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.
Colors wash over the city again, the greys now fading to the background. Even now, we stand in the shadow of war and all those who profit from it. Nevertheless, thanks to artists the streets are popping with promises, warnings, aspirations, exhortations, codes, and proclamation.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Faile, Adam Fujita, Jason Naylor, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Lauren Asta, Chris Soria, DEK@DX, SidkaOne, Misha Tyutyunik, TDM2DX, Ergot, Flye Lyfe, YoYo Cam, Let It Out, and Suizid.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week, where New York keeps pushing forward through this stormy winter – although the amount of new street art and graffiti dissipates this time of year as artists stay in their creative caves, waiting for spring. Hang in there peeps.
Great news for New York artists this week: artists can now apply for a monthly stipend of $1,000. This is big news because unlike a lot of Europe, the US and its institutions do not support artists or cultural workers.
Speaking of exemplary New Yorkers, Jeffery Epstein’s friend Jean-Luc Brunel has been found dead in his prison cell, mysteriously. One of Epstein’s other friends, Prince Andrew, reportedly settled out of court this week. “Prince Andrew reportedly agreed to never again deny raping Virginia Giuffre”, says the New York Post, The Independent, and The Sun. The Times says: “A new nursery rhyme is doing the rounds at the Palace:
‘The grand old Duke of York, he had 12 million quid. He gave it to someone he’d never met, for something he never did’”.
Jesus, let’s go out for a walk and see if we discover some new street art.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: Skewville, Specter, City Kitty, Adam Fujita, Pork, Jason Naylor, Below Key, Lexi Bella, Jowl, Nimek, Klonism, Harvey Ball, Eloy Bida, Kat Blouch, Timmy Ache, and Eyedao.
At the moment in New York most of us are staying off the street because it is bitterly cold outside. We just had a wind chill of -1 degrees fahrenheit (-18 celcius). Not a lot of graffiti and street art goes up during this weather.
But that doesn’t stop us from going out to shoot it.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street (in New York and Miami), this week featuring 2OX Crew, Arson, ATOMS, Boy Kong, Buff Monster, Ivan Roque, Jason Naylor, Jimenez, Kern Myrtle, MrKas, Patrick Kane McGregor, and Pleks.
The street art can double as advertisements, the advertisements can double as street art, and all of it has been supplanted by fevered talk about NFTs, as if the speaker whom you’ve been accosted by invented them. For a scene that likes to consider itself to be on the bleeding edge, this is all a bit disappointingly 2017 to hear, but there you have it.
Yet we are still pleased to see that the neighborhood is popping with more fresh new creativity than last year and you again feel like new things are to be discovered around almost every corner. Oh sure, there are many cultural looters here, but that’s always been the case. It’s good to see that some new transgressive pieces, eye-opening missives, and dripping wet tags are scattered here among the permission-based walls and ghosts from December past. No one knows what the socio-economic future holds, but for now, Wynwood’s holding steady.
Here are a few shots from Jaime Rojo as he made a few laps among the streets.
The summer storms keep coming, and yet somehow so does the incredible show of creativity on our streets; the celebration of murals and graffiti burners and painters and sculptors and characters and opinions and cogitations. However hot and steamy and hard New York can be sometimes, it also is positively ebullient and inspiring. We know our many differences are our greater asset, our combined aspirations a stunning new possibility.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A. Smith, Captain Eyeliner, China, Cody James, CP Won, David Puck, Gabriel Specter, Huetek, Iquene, Jason Naylor, Jitr!, Amanda Valdes, Lorenzo Masnah, M.R.S.N., Not Your Muse, Peachee Blue, Sara Lynne Leo, Sasha Velour, Say No Sleep, Tyler Ives, and Winston Tseng.
CP Won (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Say No Sleep (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Say No Sleep (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Say No Sleep (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Winston Tseng (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Sara Lynne-Leo in collaboration with Tyler Ives. “Remedial Purge” (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Captain Eyeliner (photo @ Jaime Rojo)A Smith (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Specter (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Huetek. Detail. Work in progress for The Bushwick Collective 10th Anniversary edition. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Cody James. Work in progress for The Bushwick Collective 10th Anniversary edition. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Jason Naylor. Work in progress for The Bushwick Collective 10th Anniversary edition. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)China (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Jitr! (photo @ Jaime Rojo)David Puck (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Iquena (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Not Your Muse (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Peachee Blue (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Amanda Valdes (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Masnah (photo @ Jaime Rojo)M.R.S.N. (photo @ Jaime Rojo)Unidentified artists (photo @ Jaime Rojo)
We pause to thank Mother Nature and the graffiti gods for blessing New York with an embarrassment of riches this summer. Amidst the swirling skirts and thunder thighs and sins of youthful exuberance, we are counting the beat of the street and the creative spirit that runs wild with or without permission.
Movie recommendation: Summer of Soulis the inspirational movie of this season, placed in thecontext of 1969 and timeless in its cultural resonance to 2021.
It’s been a hammering of the psyche again this week, as national and international news fixates on unvaccinated Covid patients flooding hospitals everywhere. Few mention that the price of vaccinations is gently bumping upward; a new subscription you didn’t realize you bought into like Netflix. Need a booster?
