It has been a somewhat delirious spring week in Berlin-town as we cope with that special blend of bliss and dysphoria that envelopes you – mixing intercontinental jet lag, blooming cherry blossoms, birds chirping, aerosol spraying, and the chaos and grief of war at the doorstep. The shadow of war was never far from conversations.
All week we have been gratified, elated, to see the spirit of creativity everywhere- murals, tags, stickers,pop-up gallery show; but friends and colleagues speak of institutional failures, inflation, and fears of war spiraling. Notably in three conversations Berliners told us they expect America to re-elect Trump and that the US will soon be convulsed into war.
But the art! The streets! The spring! The murals in the rag-tag parks here that are dotted with skater half-pipes and blooming lilac bushes, the smell of piss and marijuana and cherry blossoms – it is all here in gritty and eclectic Berlin. People help point you in the next direction, and you discover more. The new real estate developments tend toward towering glass, and some previously artist neighborhoods are decidedly gentrifying, but the balance with the creative sector is still healthy, or so we think.
Today we are back in dirty old Brooklyn, but we already miss our sister-brother Berlin and the beautiful people we spent time with.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: 1UP Crew, Nafir, CMYK Dots, Anchor, Emikly Strangre202, Andrea Villanis, Andioh, Liz Art, Tobo Berlin, Devita, and Mash.
Happy Halloween and welcome to BSA Images of the Week!
People have been in the Halloween spirit here in Berlin – and we keep seeing new pieces which may or may not be related to the holiday, but remind us of it anyway. Here’s a short collection of new stuff we discovered, including fresh pieces from Jaime Paul Scanlon AKA JPS and Nafir, who were both in town and hitting the streets with new collections of works.
Stay Safe and have fun!
Our interview with the street today includes JPS, Nafir, and a few anonymous pieces.
The moment you think you understand the street is the moment you begin to lose touch. Behavior on social media is also about as reliable as your Uncle Oscar after he’s had a few too many frosted rum balls and rosy red holiday cocktails. First, he’s twirling Aunt Marge to the Beatles on the living room rug, next thing he’s headbanging with your cousin Teddy to Bon Jovi on the back porch – and later you regrettably see him getting his freak on with a Missy Elliott classic as he waits his turn at the pool table in the basement.
So we rely on the numbers to tell us what is popular with our readers, and not surprisingly, you like everything! Little tiny stickers, massive murals, 3-D sculptural elements, even Lizzo running for president. These are the top ten pieces that got retweeted, shared on Instagram, commented about on Facebook and read about on the site. It’s not scientific, and it’s skewed through the lens of BSA’s POV, but these hottest pieces are still an indicator of the sentiments and tastes of fans on social; sophisticated, insightful, critical, dark mooded, conscious and funny AF. You’re just our type!
November was “Native American Heritage Month” in the US and has been since 1990 and ironically the growing right-wing extremism of the intervening decades appears to have further erased our collective knowledge of native peoples – so it’s the perfect time to find this new campaign of local natives on the streets of New York by Street Artist LMNOPI.
9. Abe Lincoln Jr. & Maia Lorian. A Presidential Parody
The public takeover of ‘street furniture’ and advertising kiosks continues as artists demand back the mindspace and public space that is sold or given to corporate advertisers or propagandizers. This duo brings complementary skills to the old phone booths with their own brand of political satire.
8. Okuda & Bordalo II Collaboration in Madrid.
Okusa San Miguel and Bordallo II (photo @ Jaime Rojo)
This Frankenstein duet on the streets of Madrid caught our eye this spring and you liked it too. By Spain’s Okuda and Portugal’s Bordalo II. Madrid, March 2019.
7. Oak Oak in Bayonne, France.
Oak Oak (photo @ Jaime Rojo)
A small stencil in Bayonne, France from Oak Oak resonates in its cheerful satire of pompous crass man-boys with bombs.
6 Lula Goce for NRNY Artsy Murals /Street Art For Mankind
The Swan and the falcon depicted on the mural are actual residents of New Rochelle. They came and liked what they saw and decided to stay and raise their families there. A fitting real story as New Rochelle is a town where immigrants are welcomed and are an important part of the community.
A campaign for singer/songwriter/ rapper Lizzo capitalized on the stars meteoric rise in 2019 to the top of many charts. Considering the number of Democratic challengers on the debate stages this summer and fall, it seemed plausible that she was actually running. If she promised Americans to help the poor and working-class yet assured her corporate donors to screw them once in office, she could get elected too.
