NYC’s 55th annual Pride March down 5th Avenue kicks off today, themed “Rise Up: Pride in Protest,” taking on a decidedly defiant stance on equality for all. Suppose you are in the subway, dance club, or park in Bushwick, Chinatown, or midtown. Like every June, it’s a lavender parade all weekend, with all members of the LGBTQUA+ communities from around the country and the world laughing, dancing, fighting, posing, and canoodling.
Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani clinched the Democratic nomination here this week after defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, possibly igniting a polarized reaction across NYC politics. Hm, wonder if anyone will mention his religion in the next few months. What do you think? But, de facto, he’s going to be the next mayor – unless Bloomberg wants to blow more money before the November election.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Andre Trenier, Dirt Cobain, Drones, Dzel, Fear Art, Jappy Agoncillo, Jason Naylor, Jeff Rose, Kam S. Art, Manik, Modomatic, Par, Riot, Senisa, Tom Bob, Werds, and Zimer.
The new exhibition Terra Forma from Saman and Sasan Oskouei at IRL Gallery is a quiet storm—an atmospheric meditation on fragility, formation, and the traces of life left behind as nature and industry brush against one another. The brothers don’t shout their critique; it would be folly. Instead, they whisper it across surfaces that suggest ancient terrain, marginalized neighborhoods, and the factory floor—a cross-current of poetics and rusted precision.
Formerly known to many as the street-art duo Icy & Sot, the Oskoueis have moved far from their early stencil-protest days, carrying the soil—and perhaps a few chunks of pavement—of that journey with them. In Terra Forma, cherry-wood spheres rest in arms of bent steel, organic gestures rising from hard geometries. “These fabricated plants carry forth smooth spheres of warm cherrywood as if they were sacrificial gifts—or the building blocks of a not-too-distant future,” notes writer and historian Signe Havsteen, whose exhibition text captures the tension between the natural and the manufactured.
Saman & Sasan Oskouei. “Terra Forma”. IRL Gallery. (photo courtesy of the artists)
Mutation and evolution play out here as industrial flora absorb the ambient residue of urban life. Muted hues emerge from layered surfaces—traces of changing landscapes that resist permanence, hovering somewhere between formation and collapse. There is no romanticism; instead, the Oskoueis offer a quiet ambiguity, a recognition that the ground beneath us is ever shifting.
Steel curves because someone bent it; wood gleams because someone carved it. These are materials with histories, and under the hands of Saman and Sasan they become vessels for what remains. Terra Forma invites you to experience them as weight, as scent, as memory made solid.
Saman & Sasan Oskouei. “Terra Forma”. IRL Gallery. (photo courtesy of the artists)Saman & Sasan Oskouei. “Terra Forma”. IRL Gallery. (photo courtesy of the artists)Saman & Sasan Oskouei. “Terra Forma”. IRL Gallery. (photo courtesy of the artists)
At the corner of Primorska 3 in Novi Sad, where vendors at an informal NAJLON PIJACA flea market lay out used clothes and household items on the pavement, a new mural has appeared. It shows a burning crown, painted directly onto a low wall beside the rag-tag but prim market. The work is by French-German artist MTO, known for his precise technique and sharp social commentary.
The mural follows a national tragedy. On November 1, 2024, at 11:52 a.m., the concrete canopy of Novi Sad’s central railway station collapsed, killing 16 people. The incident was widely seen as a consequence of poor oversight and alleged corruption, particularly involving foreign construction firms. In response, students organized protests that quickly grew into a national movement. Their actions included campus shutdowns, an 80-kilometer march from Belgrade to Novi Sad, a bicycle ride to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and daily 15-minute silences at the time of the collapse.
MTO’s mural, though unsanctioned, has become part of the response. “The painting of the crown on fire,” he writes, “is not a portrait of grief, but a declaration—that the monarchy of impunity must burn.” The crown isn’t aimed at royalty, but at what the artist sees as unchecked power. The mural now sits among other public expressions of remembrance, including flowers and candles at the station.