The art on the streets is banging onward, though, with new kids bringing the jokes, and the feels. OGs are up as well, including some people who have been on the street since we went off the gold standard – 50 years ago this week.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A Lucky Rabbit, Acne, Bastard Bot, Cern, Chris RWK, David Puck, Jason Naylor, Michael De Feo, Sac Six, The Daffodil Project, We The People, Acne, Bastard Bot, M, Praxis, A Very Nice, Say No Sleep, Damien Mitchell, Sonni, Bisco Smith, NYCM2, BK Foxx, 2MUCH, Hink, Smile.
You know the shy kid at the party who won’t hit the dance floor even if Jesus himself begged him – and then he hears his jam and suddenly starts doing flips, tricks, and power moves?
That’s what it felt like last week when all the funk-tech-floral-social-abstract-steez planets spun together into a powerful 2021 solar system at the Jersey City Mural Festival. How many times did you hear the word community, as if we’ve all been starved of it?
And the aesthetics were solid – you would not have guessed how sweet some of these combinations could be – with just enough curation to let the sparks crackle in the gritty oil-coated zones that are surrounding the MANA Contemporary compound. This most diverse generation is now freely tossing any rules and hierarchies out the window; these inheritors of the winds now gathering speed.
The first annual Jersey City Mural Festival brought together dozens of street artists, mural artists, graffiti writers, photographers, and art lovers to this new New Jersey. This festival in another year would have been a festive event just like any other festival – formulas have been discovered for how to mount public cultural events like these around the world – and we’ve been to many.
But this time, the energy was extra charged by the undeniable fact that we’re all emerging to a familiar yet changed world formed by fear, death, insecurity, and longing. Artists were elated to see their peers once again doing what they love doing most: painting outdoors. There is a recognition from the artists, and everybody around that life is precious and the scars left on us by the Pandemic made this event a jubilant one.
The collection of artworks presented here are only a fraction of all the works painted during the festival. Half a dozen of murals were still not completed when we departed. We hope to bring you the rest soon.
The festival unfolded over several days of painting and rain and an oppressive heatwave on two locations in Jersey City. Both locations are the remnants of Jersey City as an industrial powerhouse. The complex in Newark Ave, Mana Contemporary, is now an art center with several galleries, exhibition spaces, and artists’ studios. The complex on Coles Street still conserves its industrial grit. Still, a storage company has replaced the factories, and empty buildings in the decay process appear ready to be demolished.
The Jersey City Mural Festival was presented by Mana Public Arts and the Jersey City Mural Arts Program with the imprimatur of Jersey City Mayor Steven M. Fulop, the city’s Municipal Council, and the Office of Municipal Affairs.
We would like to thank the organizers and production team for all their assistance during the duration of the festival and to Mario at Tost Films for helping man the lift for our final photo session.
Many people in New York and around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief this week when our native son from Queens got on that helicopter with his immigrant wife and A. left the White House and, B. flew to Florida.
But for this week anyway, the streets are saying let’s give Biden and Harris and this new administration the congratulations and the honeymoon they deserve. We wish them (and us) the best!
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Anna is a toy, Bastard Bot, CRKSHNK, Elfo, Jason Naylor, Lunge Box, Praxis VGZ, and Queen Andrea.
The streets are alive with street art and pointed political protest. NYC citizens are joining the cities and communities across the country who are demonstrating furiously over the newest examples of systemic, latent, and explicit racism and police brutality that have characterized our society for so long. Of course it’s just one fire that has been waiting to spark as economic conditions run parallel with social inequity. In the face of sky-high unemployment, unpaid rents, increasing food insecurity, a “rescue” program that gave the store to the rich, and the ever-growing gap between hyper-rich and the chronically poor/ newly poor, the summer here looks like it could be torrid.
We won’t need or see a large number of street art festivals for a while. This show of politically/socially inspired artworks and text messages is probably just warming up on the streets and you can imagine that artists won’t find it appealing to be sitting on panels and pontificating about the genesis of mark-making, the original roots of punk anarchy, or how they are incorporating being woke or inter-sectionalism into their “street practice”. The creative class, however you define it, has suffered a huge blow and many are out of work, and patience. Based on what we have been witnessing here these past few weeks, you may predict that the more aesthetically inclined will seize the opportunity to make art for the city, on the city.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring 1UP Crew, Adam Fujita, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Billy Barnacles, Combo-CK, Denis Ouch, Indecline, Jason Naylor, Lunge Box, Matt Siren, Mr. Toll, and Woof Original.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street featuring Add Fuel, Almost Over Keep Smiling, BR163, Crash, Degrupo, Disordered, Early Riser, finDAC, Fours, Jason Naylor, Leleus, JL, Maya Hayuk, Obey, Sara Lynne Leo, Surface of Beauty, Telmo & Miel.
Did you see that micro-moon on Friday the 13th? We were up on the roof with artists and friends and weirdos celebrating “mid autumn moon” and looking at the New York skyline and that beautiful moon, which didn’t seem 14% smaller, did it? Seemed like your run-of-the-mill gorgeous Harvest Moon, right? Also, a dope opportunity to say “apogee“, which you just don’t get to say very much. No those are not those tassels that exotic dancers put on their nipples.
So here’s our harvest of Street Art and graffiti for you! The city has been producing amazing crops all year, to tell the truth.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Almost Over Keep Smiling, Crappytalism, Jason Naylor, Jocelyn Tsajh, Li-Hill, Peoples Power Assembly, Plannedalism, Pure Genius, Rider, Subway Doodle, Surface of Beauty, The Joker, Thomas Allen, and Will Kurtz.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
