Happy Holidays! We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA readers, friends, and family for all of your support in 2022. We have selected some of our favorite shots by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, and 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.
In the terminology of our pop hagiography, there can be no doubt which portrait appears in the most murals throughout our borough – Christopher George Latore Wallace, better known by his stage names the Notorious B.I.G., Biggie Smalls, or simply Biggie. 25 years after his death, you see Biggie all over Brooklyn, and he truly is a king.
In other NYC news, do you ever feel like a slowly boiling frog? NYPD is talking about partnering with Amazon’s Ring network; the New York Times explains that all those 5G network towers going up on the streets around the city are really just upgraded cell phone equipment, the police will begin a “Drone Unit” to fight crime– “said to be equipped with night vision technology,” this article says, they “won’t be weaponized,” and the NYPD digi-dog program from Boston Dynamics has been discontinued for right now and drones patrolling streets soon, right? Also on Friday the New York Federal Reserve announced plans for a new Fed digital dollar – a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) and the new UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is all in favor of completely digitized money. Meanwhile, it looks like NYC schools are going to be a lot safer with new initiatives to put biometric screening in them including maybe facial recognition. Nothing to worry about, right?
The city pays tributes to its heroes in different ways, and NYC street art loves Biggie Smalls more than anyone, along with folks like Spike Lee and Jean Michel Basquiat. This week we spotted a few new ones among the bevy of new street art beauties we discovered below.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Jason Naylor, Homesick, Savior El Mundo, King Baby, Mutz, Glare, Banksy Hates Me, Ashley Hodder, Raisa Nosova, Qzar, Spin, INU, Cheatz, Ultraboyz, Humble, Carlos RMK, and Yuzly Mathurin.