MTO, originally from France and based in Berlin, is known for its large-scale grayscale portraits, which often incorporate symbolic elements. His work has appeared in cities such as Lisbon, Berlin, Miami, and Sarajevo, usually featuring political and social critique. The mural in Novi Sad continues that approach. It also connects to broader public sentiment: in the U.S., the recent “No Kings” marches have voiced similar calls for accountability and limits on concentrated power. In both cases, public space becomes a site for protest and reflection.
This week, we mark the passing of Brooklyn-born photographer Marcia Resnick, whose camera cut through the cultural chaos of late 1970s and early 1980s New York punk subculture with clarity, bite, and precision. She wasn’t just in the room—Resnick was part of the scene. Her black-and-whites told the truth, or at least a version of it that compelled you. She caught peacocks like Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, and Stiv Bators when nightlife was a contact sport and celebrity was going through a re-evaluation. Gritty or mundane, she captured pockets of the city—Mudd Club, CBGB—where the Ramones, Talking Heads, and Bad Brains blew out the walls and made mockery of mainstream, and where cultural conduits like Fab Five Freddy slipped between scenes, wiring punk to hip hop and graffiti before most people knew there was even a circuit.
Resnick had a particular skill: people—posturing poets, punk detonation squads, intellectual misfits—trusted her even when they shouldn’t have. Lydia Lunch, Klaus Nomi, Quentin Crisp, Jean-Michel Basquiat, William Burroughs, Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, and John Belushi – each showy in their own way and more iconic than the last- were captured. She made them look less like icons and more like complicated mammals with dreams, drugs, and dirty laundry. Her whole visual archive sings like a live wire, and we thank her for it.
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Branded Art, Elena Ohlander, INEPT, Karat, RIPE143, Rita Flores, Tones One, Trek6, and Yalus.
A powerful new mural emerges this summer in Hell’s Kitchen, where West 47th Street meets the edges of the park. Painted by Italian artist Fabio Petani, BOTANICAL PULSE: Insulin & Spartium Junceum is more than a striking visual gesture—it is a message written in flora and chemistry, an atmospheric gift to the neighborhood. Tall, quiet, and surprisingly layered, the mural brings together golden blooms of Spanish broom (Spartium junceum) with floating shapes and forms that echo chemical diagrams, referencing insulin. This hormone regulates energy in the body. As is his practice, this is a fusion of science and nature, with Petani offering an urban meditation on the balance between breath and density, body and structure, biology and atmosphere.
Known for his thoughtful combinations of botanical illustration and scientific symbology, Fabio Petani has painted his signature visual language on public walls from Europe to the Americas. Initially from Pescara, Italy, he approaches each mural as site-specific, researching the environment, history, and ecology of a place before selecting his subjects. His work often pairs the Latin name of a plant with a chemical compound that has metaphorical or environmental significance. Here in New York, Insulin & Spartium Junceum speak of resilience, adaptation, and inner rhythms—fitting themes for an NYC neighborhood shaped by constant movement and reinvention.
But this mural does more than speak—it acts. Painted with a mineral-based technology that interacts with sunlight and airborne pollutants, the wall itself performs a kind of quiet urban alchemy. Every day for years to come, this mural will reduce the impact of traffic emissions on the surrounding block. It’s a reminder that public art can serve a purpose beyond aesthetics, offering beauty as well as benefit. Without branding or slogans, it invites passersby to consider what it means to live in a city where art and air quality might improve side by side.
The composition has an elegance and a calm conviction. Petani’s cool tones and open structure give the work room to breathe, while its underlying scientific references suggest invisible forces at play. It is a mural that functions on many levels—as a work of art, an act of care, and a public pulse check.
Welcome to Part II of II of our photo collection from the 14th Annual Bushwick Collective Block Party. This year’s edition, held on May 31, 2025, brought together a powerful fusion of beats, paint, and community spirit—just the kind of vibrant energy we at BSA love to celebrate.
Everybody’s proud of their neighborhood, and even though Bushwick continues to change, become more unaffordable, a little suburban, and sometimes feels like it is erasing the hardworking community that made it great, it takes a block party like this to remind you about what Bushwick is. Shout out to Joe and his family and team for incorporating the graffiti heads into the mix and allowing street art and graffiti to coexist in a way many predicted would be impossible; a truly unique collection of artists, styles, disciplines, inspirations, and themes.
