Constant rain for days, but the street art is blooming, baby! As are the riotous news waves about the Supreme Court, abortion laws, the efficacy of the vaccine, the ridiculous/tone deaf Met Ball, the new electric bikes just released by Citi, a rise in anti-semitism in New York, the legalization of weed, the 60 Collective 3 show in Dumbo, Swoon’s new “Sanctuary” Project, Elon Musk buying Twitter, a virtual unknown winning the Kentucky Derby, and Meghan McCain selling only 244 copies of her new book. Who is she again?
Nevermind, we’re back on the streets where we belong, tracking the exciting new directions it is taking us.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Jason Naylor, INSA, Sticker Maul, Stikman, Degrupo, Diva Dogla, Mike Raz, Corn Queen, Jorit, Eric John Eigner, Smet Sky Art, Bad Boi, O. Grey, Steven Paul Judd, Katie Merz, and Delphinoto.
“Ramadan Kareem” to everyone celebrating it this month. Also in April the Jews will be celebrating Passover and the Christians will be celebrating Easter and the Hindus are celebrating Chaitra Navratri. New York has the most diverse assembly of amazing and beautiful neighbors and we are all richer as a result.
In Hollywood and elsewhere people are celebrating/mourning the events surrounding Will Smith. In street art style, his infamous act shows up on a wall this week already (below).
It’s been cold in NYC this week! Fingers are cold, noses are cold, and migrating geese are humming the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go”. The Cyclone at Luna Park in Coney Island, opened yesterday and assures New Yorkers that Spring is already here even if you don’t feel it yet.
We’re excited to see the new exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure opens here this week. Congratulations to his family for bringing this enormous undertaking to fruition, especially Jean-Michel’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux and his stepmother Nora Fitzpatrick.
Also, don’t sleep on the Whitney Biennial, opening Wednesday! Curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards say they have had a guiding principle; “It’s got to be buck wild.” That’s enough for us. Hopefully, some people will be buck naked at the show. A special shout-out to Biennial artist Jane Dixon. Her paintings and photographs of New York in the 80s captured its electricity and unpolished promise – during the time when she lived with filmmaker Charlie Ahearn in an apartment overlooking the tawdry excitement of Times Square. She say the city was, “burning, broke, and dangerous.”
Gentle people, start your stopwatch! Let’s see how long it takes for news items and pundits to begin likening our new Staten Island Amazon warehouse union workers to terrorists.
We’ve allowed companies to become richer than nations, so you can imagine what resources they can summon; the most comprehensive campaign to malign, discredit, impugn the character of workers, and thugs to intimidate them. This is the biggest victory for organized labor in a generation, born in a time of unprecedented income disparity across the city and country. Most citizens would be pleased if corporate behemoths simply paid their fair share of taxes.
The street is still one of the best exhibition spaces, never to be recreated fully.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: AJ LaVilla, Clown Soldier, Little Ricky, Sticker Maul, Michael Alan, Dragon76, Diva Dogla, CP Won, Savior El Mundo, Acro, Jennifer Pod is Dead, and Masnah.
One of the first graffiti writers to name themselves after a laptop, ACER got up big on the front of the New Museum this week, which may be one of the most relevant shows they have presented in recent years. Just kidding, he’s not named after a laptop. Police will certainly be after him for this high-profile crossing of the legal line that got more press than Putin for a New York minute, but in terms of graffiti parlance, this got him major fame among peers.
Speaking of crossing the line, national embarrassment Ginni Thomas was accused this week of using her husbands’ influential seat on the Supreme Court as leverage to overturn the 2020 election. But competition for most embarrassing US citizens was very stiff this week. Did you see all those frustrated white guys grandstanding and preening before a black woman, presumably prosecuting a culture war while disrespecting her office and person? These Supreme Court hearings were especially painful for what they revealed. Ted, Josh, Dick,… Lindsay Darling, did you know the cameras were rolling? You know people can watch those for years, right?
Here in New York we have daffodils, shag mullets, and a man nesting in a tree. In street art news, its all about Ukraine and Zelensky, baby.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: CRKSHNK, Sticker Maul, Sara Lynne-Leo, Stickman, David F Barthold, Savior El Mundo, Manuel Alejandro NYC, Home Sick, Georgi Collagi, The Bloom Project, and ACER.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The streets are reflecting this moment in New York this week as artists are showing their colors. Or Ukraine’s colors, rather. Hard to sleep through the night when you know that Gotham is on the hit list if this Russian invasion turns nuclear, hard to process the idea that a cold war is never far from a hot one, despite activists best efforts for all these decades. Hard to believe that sanctions won’t damage many more people than the intended targets. Hard to believe that money-printing is never discussed in the news as THE creator of this inflation and much more inflation to come.
Let’s do everything we can to de-escalate this war, this perpetual specter.
And thank you to the street artists who are keeping the conversations alive. Also this week, new works from F**kin REVS !
