|
Hello BSA Friends!
Striking images, background stories, and long-winded observations about the streets worldwide. Write to us! |
|
|
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, LIVE from New York!
For a few more days this week, BlankMagBooks (17 Eldridge Street, Chinatown) — run and curated by Jun Ohki — is featuring photos by Sonny Gall from her newly launched book 99 of New York, with texts by Mila Tenaglia. The streetwise romance of this photographer’s eye draws the viewer into often overlooked streets and scenes of New York with acute observation, adoration, and a sense of possibility. With texts that contextualize and accentuate the images throughout the slim and ample hardcover...
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring AKUD, BornOner, ENT, EXR, Frodrik, Humble, Never Satisfied, OPE TFP, One Mizer, SOULS, Tess, VENA, Vers 718, Zero Productivity, and Zooter.
|
|
|
Inherited Thread takes as its starting point Berlin von Hinten, a gay tourism atlas first published in 1981 that catalogued Berlin’s bars, bookstores, and venues at a time when queer life existed largely in coded networks. From this modest guidebook, Dylan reconstructs a cultural topography: visiting surviving sites, mapping closed ones, and photographing their present forms. Their fieldwork extends into the archives of the Schwules Museum and Spinnboden, where they piece together ephemera—ads, zines, snapshots, and personal notes—that once charted a thriving but precarious social world.
|
|
|
“Akkord,” the newest addition to its long-running One Wall program—a series built on the premise that it is possible a single wall can carry a powerful message in a community. Created by the Berlin-based collective Innerfields, this mural rises above Schwambzeile 7 in Charlottenburg-Nord, transforming an ordinary apartment façade into a site of memory, artistry, and civic reflection. Following the One Wall charge, it’s meant to be public art with purpose: direct, accessible, and impossible to ignore.
|
|
|
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! The energy always builds on the streets of NYC as Halloween approaches. The night feels inky and dense, the air cold and damp, with dried leaves and bits of garbage lightly clattering across the sidewalk in sudden whirlwinds. The city’s nerves tightened this week as masked ICE agents descended on Canal Street, pursuing the sidewalk sellers of faux Chanel and Versace shades. And in a curious coincidence, the East Wing of the White House was reduced to rubble — surely a metaphor waiting to be explained.
A piece inThe Art Newspaper tracks how the mayoral candidates view the arts: funding, creative-sector jobs, and affordability for artists.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this time featuring Chusma, Dirt Cobain, JG Toonation, Mack & Frodrik, Merck, Modomatic, Outer Source, SAMO, Uncut Art, and Unfollow.
|
|
|
BSA reviews books for The Martha Cooper Library in Berlin, a growing collection of worldwide graffiti and street art books, zines, and ephemera.
Reprinted from the original review by BSA for the Martha Cooper Library.
Graffiti writer, calligrapher, painter, typographer—Meulman’s professional identities have long orbited the written mark. “Shoe Is My Middle Name” gathers those decades-deep orbits into one gravitational field, presenting a mid-career survey whose scale and heft match the artist’s sweeping gestures. Photographs of murals, canvases, and poetry scrolls are sequenced chronologically yet feel rhythmic, echoing the repetitive muscle memory that turns letters into pictures.
|
|
|
Graffiti is a living monument—an act of doing rather than keeping.
Rafael Schacter has been offering an alternative to institutional monumentality in his latest book Monumental Graffiti (2024). He buttressed his alternative view during his keynote speech for the New York 2025 Tag Conference (BSA is a sponsor). To a packed audience at the Museum of the City of New York, Schacter talked about a monumentality that is grounded in community, embodiment and the acceptance of transience as truth.
|
|
|
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
If you were in the room Friday night at The New School, you caught Matteo Pasquinelli throwing down ideas that lit up the crowd with his keynote “AI and Madness: On the Disalienation of the General Intellect.” It kicked off the Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence—a weekend asking who gets to define intelligence and what happens when machines, bodies, and institutions all start claiming a piece of it. Later, over a community dinner, we met artists, curators, journalists, researchers, and assorted brainiacs who traded stories about neural nets, algorithms, kimchee, pulled pork, and tarot card readings that were available at many tables.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring CKT Crew, Dain, Dmote, Dream, Famen, King157, KNOT!, Luch, Mr. Cenz, OptimoNYC, Phetus88, SHOCK, Skulz, Staino, Stevie Dobetter, and Sweater Bubble.
|
|
|
Sometimes street art festivals run headlong into battles with local politics or corporate brands that believe murals should only be decorative—certainly not inclusive of certain communities or certain politics. To be clear: all art is political. If you like a mural, chances are it aligns with your worldview. Don’t make the mistake of believing otherwise.