In a decisive nod to the city that shaped him, legendary graffiti artist DAZE (Chris Ellis) has unveiled two new large-scale murals at 550 Madison Avenue, transforming the building’s soaring street-level space into a canvas that bridges worlds. Painted live in public view, these works are part of “Above Ground Midtown: MCNY x DAZE.” With their vibrant forms, layered textures, and intuitive energy, DAZE’s murals draw from the pulse of New York City, the geometry of Philip Johnson’s iconic building design, and the surrounding garden oasis that gently appears in midtown Manhattan.
To fans of New York graffiti and street art, DAZE needs no introduction. A member of the second wave of graffiti writers in the late 1970s and early ’80s, he began painting subway trains as a student at the High School of Art and Design, developing a signature style marked by wildstyle lettering, surreal characters, and a painterly sense of movement. Over the decades, he has nurtured a career, evolving into a fine artist while continuing to honor the raw urban energy of his roots. “I think of these pieces as a continuation of a language I started developing underground,” DAZE tells us. “Only now, we’re bringing it out into the light—quite literally.”
Curator Sean Corcoran of the Museum of the City of New York sees this installation as an extension of the museum’s current exhibition, Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, which includes early works by DAZE and many of his contemporaries. “This project is about visibility—making sure the public understands graffiti not just as something from the past, but as a living, evolving art form with deep ties to the city’s history,” he says. “Having DAZE create these murals in real time, for anyone to see, reinforces the idea that this movement was always meant to be in dialogue with the street—and with the people of New York.”
BSA asked DAZE and Corcoran a couple of questions about the project:
Brooklyn Street Art (BSA): DAZE, these new canvases feel like they’re in direct conversation with the city itself — its architecture, movement, street energy, and natural elements. How do they reflect your biography as a New Yorker and a writer who came up in the 1970s and ’80s?
DAZE: In creating these two paintings I wanted to capture the feeling of someone somehow say, in a taxi, going uptown and watching how the cityscape changes from one neighborhood to the next. At the same time I wanted to inject certain natural images within the painting. Even though we all live in a city that is noisy and congested, there are still areas where one can find a nice park to sit and have a quiet moment. I felt like that side of the city had to be represented too.
BSA: You created these pieces live, in a high-visibility Midtown space, a far cry from painting trains in the dark. What does it mean to you to create something so public and above-ground in the heart of a city you’ve been documenting and writing a visual diary for over 40+ years?
DAZE: I was very aware of the architecture of the building and its history. One of the unique things about the space is that the ceilings are so high. It’s an interior space, however, you feel as if you’re outside, which is quite unique.
It was amazing to create something large scale in an area of New York City that receives both many tourists and people who are working there. It exposes my work to a new audience.
BSA: Sean, DAZE’s career spans the early days of illegal train writing to significant institutional recognition — how does his presence here at 550 Madison, and possibly in the Martin Wong Collection, help tell a fuller story of graffiti’s evolution in New York?
Sean Corcoran: Daze’s career is an excellent example of the trajectory of a number of the artistically ambitious writers who emerge from the “train writing”’ era movement that developed a long and impactful studio career that helped export the regional subculture to a worldwide phenomenon. Martin Wong, the Lower East Side painter and generous donor of the majority of the Museum’s collection of more than 300 paintings and 60 black books, was interested in telling the story of this a youth culture that largely sprung up in New York City.
He wanted to trace the youthful rebellion of you people painting on subway trains and public spaces, but he was equally interested in the communication and artistic inclinations as well, and he actively encouraged and supported this by not only buying canvases, but by being a friend and sometimes mentor.
BSA: The title Above Ground for the Martin Wong Collection—and this above-ground exhibition by a writer known for his work on underground trains—suggests a subculture being brought into the light. In curating this collection today at the MCNY, what conversations do you hope it sparks about the place of artists like DAZE in both the art world and the cultural history of the city?
