Happy Easter to all the Christians today, and we hope all the kids get a chocolate bunny in their basket and go on an egg hunt in this new green grass Mother Nature has brought to the park for everyone to enjoy. It has been such an entertaining and rewarding hunt this week looking for new works popping up like daffodils on the street in NYC. We hope you enjoy some of these new works, a boon to the creative spirit that is running the streets in all five boroughs, no matter the season.
And now, here are images from our ongoing conversation with the street, this week, including: Praxis, Sara Lynne Leo, UFO 907, Aneko, Sluto, Viler, QUAZAR, Bones, Luch, Deluxe, WaliC, Suka, Ring, and TCONE.
Is it even possible to take a personal inventory when it looks like the world around you is going off kilter? It’s worth a try. It may be the thing you depend on most in the future.
Here is our weekly interview with the street: this week featuring Pork, Sara Lynne Leo, Homesick, Clint Mario, Pear, Girlty, Georgia Violett, and Max Grax.
Some kind of big game today we guess. Happens every year about this time – the streets will be empty this afternoon as people will be inside their homes, gathered around their screens, eating buffalo wings, pigs-in-a-blanket and tater tots with family and friends. Happy World Series everybody!
New York street art is heavy with pop icons, pop psychology, and popular culture in this week’s collection.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring: SacSix, Sara Lynne Leo, Degrupo, Eye Sticker, Stickman, Ollin, Jorit, Steve the Bum, and Kir One.
“Now don’t go jumping to conclusions”, your 5th grade English teacher Mrs. Muckaraka would tell you, and you thought she sounded like a prehistoric relic, a walking anachronism.
Apply that proverb to the cycle of news propaganda parried at us on a daily basis, one wonders if we are always being led to the slaughter – or just every other day. With great regularity, we are encouraged to jump to conclusions without reasoned examination.
Thinking is being erased. When watching cable news or listening to the corporate radio that blankets rural America, one sees that we are being pummeled by a logic that is beyond tortured, in much the same way Orwell warned. As you know, the repetition of the lie is what eventually makes it true.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
But now, don’t jump to conclusions. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we are going to repeat history. Our behavior is not being manipulated in an organized programmatic manner.
Right?
Our thanks to street artist Sara Lynne Leo for sparking this particularly side-winded Saturday diatribe.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! We’re thrilled to see you – you look marvelous!
The blustery cold snap outside today follows the mercurial mashup of winds, rains, thunder, and hail that shook our streets and darkened our skies yesterday – denting some cars, pummelling leaves downward. Ah fall; it feels like you are a couch and someone is taking out your stuffing.
The art of the street is indicative of the surreality of our times – a compression of days that also stretch like pumpkin taffy, wrapping around street lamps and fresh new Christmas light displays in Brooklyn. Everything, it would appear, is a dreamland of crisis; the economy, the environment, the bond crisis, the supply chain crisis, growing inflation, an impending food crisis, our faltering belief in institutions, our increasing distrust of each other, the police, the government, corporations, our currency, the medical profession, the church, and certainly our banks, the stock market, and Wall Street – these all define our times. Thankfully we have each other, friends.
Thank God for street art – the tea leaves of our time. Here’s a jolly mix-up of recent work found on the streets of two of our favorite cities – New York and Berlin.
Our interview with the street today includes Chris Jarosz, David Flores, Early Riser NYC, El Toro 215, Kiez Mie, Niko, ONI, Praxis VGZ, Rabea Senftenberg, RAMBO, Sara Lynne Leo, T.B.O.N.S., and Tianoo the Cat.
Ah, never mind, there’s gold in these here streets.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring 4sakn, Adrian Wilson, Against Dgrams, Billy Barnacles, Captain Eyeliner, Corn Queen, De Grupo, DLove, Eye Sticker, Goblin, Mister Alek, Moka, More Less Eveything, Plannedalism, Sara Lynne Leo, Stikman, Sule, The Art of Will Power, Trace1, Werd Smoker, and Winston Tseng .
Sara Lynn-Leo. Well-placed, well-rendered, witty, insightful, incisive.
These are hallmarks of the miniature pieces of street art that New Yorker Sara Lynn-Leo has been putting up in many neighborhoods in alleyways, doors, dirty corners, magnet walls, street furniture, and lamp posts. Finding these offerings can be difficult. They may be tiny in size and often placed out of eye view.
Look carefully; her furtive insecure, and smart characters will wag their intellect at you, eliciting empathy and possibly delight if you are not too bitter and hardened. During a year where everyone you met had a meltdown or two, she melts with you.
Actually, the first one we found in Brooklyn was made of vinyl – maybe in 2019? She mostly works on paper now, and she’s been experimenting with collage. She’s a regular on the BSA Images Of The Week section and a previous special feature HERE.