4. Judith Supine’s Luxury Cowboy/girl Ad Take Over
The brilliant collage surrealist Judith Supine was back with a new lasso this year, skillfully misleading audiences on the street with his free associations equating luxury fashion brands and 20th-century cancer product advertising. It’s a match made in Hell!. Welcome!
Iranian Street Arist Nafir left this Instagram alienation indictment hanging in a hidden spot at Berlin’s Urban Spree playground this year, and for some reason, it struck a chord with many.
Do you want to talk about it? We’re not joking about suicide.
It began as a way of bringing fine art pieces from inside the museum to the Street, and “The Outings Project” has brought hundreds of artworks out into the daylight this way for a decade or so, thanks to French artist Julien de Casabianca. These particular dark angels have been cast out of heaven and are just about to hit the ground across the street from Urban Nation Museum, Berlin.
1. Sara Lynne-Leo struck a chord with her pain commentary on the streets of NYC
A relative newcomer to the streets in New York, Sara Lynne-Leo keeps her small scale pieces well-placed, if your eyes are open. A comedian and social observer, her character’s pains and insecurities are played out in magnified emotional tableaus that quickly capture the severity and make light of it at the same time. This one must have really captured the zeitgeist of a troubled time across modern societies, where one pretends a wound is made bearable with an optimistic sunny perspective, even if the situation may be life-threatening.
With Roger Stone found guilty on all 7 counts this week in the US, Donny Tinyhands appears to have more associates in prison than John Gotti did. During his own impeachment hearings this week the occupant of the Oval Office actually LIVE-tweeted his harassment of a witness while she testified – that’s a new record for this record-breaking lawless period we live in, seemingly displaying corruption and contempt for our systems of law at the highest offices of the land.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Berlin, and this time featuring Stohead, Christian Bohmer, CTO, David De La Mano, Equipe Fatale, Emmanuel Jarus, Francisco Bosoletti, Fatal, Feser, Herakut, HRVB, Weird Crew, Marina Zumi, Marycula, Mimi the Clown, Nafir, Peus, Señor Schnu, sp.38 and Stefan Ways.
Welcome to Images of the Week! Go outside! Take your recycled bag with you because New York just outlawed plastic bags as of March 2020, so you can get in the habit now. This week most of our images come from the Urban Art holy city of Berlin, which we visited for a few days. Next stop, Querétaro, Mexico! Vamos!
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring Berlin Kidz, Herakut, Homo Punk Action, Lapiz, Lister, Marina Zumi, Mr. June, Nafir, Nespoon, Nils Westergardt, Ostap, Pink Pony, 1UP Crew and Snik.
Two new street mandalas here in Milan, Italy from two Street Artists from Iran, Nafir and FRZ. Not surprisingly, the theme is peace, something that feels very endangered in certain parts of the world due to oil, natural resources, banking, private profits, and sometimes geopolitical rancor. The side by side pieces, one based on natural and traditional Iranian decorative patterning, the other more folkloric in motif, each take a different route to the same goal.
“This piece is called ‘Flight of Eslimi’ and it is a statement about changing for the better,” says Nafir, who is originally from Tehran and whose work on the street is usually darker in mood and outlook than this one. “It talks about our ability to become a new form of existence, like the worm (idea) that can change to a butterfly (gold).”
FRz. “Fa Kingz” Milan, Italy (Gif courtesy of the artist)
Tabriz based FRZ creates his mural (and GIF) “Fa kingz” as perhaps a colorful condemnation of the people who are using war and violence to steal and destroy lives and cultural heritage. “It is about the ambitions of those who have power and their unreasonable demands for governing the world,” he says. “Those human beings demolished priceless lives and homes of others just to prove their power and wealth are showing us the selfishness of those who say they are searching for immortality – but for them it does not exist.”
Happy Autumn New York! To our readers south of the Equator, the spring birds must be singing by now, right? Meanwhile in dirty old New York there is a lot of new stuff – including two new walls going up by OsGemeos and UK artist Lakwena’s turn at the Houston/Bowery Wall.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Anagard, Anthony Lister, Banksy, Brad Downey, D7606, Kai, Licuado, Martin Whatson, Mr. DiMaggio, Nafir, Nespoon, OsGemeos, Peter Phobia, Ron English, Silvio Alino, Voxx, and Zezao.
After absentee voting last week in NYC it was a quick trip to Germany this week to see new stuff in Berlin and Dresden and to find that it’s autumn there too, and getting cold. Of course it was zero sleep election night because of the time differnce it was 6 am Wednesday before the Electoral College pushed Trump into the win zone.