Remember to Set Your Clocks Ahead One Hour Today.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Adam Fujita, Fuckin REVS, Below Key, Sticker Maul, Sara Lynne-Leo, Hek Tad, Gold Loxe, Mike Raz, Smetsky Art, Hear Eye Am, Equalist, Liagam, and Mitya Pisliak.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! The streets are alive with fresh cool air, skateboarders, bicyclists, the smell of fresh street art, and of course, shootings.
Our interview with the street today includes BK Foxx, David Flores, Didirok, Drecks, Melski, Miss Me, Peat EYES Wollaeger, Rap Gang, Sticker Maul, Timmy Ache, Villarose, and Vitruvian Truth.
We like findings spots that feature walls slammed with street art in a most organic way, the aesthetic signature of a current ecosystem mid-evolution. These spots are often a magnet for street artists to get up in NYC, L.A., Berlin, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Barcelona, Mexico City, Miami, Boston, London, and beyond. Usually illegal, they allow the artists a quick way to safely leave their imprint on the chaos of the city, a welcome to international artists on their spraycation as well as locals who relish the feeling of standing among peers. The art is usually limited to small original pieces, stickers, and posters, wheat pastes.
We call them “magnet walls” – and NYC has had its share of them. Now, however, they are increasingly endangered because of Gentrification and the voracious real estate market in the city with its apparent never-ending appetite for building new soaring soul-free glass towers. One spot is still welcoming artists to its walls: Freeman Alley. This favorite enclave, composed of two long walls along a narrow corridor in the Lower East Side, is constantly updated in an organic way with contributions by local and international artists. We have surveyed it for years, often publishing our findings in the popular “BSA Images Of The Week.”
Last week we rolled by the alley again and to our surprise, we discovered a gate ajar; one that leads the lobby of a relatively new hotel. Usually locked with a code, this secret Bowery spot instructs guests to enter through the alley. Once inside, they’re greeted with a nicely landscaped, small-scale courtyard leading to a lobby. Surprisingly, it is now bursting with new stickers, posters, stencils, paintings, collages, wild imaginings. Technically, this is a legal magnet wall – but most of the artists whose work is on display here can also be found illegally on the walls of the alley. Here’s a fresh selection just for you:
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! These are the beautiful long summer days that we all wait for. As New York frees itself from the shackles of Covid and our cloistered lives alone the sense of freedom to explore our city and commune with its fabulous chaos is sweeter still. But suddenly restaurants can’t sell you a bottle of booze, so maybe we also will stop seeing sidewalk sales of cocktails as well. Of course with legal weed in New York, people will still be strange and slightly hallucinated and punching random other New Yorkers, no doubt.
When it comes to freewheeling handmade one of a kind art in the public sphere, we still follow the beat on the street.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Drecks, Le Crue, Mirs Monstrengo, Modomatic, Mort Art, SacSix, SMiLE, Sticker Maul, and TV Head ATX.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Today is PRIDE DAY in NYC and Father’s Day in many parts of the world. Congratulations to us all, queer and/or fathers. We’re happy to show you what we’ve been finding as the spring now stretches into Officially Summer. At night in some neighborhoods, you’ll hear a smattering of fireworks as youthful hooligans are already lighting them – anticipate the 4th of July holiday. A sign of our crazy summer ahead; behold the bang-pop-ratatat-tat-bang-bang-swizzle-shizzle-pop now erupting regularly in empty lots and dead-end streets.
It’s great to see so many kids and youth and adults on bicycles now that the City has made myriad networks of safe pathways throughout the five boroughs. If we could get the police to hand out tickets to car drivers, even school bus drivers, sometimes using the bike lanes to circumvent others and put riders in danger.
The street art and graffiti scene are thick, and you don’t want to miss it here this time of year. While some complain that “vandalism” is reaching 1970s levels, many are happy to see a rotating display of artworks on the city skin at a time when so much of our local cultural and entertainment options have been killed or neutered. The institutional and commercial arts will all come back to New York, we have no doubt. Often, the renaissance begins in the streets.
Aliens, robots, skulls, femme Fatales, cats, cartoons, nationalism, existentialism – the new are runs the gamut and if it upsets the audience, it doesn’t run for long. Catch it while you can
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Acne, Adam Fujita, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Captain Eyeliner, City Kitty, Degrupo, Demure, Eugene Delacroix, Jeremy Novy, Lunge Box, Matt Siren, Modomatic, One Rad Latina, Plannedalism, Raddington Falls, Royce Bannon, Russian Doll NYC, SacSix, Sara Lynne-Leo, Save Art Space, Sticker Maul, The Creator, and Vy.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week as we head into Passover and Easter. If street art reflects society, and we know that it does, Governor Cuomo is in hot water and may not keep his job. But then, we thought the same about the war criminal George Bush and the grifter Trump, so never mind.
Thank you to reporter Jim O’Grady for interviewing us for a story on WNYC radio this week – along with our colleague Sean Corcoran who is the Curator of Prints and Photographs and a graffiti historian from the Museum of the City of New York.
