Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere today, so presumably we can see more with all this daylight. And yet, the view is somehow clouded from here. The machinations of the city, the state, our institutions, the financial industrial complex, the welfare state – all whir mysteriously before us and behind us. The new Fed Chair made his first public/opaque utterance, and there is some kind of new peace agreement between the US and Iran, yet new bombs explode in Lebanon. In other interesting and unrelated news items, investors gawped as SpaceX dropped 20 percent from its peak during its first week, New Yorkers are worried about videos of unknown people entering and exiting the sewers through manhole covers, and leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind participated alongside elected world leaders at the G7 in closed-door meetings.
On the streets, the art, graffiti, and individual commentary tell a multitude of stories as well, including love, hope, fear, celebration, humor, frustration, mourning, and defiance. Here’s our weekly survey, including Arioh, Buttsup, CRKSHNK, Derek Fordjour, Funk, Homesick, JerkFace, Jocelyn Tsaih, Modomatic, Onur, Optimo NYC, Prez NCE, Stop Men, Werds, and ZimerNYC.
If the crowds come for the murals, the artists themselves are often part of the attraction. During Bushwick Collective weekend, painters from across New York and around the world find themselves performing a peculiar balancing act: creating highly personal work in one of the most public environments imaginable. The walls may be their canvas, but the streets are alive with commentary, questions, compliments, critiques, requests for selfies, and a steady stream of curious onlookers who assume that because the artist is visible, they are also available.
By now, most of these artists know how to handle the practical challenges. They can paint on brick, corrugated metal, concrete, and weather-beaten surfaces. They can work through heat, wind, rain, and long days on lifts. The greater challenge is often maintaining the fragile concentration required to transform an idea into a finished mural while surrounded by the noise and unpredictability of a city in motion.
That means finding the right materials, adapting to changing conditions, trusting the creative process, and protecting the mental space necessary to make hundreds of decisions in a day. It means staying focused while music blasts from nearby speakers, conversations erupt below, cameras point upward, and traffic honks and screeches its way through the neighborhood. Not every passerby understands that an artist standing twenty feet in the air may be in the middle of solving a visual problem, even as they are being asked where they’re from, how long they’ve been painting, or what the mural means.
The Bushwick Collective events have evolved over the years, but they still retain a particular kind of productive chaos that is difficult to find anywhere else. It is part block party, part outdoor studio, part neighborhood reunion, and part international gathering. The best advice for artists arriving here for the first time is simple: bring a thick skin, keep your sense of humor, stay focused on the wall, and enjoy the experience. There is only one Bushwick.
A scintillating selection of images this week as we travel to a Jersey boardwalk and the erupting Brooklyn scene called Bushwick Collective. The trio of foxes by Bordalo is still rocking after a year, and the small flood of international and local talent has once again transformed walls in the formerly industrial, still gritty Brooklyn neighborhood that has welcomed about 400 artists to paint here since 2011.
We had the great honor of hosting a panel discussion with 5 Taiwanese street artists this Thursday as part of the first Artist Talk ever for Bushwick Collective’s 15th Anniversary. All week, those five plus one other OG from Taipei all painted walls here – ALLO, Vasstar, Candy Kuo, Colasa, Mr. OGay, and BLACK ZAO brought high technical skills and Taiwan flavor to the already international scene here. The long weekend events included roof parties, DJ sets, and a roiling, joyful open stage with hotly spit missives that pose and bear witness to life from some of our best rap and hip-hop artists who know the streets and rightly celebrate them. As usual, it’s so local, and so international here in Brooklyn.
Stylistically, the vertical rappellers have taken over NYC these last three years or so, and overnight Thursday, one of the highest focal points was taken over by a wildly striped crew of current visual kings with aesthetic and cultural currency – taking everyone by surprise with a rapid fire battle of styles side by side – see below.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Allo, Ashley Hodder, Black Zao, Bordallo II, Chris Haven, Dad Father Son, Dae Law, Degrupo, Dzel, EXR, H Kubed, Mad Vaillan, Mendoza, Nick Sweetman, Optimo, Psylent Mushroom, Robert Vargas, Shane, Smoe, Stuo Backup, Werds, and Zach Curtis.