Sean Corcoran:Above Ground is intended to loosely trace the early efforts of train writers as they moved out of the tunnels and layups and into the studio. The exhibition notes the importance of several transitional moments in this history – The United Graffiti Artists (founded in 1972), Sam Esses Studio in 1980, the advent of East Village galleries like Fun and 51X soon after in the early 1980s, and then the jump to blue chip galleries, including Sidney Janis, and opportunities in Europe. These are all examples of the long road these artists took in developing their careers. The paintings in the gallery reflect both Martin’s collection and the various paths the artists took, from maintaining a letter-based art to moving into abstraction and figuration. The exhibition ends in the early 1990s just as the “train writing era” ends, but we all know that that was just the end of the beginning of the story…..
Welcome to Part I of II of our photo collection from the 14th Annual Bushwick Collective Block Party. This year’s edition, held on May 31, 2025, brought together a powerful fusion of beats, paint, and community spirit—just the kind of vibrant energy we at BSA love to celebrate.
The day’s star performer, hip-hop legend Rakim, set the stage alight with an electrifying set that fused old-school authenticity with Bushwick’s forward-thinking street culture – an intelligent merging of underground and old-school. Sharing the spotlight were dynamic artists Statik Selektah, Gorilla Nems, Termanology, and Evil Dee, among others.
On the mural front, the Block Party again transformed Troutman Street into a living gallery. This year’s visiting muralists included Sef1, Contrabandre, Huetek, Gigstar & Minus One, Tymon de Laat, Ashley Hodder, and Enzo a psychotropic summer stew that again sampled from acrss the graffiti and street art spectrum.
It was a weekend where paint met poetry, beats met brushstrokes, and each corner of Bushwick told a fresh story. We hope these images capture the creative dialogue that unfolded. Stay tuned for Part II, where we continue to explore more of this year’s murals and moments.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Eid Mubarak to all observing today. Happy Puerto Rican Parade to todos nuestras hermanos y hermanas. We’re grateful to live in a city that celebrates many traditions with such heart. That’s why it’s always perplexing to see Ken and Barbie-types on the national stage vociferating about DEI as if it were a mold on the back wall of your refrigerator. Equality has always been the point.
Banksy’s recent mural in Marseille, France, continues the Bristol artist’s tradition of indirect yet emotionally charged communication. Painted on Rue Félix Frégier, the black-and-white stencil depicts a lighthouse, accompanied by the phrase “I want to be what you saw in me.” Cleverly integrated into its environment, the mural uses the shadow of a nearby street bollard to serve as the lighthouse’s beam—an understated but remarkable visual device.
Interpretations vary, but we’ll venture one: it reads as an oblique critique of nations or institutions once seen as guiding lights—sources of moral or cultural leadership—that now appear directionless or diminished. The lighthouse, in this reading, becomes a symbol of lost purpose. Aware that no one looks to it for guidance anymore, it expresses a quiet resignation, perhaps even grief. Poor lighthouse. The Smithsonian magazine says its just a straightforward plea for attention from the artist. The view may seem surprising, but more astonishing is that the Smithsonian weighed in at all.
Now it’s your turn to be the armchair psychologist or social analyst.
This week in break-up news, the U.S. President and the Twitter tycoon who would be king took their grievances public, trading jabs on social media in a battle to tarnish each other’s image. Each was presumably trying to damage the other’s perception in the public eye, although that hardly seemed necessary. As George Clooney’s Edward R. Murrow put it last night, live on Broadway and live broadcasted on network television: ‘Good night, and good luck.’ As ever, it’s more about control and good money than anything else. It makes you wonder if either one of these guys could be sworn in as president in January ’29. Has a certain ring to it, no?
And here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 2DX, Adam Fu, Atomiko, Below Key, Chris Haven, EXR, HEFS, Jason Haaf, Quaker Pirate, Scoote LaForge, Tom Bob, and Werds.