“As Covid Ravaged New York, Street Artists Fought Back” is the name of Jim’s eight-minute exposition – and his storytelling adds so much to our appreciation of the city and the environment that gives life to our street art and graffiti scene here. Thanks for including us Jim.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: Chris RWK, CRKSHNK, Dwei, Hope Hummingbird, I Heart Graffiti, Little Ricky, Peachee Blue, Raddington Falls, Rambo, SacSix, Sara Lynne-Leo, Sticker Maul, and Technodrome.
Nowruz Mubarak! Happy Persian New Year to all the New York neighbors who celebrate it. Also, Happy Spring! Did you think it would never arrive? Already the birds are chirping in the trees, and the crocus is popping up from beneath the garbage and dog crap. That guy who lives downstairs named Manny and his brother are washing their car on the curb while blasting a mix from Marley Marl & Red Alert at top volume for the block to enjoy. All the while, there is a colorful parade of young bucks and shorties who are strutting around the neighborhood with big eyes and a burning flame of hope in their hearts.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: Almost Over Keep Smiling, City Kitty, D7606, Damien Mitchell, Ethan Minsker, Invader, LET, Matt Siren, Mort Art, NET, Rambo, Raw Raffle, Royce Bannon, SacSix, Sara Lynne Leo, Sticker Maul, Tram, Voxx Romana, and Winston Tseng.
What the hell just happened? Has it been a year? Or has it been 10 years? Or just one long nightmare/daymare? Or has it been 10 years? Did we already ask that?
In March 2020 we awoke to a world that was transforming before all of our eyes, yet we felt so cut-off from it and each other. The first days seem so long ago as we mark the first anniversary of the pandemic. Still, the initial shock of those days resonates in our chests so strongly that we confidently talk about a collective global trauma that has indelibly marked a generation.
From Stockholm to Mexico City to Barcelona to Bethlehem to New York to LA, BSA brought you street art that was responding with fear, derision, critique, hope, and humor to the never-static, always evolving barrage of Covid news. Stuck inside and afraid to expose ourselves to each other, we New Yorkers became accustomed to experiencing the outdoors only through our windows, connecting with neighbors we’ve never met who were also banging pots and pans or clapping and waving and yelling.
We listened to ambulances screaming past our windows every half hour or so during those first weeks, imagining the torn families, the terrified fellow New Yorkers now being rushed to the hospital and separated from their loved ones without a goodbye, gasping for air. We wondered if we would be next.
When we did go to the streets, they were empty – or nearly. In New York this was unheard of. In this bustling, noisy metropolis, we experienced a daily disconcerting quiet. That is, until the killing of George Floyd by cops finally pushed the anger/anxiety into the streets all summer.
The deadly hotspot of New York quelled, but the fires of Covid spread west, grabbing communities who thought they would avoid impact. At the same time, local, state, and national leaders fumbled and argued or famously callously ignored the desperation of citizens, occasionally admirably filling the shoes they were elected to occupy, often misstepping through no fault of their own.
We have no particular wisdom to offer you today beyond the obvious; this pandemic laid bare inequity, social and racial and class fault-lines, the shredded social net, the effect of institutional negligence, the ravages of 40 years of corporate privatization, and the power of community rising to the occasion to be in service to one another in ways that made us all more than proud.
Here are some of our favorite Covid-themed street art pieces from over the last year, a mere sampling of the artistic responses. Interspersed we paste screenshots of the daily events (via Wikipedia) in 2020 that shaped our lives, and our society.
We mourn the losses of family and friends and the broken hearts and minds in all of our communities. And we still believe in the power of art to heal and the power of love to balance our asymmetries.
As NYC went on complete lock-down and New Yorkers were ordered to remain in their homes in complete isolation the city’s residents organically joined together in a collective 7:00 pm ritual in support to the first responders. To the nurses, doctors, paramedics, trash collectors, public transportation, police, fire fighters, supermarkets workers etc…with their services and sacrifices we, the residents of this megalopolis were able to keep out hopes for brighter days to come.
Video of four former presidents urging people to “roll up your sleeve and do your part” and get the vaccine.
Welcome to the first BSA Images of the Week of 2021 !
We start our collection this week with an image of Christ crucified on a Facebook logo. If this is the level of subtlety that we can expect from the new year…gurl, we in trubble.
In fact, we have found that much of the organic street art that we find today has become increasingly strident in opinions expressed, especially around themes of social justice and political skullduggery. It’s all mixed in with favorites like pop figures, sports figures, cats. In a way, the artists are ahead of us, so we consider these images as the tea leaves for what is coming.
How will you interpret these messages from the street? Will you become emboldened? Scared? Or will they not have any impact on passersby?
Here is our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 7 Line Arts Studio, Bastard Bot, Calicho Art, Captain Eyeliner, Calisi Maultra, City Kity, CRKSHNK, David F Barthold, Degrupo, Elle, Jeff Roseking, Joseph Grazi, NohJColey, Poi Everywhere, Sickid, Sticker Maul, and Stikman.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