|
|
|
Seth’s imagery blends saturated palettes, geometric constructions, and elements of folklore. His recurring figures—faceless children—are staged within environments that suggest both vulnerability and resilience. Across 256 pages, On Walls traces a path from Phnom Penh to Palestine, from Haiti to Ukraine, each mural shaped by the physical and social landscapes where it was created.
|
|
|
Many everyday New Yorkers do not go to these sparkling openings or exhibitions, however, possibly because their day-to-day financial worries are all-consuming: The United Way estimates that about 50% of working-age New Yorkers are struggling to cover basic needs – up from 36% only four years earlier.National surveys put the estimated number of Americans who are living paycheck-to-paycheck at ~60–67% in 2025. Thankfully, many museums have a window of time with free admission, but not all. Maybe the Whitney could have a show called “Surreal Twenty-Twenties”, or the Whitney might present, “Jerome H. Powell: Inflation Can’t Be Stopped”.
The Whitney offers all Fridays free from 5–10 p.m., every second Sunday free, and if you’re 25 or under, it’s always free. The Museum of Modern Art welcomes New York State residents free of charge every Friday from 5:30–8:30 p.m. (proof of residency required). The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum invites visitors to pay what they wish on Mondays and Saturdays from 4–5:30 p.m., with a suggested minimum of one dollar. The New-York Historical Society follows suit with pay-as-you-wish admission on Fridays from 5–8 p.m. And for those who prefer art in the Bronx, the Bronx Museum of the Arts remains free every day of the week. And right here in Brooklyn
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Chloe, I Am Frankie Botz, Jappy Agoncillo, Jeff Rose King, Kam S. Art, Lucia Dutazaka, Mad Villian, Man in the Box, Manuel Alejandro, Nandos Art, Rommer White, Sonni, Sophia Messore, and Tone Wash.
|
|
|
Feel chained to your cell phone? That’s the plan.
Not that you don’t have free will and could quit your phone any time. Of course, you could.
Street artist Leon Reid works conceptually often, and in this case, as a sculptor alongside you on the street in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. The message is self-explanatory, and yet, you would have to look up from your phone scrolling to see it, so many will miss it.
|
|
|
POLINIZA DOS (or “Polinizados”) is the annual urban-art program at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), running since 2006 and turning the Vera campus into a working outdoor studio each May. It’s organized by UPV’s Área de Acción Cultural and built around site-specific murals by invited artists—recent lineups have included 108, Lidia Cao, Musa71, Felipe Pantone, Gordo Pelota, Wasted Rita and Catarina Lira Pereira—alongside public programs like artist talks, guided walkthroughs (often led by painting professor Joan Peiró), and family workshops under “Menudo Poliniza”.
|
|
|
Let’s see what the street art tea leaves are saying. Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Barbara Galiniska, Below Key, Gane, Hope, Jason Naylor, Merk, Mike King, Miki Mu, Modomatic, Pin, Steph Costello, and Tover.
|
|
|
A new show brings together three artists whose work has created instantly recognizable visual systems that rely on repetition, symbols, and cultural icons. While two are rooted in unsanctioned work in public space and the third is identified with the gallery and market system, all three have generated debates about art’s role in mass culture and have extended their practices into new contexts through collaboration.
|
|
|
Italian-born, Hackney-based painter ALO (Aristide Loria) returns to BSMT with BARDO, his third solo exhibition at the Dalston gallery. Often described as an Urban Expressionist, he brings drawn, pattern-rich portraits from his street illustrations into the gallery, working with brushes, paint, and pens rather than spray. His practice grew in public view—portraits that could be found on doorways and arches—and here they are grounded and approachable.
|
|
|
First, some housekeeping: over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed we’ve been publishing less—and the site’s been buggier than Mayor Adam’s re-election campaign, the MTA’s subway announcement system, or a 2025 White House policy rollout. You’re right. BSA is in the middle of major technical upgrades, and it’s been a lift. Thanks for your patience. We’re entering our 18th year—more than 7,000 articles, 60,000 images, thousands of artists across six continents—and we’re focused on making our next chapter faster, cleaner, and steadier.
