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Hello BSA Friends! Striking images, background stories, and long-winded observations about the streets worldwide. We've been busy. Enjoy! |
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We The People. This mural has been on this spot for years now. We have published it on these pages before. We were happy to see it still running, so we took another photo and publish it again. These are the first three words in the United States Constitution. These words carry a powerful message. “We The People” stand to lose so much, or everything...
It’s also New York Art Week — a citywide celebration of contemporary art that brings together fairs, gallery openings, and museum shows across all five boroughs. Among the marquee events are Frieze New York at The Shed, Independent at Spring Studios, and NADA at the Starrett-Lehigh Building.
In fact, this week New York hosts Frieze New York, Independent Art Fair, The Other Art Fair Brooklyn, NADA New York, TEFAF New York, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Future Fair, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, The American Art Fair, and Clio Art Fair.
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There’s a deliberate clash at play—between past and present, elegance and utility, ornament and object. Lille’s 19th-century architecture whispers of empire and ambition; SpY’s monoliths shout in the blunt language of global logistics. These gleaming and gilded containers aren’t just visual anomalies—they’re conceptual ones too. Just weeks after a new international trade war flared and ports across continents ground into chaos, SpY stands these literal vessels of commerce in plain view, forcing us to consider what we consume and how it gets to us. The message lands as clearly as a dockworker’s shout: the street one walks is connected to the shipping yards and supply chains that shape daily life.
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They took the fight to the street. Not with spray cans or stencils, but with wheat-pasted posters and billboard hijacks. They weren’t painting trains or tagging rooftops, but instead bases of light posts and SoHo walls and East Village gallery windows, blasting hard truths in bold type and asking questions the so-called art world didn’t want to hear: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” The public space was their gallery, the street their showroom. Like the best street artists, they sidestepped permission and gatekeepers, relying on timing, location, and gut-punch wit to spark conversation and outrage ...
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Yes, it was street art… on a whole new level. We’ve been questioned endlessly over the last two decades about the true nature of art in the public sphere—pulling apart and examining the progenitors, the aspirations, the elements that comprise street art, graffiti, public art, and advertising—mainly because we wanted to understand the genesis of this story. Today we find that sometimes it all merges into one.
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With heavy hearts, we say goodbye to the brilliant Don’t Fret.
Cooper, the Chicago street artist known as “Don’t Fret,” was born and raised in the Wicker Park neighborhood—a community that shaped his perspective and featured prominently in his work. A few days ago he passed away at the age of 36 after a long illness, as confirmed by his family. Deeply connected to Chicago’s working-class spirit and changing urban landscape, Cooper created street art that reflected a genuine affection for the people, culture, history, and places around him.
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The city’s buzzing with art this spring—start with these must-sees, in addition to hitting the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn and the Bronx and the local park and your neighbor’s tulip bed: At White Columns, Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive 1972/3 offers a rare look at early graffiti culture through the artist’s archival photographs (whitecolumns.org). Over in Industry City, Brooklyn native Michael “Kaves” McLeer presents Brooklyn Pop – A Brooklyn Dream, an immersive homage to the borough’s style and swagger, complete with full-scale subway replicas and vintage ephemera (brooklynbuzz.com). At the Whitney, Amy Sherald’s American Sublime brings together nearly 50 of her portraits in a commanding solo show that focuses on Black life with quiet power and elegance (whitney.org). Meanwhile, the Guggenheim hosts Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, filling the iconic rotunda with ...
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Jordan Nickel, better known as POSE, is a Chicago-born graffiti artist whose work fuses street culture, pop art, and comic book aesthetics into a bold, layered style. With a bright palette and complex collage style, he often hides messages and abstract forms that reward a closer look. A standout example is his 85-foot mural he painted last summer beneath the Purple Line in Evanston, Illinois—a city just north of Chicago—a pop kaleidoscope of memories and associations with his youth there.
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If you’ve ever been stopped in your tracks by a cryptic phrase pasted on a lamppost or beamed onto a building, there’s a good chance you’ve crossed paths, at least spiritually, with Jenny Holzer. Before text-based street art became a global, sometimes cerebral, genre, Holzer treated the city as her canvas, her publishing platform, injecting unsettling truths and poetic jabs into public space. Her work speaks, it interrupts, cutting through the usual noise of ads and slogans with smartly honed phrases like “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Protect me from what I want.” For those familiar with the language of the street, her words hit like a well-placed burner on a clean wall—brief, bold, impossible to ignore.
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Running through June 9, 2025, Hi-Vis celebrates over 80 artists who have participated in creating more than 60 public works across Buffalo and it’s surrounding county. Names familiar to fans of street art and contemporary muralism appear alongside local heroes of various styles and disciplines, forming a compelling mix that includes FUTURA 2000, Shantell Martin, Felipe Pantone, Maya Hayuk, Louise Jones, Jun Kaneko, Julia Bottoms, Monet Kifner, Pat Perry, Edreys Wajed, and many others. These artists—some creating their largest or first-ever public works—are altering and shaping Buffalo’s new visual identity by emphasizing community collaboration and civic visibility.
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The most remarkable image we caught this week comes courtesy of someone who may be a new “Splasher” in New York—bloody flash installations dripping down walls and onto sidewalks. The symbolism could apply to so much happening in the world, and the beauty of most street art is this: you create the narrative.