In the charged aftermath of 1960s protest movements, artists began taking their practices beyond galleries and into the streets, forging a new relationship with public space and everyday materials. The Situationists, for example, sought to interrupt the routines of daily life by wandering the city without a plan, using these aimless drifts to reveal the city’s hidden psychological and political layers. Around the same time, Gordon Matta-Clark carved literal voids into abandoned buildings, turning architecture itself into sculpture and critique. It was during this fertile moment, when early graffiti writers were claiming walls and conceptual artists were transforming the urban landscape, that Masao Gozu began his own quiet, obsessive project in New York. Though not street art in the conventional sense, Gozu’s decades-long practice of photographing and reconstructing building façades from the Lower East Side resonates with the same spirit: using the city itself as subject, surface, and raw material. In the essay that follows, artist and curator Ted Riederer—who first met Gozu while directing Howl! Happening—offers an intimate portrait of an artist who transforms dereliction into devotion, and time itself into sculpture.
During the Pleistocene 1970s and 80s, New York street art culture coalesced into a variegated art form. What began with simple tags ended with museum exhibitions. In the early 80s, when East Village street artists were painting and posting on derelict buildings, Masao Gozu was disassembling them and reconstructing them into monuments. I first met Gozu when I was the artistic director of Howl Happening: An Arturo Vega project. We mounted his exhibition Timeframe in the Fall of 2017. I was awestruck by his all-encompassing quasi-spiritual devotion to his work. Piece by piece he dismantled abandoned buildings. Piece by piece he methodically rebuilt them in his studio. In disassembling and reassembling a puzzle of bricks, he was in search of a fleeting moment in time. His work is not street art, rather art made with the streets.
Born at the end of WW2, Masao Gozu grew up in rural Nagano, Japan, where his family had lived for ten generations. Like many other artists his age, Gozu was discouraged by what he perceived as a lack of opportunity in the reconstruction and occupation of post-war Japan. He applied to art school in the United States as an escape and was accepted into the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
There is an under-reported history of Japanese artists contributing to the vibrant downtown art scene in New York during the 1970s and 80s. Artist and friend Toyo Tsuchiya, who moved to New York in 1980, attributed his own immigration to an enticing article about the New York art scene published in the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo. Unable to relate to the stiff, formal academic art world reigning in Japan during these years, Tsuchiya described arriving in New York and being quite surprised to find an established and thriving community of avant-garde Japanese artists on the Lower East Side, centered for the most part, around Kazuko Miyamoto’s Gallery Onetwentyeight.
Penniless and alone, Gozu had moved to Brooklyn in 1971. At the Brooklyn Museum Art School he studied under Reuben Tam, a landscape painter. Through this community, Gozu found other artists who helped him find work and housing. 1971 is also the year he began taking pictures of windows.
Stalking parades, street fairs, and feast days, Masao Gozu photographed the diverse residents of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods peering out apartment window frames. In almost all of the photographs of windows, the subjects are gazing at some action outside the frame of the window, either on the street below or up in the sky above. This series entitled 33 Windows references the number 33 which in Buddhism is a sacred number representing infinity.
Gozu’s Window Series captures the “zeitgeist” of New York in the 70s and 80s with as much aesthetic appeal as some of the storied photographs of the city such as those by Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Alfred Stieglitz. There is, however, something distinct and unique in Gozu’s artistic vision. Through the repetition of his formal composition in which the window frame is always centered in the photograph, Mazao Gozu’s pictures represent less of a documentation of everyday life, and more of an investigation into time and form.
This conceptual nod to the architecture of the window is reminiscent of the work of Bernd and Hilda Becher whose pictures of industrial structures from the same time period evade the categorization of traditional landscape photography. Their “tableau-like arrangements …always created and conceptualized according to the same parameters, inscribe themselves in the presentation space.” The Bechers label their work as Anonyme Skulpturen or Anonymous Sculptures.”¹
In his other photographic series 264, and Harry’s Bar, the practice and discipline of taking repetitive photographs over the course of years from the same position again and again hints that photography was a tool in part of a much larger conceptual practice. In Harry’s Bar, Gozu hunted the precise moment when a bar patron appeared in the exact position in lower left windowpane of a bar at 98 Bowery. To produce a series of 20 photographs, Gozu spent five years rigorously tracking and hunting the absolute image.