Can’t even.
It’s getting harder and harder to explain things to people when we travel, let’s just say that much.
It was crisply chilly, rainy, and windy and the shop keepers were putting up Christmas trees in the windows, but the streets of Berlin were in bloom with new Street Art. Here is a very abbreviated autumn bouquet picked fresh from Berlin for your splendid review.
It’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring A Squid Called Sebastion, Adele Renault, Bailon, Dainel Nehaus, Nafir, and Snik.
This week we bring you fresh stuff from Berlin where the final Project M/10 was debuted with a collection of artists curated by Instagrafite and we had an opportunity to ride the streets looking for interesting art, to avoid getting swept away by a sudden massive flood, and to visit Urban Spree for some great prints and paintings, and even to hang out in a boxing club for days with a cluster of curators.
Our special thanks to Yasha Young and the entire UN Team for their UNflagging support as we collectively are bringing a new institution that recognizes a wide swath of history and influences forward. More to come…
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring A Squid Called Sebastian, Anarkia, Axel Void, Hop Louie, JAZ, Marshal Arts, Mindaugas Bonanu, Nafir, Olek, Panmela Castro, RoboSexi, Roxi, Speto, Uriginal, and Various & Gould.
New interventional pieces of objects in clear resin from the Polish duo Robosexi in collaboration with Polish/Brooklyner artist OLEK placed IN the streets of Berlin this week. An anagram of their first names Roxi and Sebo, the duo say their “Time Capsules” are an effort to freeze the truth about this time and people today. They say that they also do performances and video art in addition to these installations, but this week they are in town with OLEK for PM/10 at Urban Nation.
Alleged ties between US Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimer Putin made it to the street via Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Bonanu and this week on the cover of Frankfurter Allgemeine. Although the German newspaper doesn’t credit the creator of this image (which happens a LOT with street art), we can tell you that the significance of the image is directly tied to Berlin Wall art history. As writer and art critic Carlo McCormick notes in a recent PAPER magazine portfolio of Trump-related art, this piece refers to ” a famous fraternal kiss in 1979 between Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev and his East German counterpart Erich Honecker that gained fame as a painting by Dmitri Vrubel on the Berlin Wall.”
Hillary Clinton announced in Brooklyn this week that she supports raising the minimum wage to $250,000 a speech while Bernie Sanders scoped around the showroom of a Danish furniture designer in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to order a new blond wood desk and chair for the Oval Office. The two sparred live on national TV from Brooklyn Thursday but you couldn’t tell they were in the BK because the CNN logos engulfed the screen and candidates and the actual citizens were reduced to a babbling rabble who hooted and hollered like sports fans somewhere in the dark. Wonder how long CNN intends to have their brand new warehouse-sized logo beaming across the river at Manhattan.
Meanwhile, on the streets here it is pretty evident who many New Yorkers favor and the majority of new Street Art pieces and graffiti pieces are feeling the Bern. It’s true, we tend to hang out with artists, creatives, punks, hippies, and assorted wild-eyed weirdos – so its not exactly a true cross-section, but Clinton fans are not making much art on the streets. Possibly that is because level-headed reasonable people don’t feel the need to express their support for her so loudly and visibly. It will be interesting to see if Big Media predictions of a 17% Clinton lead are true by Wednesday morning. The Wall Street Journal seems to be banking on it.
Trump is #1 in NYC for the Republicans, presumably because of “New York values”.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring Caratoes, Elle, Ever Siempre, Faust, Flood, Icy & Sot, Lola Jiblazee, Lora Zombie, Nafir, Shantell Martin, Stuart Ringholt, Thiago Goms, Thievin’ Stephen, Thomas Allen, TriHumph, Vandal Expressionism, Vanesa Longchamp, Vexta, You Go Girl!, and Zabou.
The city of Oostende began its great reforms in 1883. King Leopold II earned the nickname the “constructor” for his contribution to public works. These reforms were possible thanks to the large profits that were made from the king’s colony, an area sixty times larger than Belguim: the Congo. In the Congo, rubber was a resource that became precious because of its use in the automotive and bicycle industries. The king imposed high quotas on rubber production in the Congo and forced the indigenous population to comply using coercive methods and extreme violence. It is estimated that during Leopold’s years of domination about ten million natives were killed in the Congo.