We continue with our interviews with the street, this week including CRKSHNK, Modomatic, Michael Alan, Alex Itin, Word on the Street, Mini Mantis, The Splasher (2?), AS+ORO, Baz Bon, Winnie Chiu, and Priz.
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Emerging from the underground music scene in Goiânia, Brazil, the duo gained early recognition for hand-drawn concert posters and sounds of the underground. Their work stood out—not just for its precision and electric style but for the way it captured the pulse of a scene. Since then, their large-scale murals and print works have reached large audiences while still retaining their character. These new graphics keep the same charge: a mix of neo-tropical chaos, psychedelic pop attitude, and a designer’s eye for detail.
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Before “street art” became a globally recognized genre, Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen were charting their course—one rooted in graffiti, freight trains, hand-drawn signs, and the layered rhythms of the city itself. This rare 12-minute Art21 segment, first aired in 2001, offers an intimate look into their daily lives and creative processes as they prepare for professional exhibitions, walk the tracks with grease markers, and draw inspiration from the overlooked details of the urban environment. It’s a snapshot of a pivotal moment—both for these artists and for the emerging intersection between street-based practices and the contemporary art world.
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In a notable week for New York’s graffiti and street art scene, Dutch artist Tripl, also known as Furious, unveiled his decade-long project, Repainting Subway Art. This ambitious endeavor meticulously recreates the iconic 1984 book Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, with Tripl reproducing each original piece on European trains and re-enacting the accompanying photographs. The project culminated in the publication of the 196-page book that was featured Friday night and feted Saturday night...
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Nadia Vadori-Gauthier, a Franco-Canadian artist and choreographer, initiated the “Une minute de danse par jour” (One Minute of Dance per Day) on January 14, 2015. This endeavor was her response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, aiming to offer a daily act of poetic resistance and to foster a sense of solidarity and tenderness through dance.
She records a one-minute dance in public spaces daily, engaging with diverse environments and audiences. As of early 2025, she has shared over 3,600 such performances. BSA has only featured about 20 of them over the last decade.
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Long before he hijacked billboards, Ron English was growing up in Decatur, Illinois, tuning in to the everyday spectacle of ads and authority—and wondering why nobody was messing with them. By the late 1970s, English had begun altering billboards in Texas, driven by the realization that “making art was only half the equation.” The other half? Being seen. Advertising billboard culture became his unwitting canvas, a visual battleground where commercial power collided with public resistance...
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The warming weather softens the ground and lets loose the mingled scents of hydrangea and dog pee. And once again, Saturday night Romeos are rolling down their windows, cruising slow, and blasting tracks like Jack Harlow and Doja Cat’s new banger “Just Us”—hoping someone’s paying attention.
On the street art tip, you’ll see Faile has come back with some of their new and old icons remixed, Trump and Elon are widely critiqued in caricature, and vertical graffiti is the new horizontal.
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Shepard Fairey has unveiled a new six-story mural titled We Demand Change in Washington, D.C., a solemn and visually arresting tribute to Joaquin “Guac” Oliver, one of the 17 victims of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Installed at 618 H Street NW in Chinatown—just steps from the Capital One Arena—the mural bears Oliver’s portrait above the words “Demand Change,” a frank call to action and a reflection of Fairey’s decades-long commitment to social justice through art.
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There’s a warmth in the grey—Sebas Velasco knows how to find it. Next month the Spanish artist’s distinct urban realism brings it inside the museum setting with The Morning Will Change Everything. Opening April 4th at the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this debut solo museum exhibition is more than a milestone—it’s a culmination of over a decade of travel, observation, and layered storytelling across the cities of the former Yugoslavia.
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And in street art and graffiti? The walls are still talking—shouting, whispering, reflecting us back at ourselves with a sometimes banal, sometimes beguiling presentation. If the overall message feels messy, it’s because the world is messy. But often there’s clarity in the chaos if you squint at it in the right manner.
We continue with our interviews with the street, this week including Faile, Judith Supine, City Kitty, Lexi Bella, Werds, Turtle Caps, Zoot, Corn Queen, Klonism, Zero Productivity, Muska, Nice, Badlucao, LYFR, and Barb Tropolis.
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As part of an ongoing conversation with curator Michelle Houston about the latest show at Urban Nation, LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY, we find ourselves drawn to the echoes of the Situationists, those restless wanderers who believed the city wasn’t just a place but an experience—one that tugs at your emotions, plays with your psychology, and sometimes leads you straight to an impromptu picnic on Görlitzer Park’s slightly suspect grass.
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For a decade, SaveArtSpace has transformed New York’s streets into open-air galleries, reclaiming advertising spaces as canvases for public expression. As jurors for The People’s Art, we’re proud to celebrate this milestone 10th-anniversary exhibition, continuing the tradition of putting art directly into the streets—where it has always belonged.
From the earliest graffiti writers to the street artists of today, creatives have long turned to public space, short-circuiting the existing system and taking their work to the streets. The billboards in this exhibition honor that history...
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Brooklyn Street Art® is a registered trademark.
From the street, the studio, the museum, and the stage, leading an inquisitive global conversation on street art, graffiti, and contemporary urban art 2008-2025
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