I asked Gozu how he transitioned from taking pictures of buildings to making sculptures with buildings. He answered that, “It started with Harry’s Bar.” Masao writes, “When it closed, I saw a sign that said ‘Everything for Sale’ and had the idea of buying the entire window and exhibiting it at a photo exhibition with photo. I tried to negotiate with the bar, but it didn’t work out.”
Masao continues, “Then, around 1983, I came across a destroyed building near Wall Street area and tore off the bricks and window frames from the surface, carried them to my apartment, and rebuilt them. It was an ordinary apartment, so the living room floor sank, so I quickly secured space in the basement of a nearby East village apartment and started assembling the windows.”
In his quest to capture the fleeting images he chased, Masao methodically marked, numbered, and then removed the bricks, glass panes, and mortar from the window frames of abandoned buildings in the East Village, reconstructing them in his studio. He enlisted his neighbors as models and dressed the windows with taxidermy, curtains and flowers. By staging the photos, he could have more control over the subject and composition, yet it’s clear that, in the process of making these pictures, Gozu’s persistence and meticulous rebuilding allude to the fact that his use of photography belied his affinity for sculpture.
It’s difficult to imagine anyone attempting to steal entire sections of buildings in today’s New York, but the East Village was lawless during the 1970s through the early 1990s. Heroin addiction and then crack were endemic to the East Village. In October of 1975, the city was hours away from bankruptcy as mayor Abraham Beame announced to the press, “I have been advised by the Comptoller that the City of New York has insufficient cash on hand to meet its debt obligation due today… Now we must take immediate action to protect essential life support systems of our city to preserve the well-being of all our citizens.”²
Robbery and assaults were reported at all-time highs, and as middle-class families abandoned the city so did landlords abandon and neglect buildings. Squatting was rampant up until the late 1980s.
Artists like Gozu were taking advantage of the city’s demise. Dismantling buildings is reminiscent of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark who staged a series of actions in the early 1970s in abandoned buildings in the Bronx and in piers along Manhattan’s waterfront which exist today only in photographs. Masao says he was not aware of Gordon Matta-Clark at the time.
During this period photography expanded sculptural practice, “It permitted the sculptors of the 1960s and 1970s to emerge from their studios and the white cubes of galleries and museums, and to make remote desert zones, downtrodden urban districts, indeed the entire social environment, the venues of their spatial/sculptural interventions. The expansion of the sculptural field as we know it from Earth Art and Street Art was based essentially on the authenticating, indexical character of the photographic image.” ³
Masao Gozu staged 8-10 of these photographs. They were laborious, physically strenuous, and time-consuming. These actions were also physically dangerous. One night, he recounted, he was carrying pieces of a building and a tripod back to his studio when he was surrounded by police who had been tipped off that someone matching Gozu’s description was carrying a shotgun. Later, in an abandoned building in the Bronx, two men threatened to shoot him.
Reconstructing the windows as set pieces planted a sculptural seed. As he constructed these windows, Gozu realized that the solemnity of an empty window frame without the human figure was the embodiment of the ephemeral state that he had long sought to capture through his pictures. By removing the figure from the window, Gozu, as he recently described, now saw the empty frames as mirrors, “empty windows are now the stage that can reflect me.”
During the installation of his show Time Frame, I marveled as he hoisted section upon section from his perch atop metal scaffolding. The determination, rigor, and discipline that Gozu demonstrates in his work is inspirational. He will spend five years taking photographs from the same spot, and thousands of hours assembling tons of rock to create a sculpture which is a monument to the fragility of time, a concept that he calls “Nagare” or stream, in which he sees himself as an ephemeral moment in the span of eons.
