We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
As we close out the year, we reflect on the powerful tension between graffiti and street art’s raw authenticity and its appropriation by the commercial world. This image of the Nekst campaign on Manhattan streets is both a statement and a question. Featuring iconic faces like Claudia Schiffer and Anna Nicole Smith—aged and distorted by weathered wheat paste—it sparks nostalgia for the 90s while confronting the passage of time.
At its heart, the campaign addresses a larger controversy: the fashion label Guess allegedly lifted Nekst’s signature tag and turned it into a commodity. Nekst, a prolific and bold graffiti writer revered by the community even a decade after his passing, made his mark in high-profile spots that earned him enduring respect. Seeing his legacy co-opted without consent raises ethical questions about the fine line between inspiration and exploitation—particularly when major fashion houses profit off street culture without acknowledgment.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
2024 brought New York a new fine feathered superhero – an escaped tufted-eared Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco whose daily plans became a focal point for people all over the city. We celebrated his liberation by vandals at the zoo, his sightings and adventures via social media, his tributes in paint and pen by artists and fans on the street, and we coined a description quoted by the New York Times. Sadly, we also mourned his loss and dedicated one of our Images of the Week to him in March.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
We are deeply grateful for the fans and friends we meet in cities, at symposia, or on cozy living room couches. In times of economic, political, and social uncertainty that leave many feeling like we’re standing on a precipice, one thing remains clear: the future lies in our friends, families, communities, and especially our kids.
If you know a young person, support them. Guide them. Remind them that they are doing a good job and that they matter. Your encouragement can make all the difference.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
This shot is a favorite for many reasons. We are celebrating seven years since the opening of the Urban Nation Museum with just a handful of curators. It’s exciting to see the Berlin museum continue to grow, reaching new audiences and sharing the ever-evolving story of street art.
Marking the launch of the new exhibition,Love Letters to the City, the façade features a striking piece by Lady Pink, the legendary New York train writer of the 1970s. Her “love letter” unfolds through a sensuous female form, a nod to both her roots and her enduring voice in the scene. The U2’s section between Bülowstraße and Nollendorfplatz is particularly iconic, and in the foreground, the blazing yellow train rolls by, a vivid reminder that time waits for no one.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
The polarity of positions is popular for simple journals today, a shamefully reductive assessment of the world and our complex interactions. If you were to fall for such easy explanations about politics and power, your only responsibility would be to pick a team. Sadly, that is the formula that takes hold right now, making citizens believe that life is just so black and white, left and right, wrong and right.
In truth it is a thin line, and many of those lines are blurred, leaving many vacillating between love and hate. And they feed off one another. Shakespeare’s famous depiction of love and hate comes in Romeo and Juliet, which is the most famous love story bought and sold. The young lovers’ intense and pure love contrasts sharply with the hatred between their families, the Capulets and Montagues.
“My only love sprung from my only hate!” encapsulates this tension. Love exists in a world filled with hatred.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
This floating plastic bag, like so many, appears mysteriously in the margins of a neighborhood, buffeted by warm, urine-soaked breezes and ice-cream truck melodies and small clouds of industrial pollution stirred by large trucks rumbling past. When artists transform everyday objects and elevate them, we reconsider them. In the case of plastic bags like these, they have been illegal for stores to use here for a few years, deemed bad for the environment. Perhaps the amorphous air-lifted ghost merits a twisted sense of nostalgia for the humble handle-bagged holder of three tins of cat food, a bright yellow bottle of dishwashing liquid, and a lottery card.
Roller-tagged above it are the Homesick boys, once residents of Williamsburg with their mom; now chased away by the surging powers of gentrification that herald luxury brands like Chanel to the neighborhood. Many who grew up in that Brooklyn neighborhood will never live in again because they can’t afford to, a displacement that makes one long for anything evocative of another era, homesick for a time that has past, often before your eyes.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
Accompanying us through the day and night, a wonderland of images leaves us bemused, beguiled, bewildered, bedazzled, and bewitched.
BSA readers loved looking into the eyes of BKFoxx’s news-watching kids this year, perhaps recognizing the stunned feeling one experiences as we surf the fire-hydrant of images and videos on our screens. A tawdry spectacle of things we desire and fear, a glittering swarm of emotion and misdirection—from all directions, this golden dopamine shower never ends.
Perhaps next year, it may collectively occur to us that our media literacy is getting hammered, and we’ll learn to get a handle on it.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
When BSA was in Dublin this year we found this mural by street artist Asbestos is still in good condition, and still turning heads.
Created as part of a series addressing the housing crisis in Ireland, the work reflects a broader issue affecting much of the Western world, where the financialization of housing continues to outmaneuver societal efforts to resolve it.
His people’s faces are often hidden or obscured, only their eyes shown – perhaps a metaphor for personal space and the psychological sanctuary it offers. Without knowing directly the intention of the work, we found folks on the street in Dublin this May to be caught by surprise at the view, with some taking a moment on the sidewalk to surmise what Asbestos is trying to say.