The Blizzard of ’26, which New York endured this week, is already a fading memory. We have fresh chaotic news every day, keeping everyone off-kilter, with purpose – some would say.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2025. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. We’re sharing a new one every day to celebrate all our good times together, our hope for the future, and our love for the street. Happy Holidays, Everyone!
This was the year that rappelling from high places tipped the balance in New York graffiti. No matter the style or anti-style, vertically executed pieces seemed to drop from above.
It’s our first snowy December day with swirling clouds of the white snowflakes swirling around you with cigarette butts and potato chip bags and pine snippings from the Christmas tree salesman name Pierre on you block. The First night of Hanukkah is tonight — best wishes to our Jewish friends and families across the city. Menorah lightings and Festival of Lights gatherings are popping off in Brooklyn at Grand Army Plaza, down at the South Street Seaport, and over on Pier 17, where a LEGO menorah is doing what LEGO does best: being quietly indestructible. Expect music, food, treats, face painting — the whole megillah.
The holiday hum (and humbug) carries through the month with holiday markets at Union Square, Columbus Circle, and Bryant Park. For all your ice capades, New York offers Bryant Park (Midtown), Wollman Rink (Central Park South), LeFrak Center at Lakeside (Prospect Park), World Ice Arena (Flushing Meadows–Corona Park), and the FDR Drive (Lower East Side) after it floods, weather permitting. Yes, that tree is lit and doing its annual job of reminding everyone they live in New York, not wherever they came from. Add in these amazing periodic Fifth Avenue street closures when you can literally run on the streets — these rare moments when pedestrians get the upper hand — and the city briefly becomes what it’s always threatening to be: festive, walkable, and almost humane.
Of course, depending on which headline you read, all joy is apparently set to expire on January 1. Certain tabloids would have you believe the city is one Mamdani mayoral term away from collapse, chaos, and moral freefall. That’s one way to welcome the new guy. But if you’ve lived here longer than five minutes, you already know the script — New York absorbs the panic, shrugs off the noise, adapts, and keeps moving. Ideally on foot. Preferably with a hot chocolate.
Zohran Mamdani is a New Yorker, part of the long line of immigrants and children of immigrants who built this city and, frankly, the country. While we’re at it — love to our Muslim friends and families across the five boroughs. New York works best when everybody’s in the room. Happy Hanukkah, Christmas, Solstice, Kwanzaa — and to everyone else, good luck making it to January.
This week, our interview with the streets has a Miami hangover and a New York winter cold snap (slap), with new murals, graffiti pieces, and street art conversing with you as you march to the subway, laundromat, or ice-skating rink. Artists and writers and street scholars this week include: Atomik, Clown Soldier, Cruze Oner, Daniel Lloyd, Dreamscape, EXR, Hiero Veiga, INFOE, Kams Art, Lexi Bella, Mesper, Mr. June, Mucky, Shepard Fairey, Tati, Tesoe, Werds, Zoot, and Zwon.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Photographer Jaime Rojo hit the ground running upon getting back to dirty old Brooklyn this week from a Berlin/Prague tour. Lots to report from there on the walls, in the gallery, and in the museum spaces – and more to come for you to enjoy. In the meantime, here’s what he found on the streets of NYC; a mash-up of handstyles, graphics, pop cues, fine-art chops, humor, sarcasm, reverence, and straight-up rebellion — cultures colliding and talking back.
We begin the show with a new portrait of the much-loved graffiti and street art photographer Martha Cooper, based on a photo by Corey Nickols and painted by Swed Oner (Mathieu Taupenas) in Bushwick with Joe Ficalora and the Bushwick Collective by his side. Born in the south of France in the 80s, a graffiti writer in the late 90s, Swed Oner is now known for his hyper-realistic, monochrome portraits of people transformed into religious icons – featuring a “halo” motif for framing.
Featuring Dzel, EAZV, EXR, Gloom, Homesick, IMK, ISB, Jodi Da Real, KAMZ, Mike King, Notice, RIP Money, Shwan McArt, Silent, Smaer, Two Five, VENG, Warios, Werds, and ZOZS.