As I write about Masao, I can conjure a 3 am Bowery moment in the 1980s when, with a cart full of bricks, Masao passes Keith Haring painting his first large-scale mural on the corner of Bowery and Houston. ___________________________________________
¹ Bogomir Ecker, Raimund Kummer, Friedemann, Malsch, Herbert Molderings(ed.), Lens/ Based Scuplture, The Transformation of Sculture Through Photography, exhibition catalog, Academie der Kunst , Berlin, and Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz, 2014, 86. ² Jeff Nussbaum, The Night New York Saved Itself From Bankrupcy, The New Yorker, October 16, 2015. ³ Roxana Marcoci(ed.) The Original Copy. Photography of Scultpure, 1839 to Today, With essays by Roxana Marcoci, Geoffrey Batchen and Tobia Bezzola, exhibition catalog, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010, 154.
About the Writer:
Ted Riederer is a multidisciplinary artist and curator whose practice merges punk ethos with poetic interventions. A former band member and the Founding Artistic Director of Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project in New York’s East Village, Riederer has exhibited widely, from PS1 and the Liverpool Biennial to galleries in Berlin, Lisbon, and Bangladesh. His international project Never Records blends performance, vinyl, and community engagement.
After a landmark debut in Brooklyn in 2023, the Tag Conference returns to New York City this June with sharpened purpose. Hosted at the Museum of the City of New York — where Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection currently holds court — this year’s program centers on legacy: specifically, the lasting influence of writers who’ve passed, but whose marks, names, and styles helped shape graffiti as a global culture.
More than a memorial, this is a reckoning for some who want to preserve memory — a gathering of voices from across generations who contemplate the urgency of honoring those whose stories often slip through the cracks of institutional history. What emerges is a rare confluence: practitioners, historians, documentarians, and artists sharing the mic to uplift the names and contributions of pioneers like PHASE 2, Stay High 149, Tracy 168, Dez, Kez 5, Rambo, and Zexor.
The lineup reads like a blueprint of lineage and loyalty: COCO 144 and David Schmidlapp speak on PHASE 2; Chris “Freedom” Pape reflects on Stay High 149; J.SON brings us closer to Tracy 168; Henry Chalfant and Blue “Dero” Asencio illuminate Dez; Skuf YKK on Kez 5; Alan Ket on Rambo; and tributes from Fernando Lions, Tats Cru, Carlos Mare, and scholars Joe Austin, Rafael Schacter, and Edward Birzin. With such a strengthened focus on this lineup — these are acts of cultural preservation.
At a time when graffiti is increasingly archived, exhibited, and sold — and its imagery absorbed into mainstream culture — the Tag Conference stays grounded in the complexities of its origins: memory, dissent, and street-level scholarship. In the same city that once deployed harsh policies to scrub these names from trains and walls, their stories now resurface — not without controversy, but with clarity. Here, they are not simply lionized or condemned, but understood as originators whose marks challenged norms, claimed space, and left a visual legacy still celebrated and debated today.
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THE TAG CONFERENCE MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK NEW YORK CITY JUNE 13 & 14, 2025
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Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Love you to the moon, June!
In New York yesterday, gamers marked the launch of the city’s first annual Video Game Festival, where esports battles, indie demos, and retro arcades spilled into real life like the final boss stage. With its mashup of pixel nostalgia and future-forward tech, the festival echoed the spirit of underground subcultures — not unlike street art — where DIY worlds are built, rules are rewritten, and creativity levels up with every move.
You may prefer experiences in the actual physical world, so Bushwick Collective had a flood of in-person opportunities for visitors to their 14th block party this weekend. Thousands of people from around the city and many parts of the world were there to see hundreds of murals, live artists painting, and a showcase of rapping firebrands of the underground scene – ending with a performance by hip-hop architect Rakim, who was, of course, paid in full.
At BEYOND THE STREETS, curator and publisher Roger Gastman sat down with graffiti artist RIME for an intimate conversation and book signing highlighting RIME’s raw, unfiltered sketchbook—a personal and psychedelic blend of graffiti, visual journaling, and spiritual reflection created entirely in pen during his travels across the U.S.
And here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Below Key, Blanco, Bisser, Danilo Parrales, Detor, Gouch NKC, Gregos, Kosuke James, MSG Crew, Nite Owl, Nito, Skewville, Tom Bob, Turtle Caps, Zero Productivity, Zoot, and ZUI.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