Someone once said of the ’60s, ‘If you remember them, you weren’t there’—and everyone laughed. Bowie said he barely remembered recording Station to Station in the 70s, and a similar collective bemusement winked at the excesses of that time as well. So as we wind up the wooden banister on the Upper East side we wonder how many memories of the cocaine-ecstasy-fueled Downtown 80s club scenes still remain. With a lot of elbow room...
|
|
|
“I managed to finish a new wall in my hometown Olsztyn. I named it The Endless River / Olsztyn / Poland / 2025,” he says. The result is a clear invitation: stand at the bank, watch the composition flow, and let the city meet the river it suggests. And to end our swim, contemplate the rolling, gentle undulations of Philip Glass performing his “Opening.”
|
|
|
Naturalists argue that human hands should leave no trace—certainly not one out of harmony with the site. In the built environment, on the other hand—cities, towns, suburbs, strip malls, fast-food restaurants, roller rinks, bowling alleys, factories, condos, lawyers’ offices, hospitals, laundromats—the conversation around street artists and graffiti writers tends to focus on property and real-estate value, less on our impact on the Earth.
|
|
|
Fall is here today, and summer’s crop of graffiti, street art, and murals has been a bounty in New York City this year. You’ll see it on your way to the park to lie under a tree.
This week’s news includes a $100K price tag slapped on H-1B visas, the Fed cutting rates before the economy keels over, D.C. squabbling like it’s auditioning for a shutdown reality show, Democrats re-thinking blank checks to Israel, and New York’s governor backing a socialist for mayor – just to keep things spicy.
All in all, America’s playing tug-of-war with itself, while New York shrugs, sprays another mural, and proves you can cram the whole world into one city block without it blowing up.
Here is our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Allison Katz, Bikismo, Dattface, Hehuarucho, Joe Iurato, Low Poly, Manfo, Muck Rock, Sandman, and Shelby and Sandy.
|
|
|
Here, we see that the interventionist has also carried out his practice by hiking in the neglected urban landscape. Here we find his discussion about nation-states and psychological states is in full view, under deconstruction.
“The five continents outline a universe fragmented into smaller emotional states, coexisting and feeding off one another,” he says. “We are flooded with facts and images depicting a world in constant decline, often without realizing that what deteriorates the most, day by day, is our inner world.
This is my world, with its own states.”
|
|
|
Together, their collaboration in Miami shows how cleanly and boldly the two vocabularies can work in unison. Seth’s dreamlike reveries and Millo’s urban dreamscapes click together in colorful/black-and-white precision, amplifying one another’s humor, tenderness, and sense of scale. Beyond the novelty of seeing two internationally recognized muralists merge their visual languages, the show also speaks to the friendships and connections formed through years of painting walls around the globe — a reminder that, in a scene as transient as street art, some conversations endure.
|
|
|
French street artist and studio artist Franck Duval, better known as FKDL, has always approached the street with a different set of tools. Where most writers leaned on spray paint and stencils, he built images out of fragments—magazine clippings, advertising spreads, press photos—that carried the ghosts of another time. He collects, trims, and reassembles, distilling hours of scavenging into figures that shimmer with nostalgia and aspiration. These are stories you may recognize, yet they arrive altered, re-framed, and suddenly more mysterious.
|
|
|
The streets and clubs were full of crossings: drag performers, punks, hip-hop DJs, and young artists finding each other downtown. Groups like Colab squatted buildings and staged wild exhibitions; ABC No Rio opened as an outpost for confrontation and community. Ephemera from those nights — an invite, a Xeroxed flyer — is what Gallery 98 specializes in, proof that the most disposable things sometimes carry the longest shadows.
|
|
|
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
Street artists often aim their spray cans at social and political fault lines, wielding invective and knife-sharp wit. Yet this week’s BSA interview with a pair of artists questions whether today’s practitioners still have the conviction to confront society’s social and economic ills. “One of the things I was playing with was the overly positive, banal affirmation-type quotes you see in a lot of street art,” says artist Alex Itin. “I see the country in a dangerous place, and positive bromides are not as important as anger and cogent analysis of our present state. So I wanted a bit of salt and burn… while still being funny.”
On our weekly interview with the street, we feature AESOP ONE, Albertus Joseph, Busta Art, Call Her Al, El Souls, EWAD, MELON, Miki Mu, NEO, Pazzesco Art, Persue, Pyramid Guy, Sue Works and Tony Sjoman.
|
|
|
Rene Lerude & Alex Itin aren’t populists chasing the lowest common denominator with their hand-rendered one-off posters and stickers. As street artists, you might call them intellectual pranksters: observers who like their wisdom salted with cynicism, their philosophy dressed in humor, and their politics wrapped in that oily fish paper called irony. Look at the company they keep — literary heavyweights, satirists, philosophers, and contrarians. Instead of quoting hip-hop pioneers, political activists, or contemporary street philosophers, they platform Wilde, Bierce, Carlin, Vidal, and Burroughs onto that empty boarded-up lot you just trudged past.