Welcome the BSA Images of the Week! Recent exhibitions, festivals, mural programs, and artist movements demonstrate that street art’s vitality continues to evolve—shifting from unsanctioned and underground to mainstream and institutional, and then back to the public streets. Far from fading, the street art and graffiti movement continues to adapt and engage more people, sparking dialogue about art, culture, creativity, property, politics, and its role in urban life. Our inbox at ABC runs like the city itself: fast, loud, nonstop—thankfully, this deli coffee is strong.
Global Graffiti Festival: The Meeting of Styles international graffiti festival just took over Rruga B Street in Kosovo’s capital, marking its 9th edition in Pristina. The city’s embrace of this festival – and the participation of artists from as far afield as Europe, the Americas, and Asia – underscores how the street art movement continues to span the globe, including places that rarely feature in mainstream art news.
As we speed through block parties, outdoor concerts, graffiti jams, and the end of New York’s summer art scene, we note next month’s arrival of the Gaza Biennale, a roving exhibition spotlighting artists from the embattled Gaza Strip. Previously exhibited in London, Berlin, and Athens, the show is a powerful cultural statement, taking place at 19 venues across 12 cities worldwide. The biennale’s New York iteration will span five days (September 10-14) at the non-profit art space Recess in Brooklyn.
Theatergoers have been flocking to Central Park’s Delacorte Theater for Twelfth Night, starring Peter Dinklage and Sandra Oh – in this New York tradition that’s open to everyone. Fans are lining up hours—even overnight—for free tickets, turning the event into a communal spectacle of Shakespeare for our treacherous time, of this moment.
“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” (Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene IV)
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring works from Acet, AIC Mosaic, Below Key, Benny CRuz, Hektad, Homesick, JerkFace, Marly McFly, Obey, Paul Richard, Qzar, Sasha Gordon, Shepard Fairey, Tom Bob NYC, and Werds.
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.
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.
Spring 2025: Growth creeps in — leaf by leaf, blade by blade, decree by decree. You barely notice the buildup, but gradually it gathers, until suddenly, you’re surrounded.
On New York walls right now, you’ll spot a mix of collage-style cut-and-paste work, aerosol rendered full fantasy – and a surge in vertical graffiti done while hanging from ropes. This high-risk approach echoes Brazil’s Pixação scene, where writers have been scaling buildings since the ’80s to get their monikers out there running north to south; a technique later amplified by crews like 1UP and Berlin Kidz in Europe. Now, numbers of New York graffiti writers are embracing this daring vertical style — a radical shift that some see clearly, while others barely register. Across styles and mediums, there often appears a recurring presence of scarlet, crimson, rose, magenta, purple, pink, and fuchsia. These grab attention an resonate at deeper undercurrents — power, sacrifice, passion, and perhaps even the stirrings of revolution.
Here are some images from this week’s visual conversation from the street, including works from Werds, Humble, EXR, Great Boxers, Dzel, Meres One, Go, Man in the Box, DK, Luch, 1440, Fridge, El Souls, Natural Eyes, Lisart, Ilato, YOSE, Miki Yamato, HypaArtCombo, Senator Toadius Maximus, HOH22, Hound, Mr. Must Art, Lucia Dutazaka, and Tess.
This week, St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue was suddenly flooded with pealing bells and congregants. In a historic moment for the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV, born in Chicago, was chosen, following in the footsteps of his predecessor Francis and his namesake Leo XIII, who was widely admired for his steadfast advocacy for migrants and laborers at the turn of the 20th century. Many observers have noted that the selection of an American pope may reflect a conscious decision by the College of Cardinals to offer a moral counterbalance to the growing tide of authoritarianism and exclusionary politics seen in some of today’s global leadership. With roots in a city shaped by immigration, industry, and social struggle, Leo XIV arrives at a time when such grounding may prove especially relevant. Best wishes to all of us.
So here’s some of this week’s visual conversation from the street, including works from Homesick, Gabriel Specter, Clint Mario, Werds, IMK, EXR, Jorit, Wild West, JEMZ, Ribs, Diva, Ellena Lourens, APE, NOEVE, ENEKKO, Rene, Happy, Disoh, Peuf, and Off Key.
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground.Artistic direction by Andrea Conte …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
