedagogy, and neighborhood record—runs through works like On the Wall. These walls fade, get painted over, disappear under redevelopment, or simply lose their surface. That fragility is part of their meaning. As Erika Doss writes, “Temporary memorials are created to be experienced: to be felt, not simply to be seen.” They do their work in the open, and then they’re gone, or nearly gone—but not before they’ve marked the place.
Further Reading Martha Cooper & Joseph Sciorra, R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art Omar Hamdoun & Michael Brewer, I’ll See You On The Other Side Jack Santino, Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death Erika Doss, The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials Janet Braun-Reinitz & Jane Weissman, On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City
Italian graffiti and conceptual artist Elfo, whose cryptic unpainterly interventions often employ language, irony, appropriation, and deliberately rudimentary aesthetics to …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