“Homage to the Past and Future” is a work that talks about the heavy legacy of the past, about how societies live with the consequences of those that came before and how they build their current reality to be better. The mural is located at the urban entrance to the city, a work that perhaps Leopoldo II had not imagined at the gates of the resort town. Today, the reality is different; diversity flourishes in the city and the image is of a resident of Oostende. Humans learn from their mistakes and the future will always be better if our present remembers and pays homage to the real heroes.”
A lot of people thought so, and the rise of commercial festivals and commissioned public/private mural programs probably brought more artists to more walls than in recent history. Judging from the In Box, 2016 is going to break more records. Enormous, polished, fully realized and presented, murals can hold a special role in a community and transform a neighborhood, even a city.
But they are not the “organic” Street Art that draws us into the dark in-between places in a city, or at its margins.
We keep our eyes open for the small, one-off, idiosyncratic, uncommissioned, weirdo work as well, as it can carry clues about the culture and reveal a sage or silly solo voice. It also just reinforces the feeling that the street is still home to an autonomous free-for-all of ideas and opinions and wandering passions. For us it is still fascinating to seek out and discover the one-of-a-kind small wheatpastes, stencils, sculptures, ad takeovers, collages, and aerosol sprayed pieces alongside the enormous and detailed paintings that take days to complete.
The main image above is from a vinyl subway advertisement that was high-jacked and we published it in February of this year on our Images of the Week posting. It’s small, personal, and very effective as you can see someone suspiciously similar to Batman is jumping out of the mouth of someone looking awfully similar to Hedwig of “Angry Inch” fame.
Of the 10,000 or so images photographer Jaime Rojo took in 2015, here are a selection 140+ of the best images from his travels through streets looking for unpermissioned and sanctioned art.
Brooklyn Street Art 2015 Images of the Year by Jaime Rojo
Brooklyn Street Art 2015 Images of the Year by Jaime Rojo includes the following artists;
365xlos43, Amanda Marie, Andreas Englund, Augustine Kofie, Bisser, Boijeot, Renauld, Bordaloli, Brittany, BunnyM, Case Maclaim, Casg, Cash4, CDRE, Clet, Cost, Curve, Dain, Dal East, Dan Budnik, Dan Witz, David Walker, DeeDee, Dennis McNett, Don Rimx, Ricardo Cabret, LNY, Alex Seel, Mata Ruda, Don’t Fret, Dot Dot Dot, ECB, El Mac, El Sol25, Ella & Pitr, Eric Simmons, Enest Zacharevic, Martha Cooper, Martin Whatson, Ever, Faile, Faith47, Findac, Futura, Gaia, Gilf!, Hanksy, Hellbent, Hot Tea, How & Nosm, Icy and Sot, Inti, Invader, Isaac Cordal, James Bullough, Janet Dickson, Jef Aerosol, Jilly Ballistic, Joe Iurato, John Fekner, Le Diamantaire, Li Hill, LMNOPI, London Kaye, Low Brow, Marina Capdevilla, Miss Van, Mr. Prvrt, Mr. Toll, Myth, Nafir, Nemos, Never Crew, Nick Walker, Nina Pandolofo, Old Broads, Oldy, Ollio, Os Gemeos, Owen Dippie, Paper Skaters, Pet Bird, Kashink, Smells, Cash4, PichiAvo, Pixel Pancho, QRST, ROA, Ron English, Rubin415, Saner, Sean 9 Lugo, Shai Dahan, Shepard Fairey, Sheryo & The Yok, Sinned, Sipros, Skewville, Slikor, Smells, Sweet Toof, Snowden, Edward Snowden, Andrew Tider, Jeff Greenspan, Specter, Stray Ones, Sweet Toof, Swil, Willow, Swoon, The Outings Project, Toney De Pew, Tristan Eaton, Various & Gould, Vermibus, Wane, Wk Interact
Amsterdam rocked the decks this month to celebrate urban contemporary art and street art in the Netherlands with visual and music based events giving artists many platforms to shine.
Graffuturism, a term and movement coined a handful of years ago to describe an intersection of graffiti, street art, and abstract geometry continues to stake out new territory and here were gallery and street exhibitions proffering some of the current practitioners whose work could be described as such.
The 5th Urban Art Festival Amsterdam featured their own collection of Graffuturists from Europe, the United States, and South America including Poesia, the unofficial founder of Graffuturism in a show of works on canvas, prints, drawings on paper, murals and site-specific abstract installations.
Running concurrently was a Stencil Masters show featuring some of the top knife-wielding artists known on the street today along with a few senior early proponents. The diverse program of gallery, street installations and DJs courtesy of the ADE (Amsterdam Dance Event) helped further contextualize the art forms for a wider audience of fans.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