“One of the things I always like to talk with artists about is money — how to make it, keep it, shake it out of trees, etc. Surviving as an artist is brutal stuff, so educating yourself and your community about legal and financial questions is just good practice.” — Alex
|
|
|
Beauty and relevance are often measured by youth; street artist/muralist Marina Capdevila flips the script with humor, intelligence, empathy, and her own style of caricature. From Falset to Barcelona to walls across continents, her work has always carried a certain irreverence toward cultural clichés, replacing them with something both slyly funny and disarmingly affectionate. In “Forever Gold: The Glorious Age,” she brings that sensibility to Pforzheim, a city with a long history of craft and refinement, transforming its legacy of jewelry and watchmaking into a meditation on age, resilience, and the sparkling currency of a lived experience.
|
|
|
Labor Day in New York is more than just a long weekend — it’s a reminder of the people whose work has shaped the city and inspired workers’ movements worldwide. From builders and transit crews to teachers, caregivers, and service staff who keep daily life moving, New Yorkers have always been at the forefront of fighting for dignity and fairness on the job, often at great personal sacrifice. Like the uncommissioned art and permissioned art that fills our streets, some labor is public, visible, and often underappreciated — yet it leaves an unmistakable mark on the life of the city. We honor that history and salute the many workers across the five boroughs who carry it forward every day, with grit, pride, and a determination that makes New York what it is.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring works from Bird Milk, Crash, Duke A. Barnstable, Homesick, Molly Crabapple, PAGED, SAMO@, SAMOI, TFP Crew, and Wild West.
|
|
|
You’re used to spotting it on city walls, rolling trucks, the back of a traffic sign — the marks of those who feel compelled to leave a trace. The Sidewalk Artist, a new short directed by David Velez and Brandon Rivera, introduces us to a character whose canvas is neither brick nor steel, but the soft gray of suburban concrete. Set in North Texas, the film brings us to driveways and sidewalks where a man’s small gestures carry the same urge to exist in public space that has driven generations of unsanctioned artists.
|
|
|
On the night of November 1, 1986, Basel was told to “immediately close all windows and doors.” A fire ripped through a Sandoz chemical warehouse, and the Rhine River ran red with toxic runoff. Thousands of fish floated belly-up, and citizens were left in fear and fury, just months after the trauma of Chernobyl.
When the authorities stumbled and minimized the danger, Basel’s artists and students seized the opportunity to express themselves on the walls. Within days, in the middle of the night, activists from the School of Design plastered the city’s billboards and poster kiosks with their furious responses【2】. They worked fast, stayed anonymous, and left the streets covered with raw, hand-painted images and biting slogans.
|
|
|
Kofie, a Los Angeles veteran with roots in early ’90s graffiti, lost his house, studio, and archive in the Eaton Canyon Fire this January. For some, that would have been the end of the story. Instead, he’s back at it, slicing up pressboard, salvaged posters, and mid-century packaging into collages that look as sharp as they are stubborn. Ever the clever mind, he calls his circles “rotationships”—a way to wrestle with balance and structure—but you can read them as a sign of survival too.
|
|
|
The tenants and their dedication turned a block into a beacon, making the work that becomes the soul of a neighborhood before the brokers and developers ever think to rename it. In interviews and quiet moments, Jacobs and Schmidt capture their shared history and present reality, weaving together laughter, craft, and resilience. These are not the ornamental “creatives” used to brand a condo brochure or website; they are the lifeblood, the first to arrive and often the first to be pushed out, a profit is to be made.
|
|
|
His work consistently blends the immediacy of Street Art with a calm, painterly sensibility. He can create large-scale public paintings with a sense of focus, embedding his character and imagined story into the environment. His projects have traveled beyond Thailand, appearing across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Caminhos Esquecidos is his first fully realized solo show in Portugal, conceived during a residency at The Holdout Art Farm on the Silver Coast. As he pedaled through orchards and along the shoreline, Alex Face translated the subtle light, weathered surfaces, and hushed corners of rural Portugal into ten new paintings. In each, his familiar figure appears as a reflective observer—quietly acknowledging the land, its textures, the lingering stillness.
|
|
|
Write to us! From shows and festivals to panels or even bonfires under bridges, we want to hear what you’re planning. We’ve been everywhere—moderating panels, giving talks, writing essays, curating exhibitions, founding libraries, starting scholarships, MC'ing events, climbing walls, slipping through fences, and drinking cheap beer outside on the sidewalk. Info@brooklynstreetart.com
If you have a friend to add to this mailing list, drop us a line at news@brooklynstreetart.com. Thanks!
©Brooklyn Street Art 2025
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
Unsubscribe · Preferences
|
|
|