Her appeal rests in grand part for her willingness to explore scabrous issues without lecturing or grandstanding and, as we mentioned, with humor. This week we found five new pieces on the streets of Manhattan…
Nowruz Mubarak! Happy Persian New Year to all the New York neighbors who celebrate it. Also, Happy Spring! Did you think it would never arrive? Already the birds are chirping in the trees, and the crocus is popping up from beneath the garbage and dog crap. That guy who lives downstairs named Manny and his brother are washing their car on the curb while blasting a mix from Marley Marl & Red Alert at top volume for the block to enjoy. All the while, there is a colorful parade of young bucks and shorties who are strutting around the neighborhood with big eyes and a burning flame of hope in their hearts.
So here’s our weekly interview with the street, this time featuring: Almost Over Keep Smiling, City Kitty, D7606, Damien Mitchell, Ethan Minsker, Invader, LET, Matt Siren, Mort Art, NET, Rambo, Raw Raffle, Royce Bannon, SacSix, Sara Lynne Leo, Sticker Maul, Tram, Voxx Romana, and Winston Tseng.
Remember that time when your best friend’s boyfriend was installing a towel rack in the bathroom of their apartment, and he clumsily busted a hole through the wall, revealing a hidden room – which subsequently released a ghost who regularly appeared at the foot of their bed and slammed doors throughout their dwelling? We do. That’s why it was/was not shocking when a New York woman investigated the breeze emanating from her bathroom mirror. She took the mirror off the wall and discovered a portal to a three-room apartment.
Dude, if that happens to us, we’re not putting it on Tik Tok. We’re heading to Bed Bath and Beyond. In a space-starved city, newly discovered square footage is like finding gold bullion or bitcoin between couch cushions.
In other New York news, some street art neighborhoods are devoid of new works these days – perhaps because January and February are a frozen, mischievous purgatory that chases you inside in a normal year – doubly so when you’re on your 37th consecutive month of pajamas, Minecraft, and Chef Boyardee Beefaroni. Have faith; the next tumultuous 8 weeks of winter-spring-winter-spring weather will eventually coax the street artists and graffiti writers outside in a perennial sign of spring like the appearance of a robin on your windowsill.
Despite the paucity of prancing vandals at the moment, our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo, still managed to capture new art in the streets this week in Red Hook, Bushwick, Chelsea, and Bushwick – amongst the scores of closed restaurant huts that have besieged sidewalks citywide. Movie theaters will open for 25% capacity now, and perhaps the moribund restaurants will be coming back to life in this city that never quite sleeps.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Adrian Wilson, Berkit, Binho, Blur, Captain Eyeliner, Colin Capernick, Comik, DYM Crew, Ethan Minsker, Know Your Rights Camp, Locs, Matt Siren, Paolo Tolentino, Sara Lynne Leo, Shark, Taboo, The Monks, and Tony De Pew.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. The weather has been beautiful in NYC and the organic art popping up on the streets is still forcefully advocating for social and political solutions amidst great upheaval, even while…
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Adam Fujita, Almost Over Keep Smiling, Billie Barnacles, Black Lives Matter, Bosko, Detor, Downtown DaVinci, Eric Haze, Fumero, Insurgo, Marco Santini, Marina Zumi, Praxis VGZ, Sara Lynne Leo, and Who is Dirk.
The New York street artist who works under the moniker “Almost Over Keep Smiling” reinterprets slightly this Boston warning poster telling anybody who was black in a “free” state like Massachusetts or New York to stay away from the police because the federal government had passed a law empowering people to capture them and return them to slavery.
The Act was one of the most controversial elements of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a “slave power
conspiracy”. It required that all escaped slaves, upon capture, be
returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states
had to cooperate. Abolitionists nicknamed it the “Bloodhound Bill,” for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.[2]
The Act contributed to the growing polarization of the country over the issue of slavery, and is considered one of the causes of the Civil War.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week and Happy Pride NYC.
No pride parade today, not that New York needs a special day for LGBTQI parades – that’s simply called walking on the catwalk, err, sidewalk.
The US is officially a pariah on the world stage – banned to travel to Europe. Because, you know, masks. But dude, we’re like in totally good company with other countries like Brazil and Russia. It’s a race to be number 1.
A special shout-out and respect today goes to the creater of the I (heart) NY logo and campaign, Milton Glaser, who passed away this week at 91. Many artists on the street today are aware of his other contributions to graphic design and illustration in the last fifty years or so. Rest in Peace.
In street art news, downtown Manhattan is still largely boarded up, so artists are taking advantage of the new canvasses. You see, there is a silver lining to everything if you look for it. Or a plywood one.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Daze, DPF Studio, Dragon 77, Hek Tad, Sara Lynne Leo, and Stikman.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week! Happy Memorial Day Weekend in the US. Happy Eid-ul-Fitr 2020 to all our friends celebrating it, wherever you are. Wash you hands, practice social distancing, don’t fight with people over small things. It’s not worth it.
This week we have some new art from the streets that appears purposeful and dense with meaning – not beating around the bush these days. Maybe there is too much at stake, and artists know it too.
Here’s our weekly interview with the streets, this week featuring Caryn Cast, Cheer Up, City Kitty, Dylan Egon, Gane , Glare Rakn, Hearts NY, Praxis, and Sara Lynne-Leo.