The figure, clad in a shirt with bold stripes, juxtaposes the simplicity of everyday attire with the surrealism of the house encasing the head, creating a mixed sense of both the mundane and the extraordinary. Before long, you can see that Asbestos is focused on themes of belonging, memory, and the fragility of the human psyche.
We’re celebrating the end of one year and the beginning of the next by thanking BSA Readers, Friends, and Family for your support in 2024. Picked by our followers, these photos are the heavily circulated and “liked” selections of the year – shot by our Editor of Photography, Jaime Rojo. 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. Happy Holidays Everyone!
The street artist named Hera always gets people’s interest when we publish her work. Nymphs and animals and mystic creatures with emotional eyes evoke a theater of street mythology. Adjacent to poetic non-sequiturs, Hera’s murals often resemble scenes within a more extensive play. Trees, walls, and sky are all part of the backdrop for the narrative she creates, implied as part of the same theatrical set design. You can be sure she intended something specific to be interpreted each time, but a passerby is free to co-author the story in their mind.
As the year comes to a close, we are pleased to present our 14th curated list of books—a reflection of our ongoing commitment to building a world-class library in Berlin. As co-founders of the Martha Cooper Library, our mission is to develop and maintain one of the most comprehensive collections dedicated to art books, photography archives, urban culture studies, street art monographs, graffiti history, and public art anthologies. These works serve as a vital resource for researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts who engage deeply with these fields.
Looking ahead to 2025, we are thrilled to announce the inaugural Martha Cooper Scholarship, which will launch next year in collaboration with Urban Nation Museum, the Martha Cooper Library, and Martha herself. This scholarship will support outstanding achievements in photography, underscoring her and our dedication to fostering new generations of talent and scholarship in visual culture.
Numerous publications explore street art, graffiti, and related practices each year, adding valuable perspectives and insights to the field. While our focus for this year’s list includes some recent releases, we’ve also highlighted significant works from previous years that help us put today in a better context. We invite your suggestions for books you’d like to see featured or added to the Martha Cooper Library collection and featured here. Your recommendations are invaluable as we continue to expand and diversify our offerings.
Below is our selected shortlist – books that make meaningful additions to any library and thoughtful gifts for family, friends, or even yourself. We hope you enjoy them as much as we have.
Bartek Świątecki, aka Penner, has a style that is a confidently defined blend of bold colors, geometric shapes, and abstract forms harmoniously intertwined. It’s a graphical minimalism that speaks volumes, with straight lines and pure colors forming complex, geometrical clusters. This unique visual language demonstrates his mastery of blending traditional graffiti with modern abstraction and reflects a deep engagement with high art and youth culture. His murals and canvas works, often large-scale, are known for their dynamic and vibrant nature, inviting viewers into a world where street art and fine art converge.
Books In The MCL: Golden Boy as Anthony Cool: by Herbert Kohl and James Hinton
From BSA:
Herbert Kohl and James Hinton’s “Golden Boy as Anthony Cool,” published in 1972, is a seminal work in the study of urban graffiti and street culture. Not only an academic exploration; it’s a journey into the heart of graffiti as a form of personal expression, rebellion, and cultural identity. Kohl’s insightful essays paired with Hinton’s evocative photographs provide a window into the lives of young people in the urban landscapes of New York City and Los Angeles as they simultaneously boil, wane and flourish in the late 60s and early 70s. These vibrant and vibrating communities are chronicled, whether affluent suburbs or struggling neighborhoods, each appears to brim with stories cryptically told through tags and murals on walls and doors.
Text Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo Photos by Sebastian Kläbsch
Books In The MCL: The Self-Titled “NeSpoon” by NeSpoon.
From BSA:
“NeSpoon,” a monograph on the work of the Polish artist, provides a comprehensive examination of her unique integration of lace patterns into urban and natural landscapes. The book, limited to 111 copies, each spanning over 420 pages, showcases the artist’s extensive portfolio and delves into the anthropology, cultural, and historical significance underlying her chosen medium.
“Why lace? It just came to me. Lace chose me, not the other way around. I’ve never liked lace. Before I started working with it, I thought lace was something old-fashioned, from a grandmother’s dusty apartment. Today it seems to me that each lace harbors harmony, balance and a sense of natural order. Isn’t that just what we are all searching for instinctively?”~ NeSpoon
Text: Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, Photos: Sebastian Kläbsch
Books In The MCL: Tokyo Tattoo 1970. Martha Cooper. Stockholm, Dokument Press.
From BSA:
In “Tokyo Tattoo 1970,” photographer Martha Cooper, well-known for her definitive work on New York City’s graffiti scene, applies her ethnographic skills to document traditional Japanese tattooing. This book provides a clear and respectful portrayal of a secretive and highly specialized art form, preserved in black-and-white film photography. Through Cooper’s lens, readers gain access to the traditional techniques and cultural narratives embedded in Japanese tattoo art, offering insights into an art form that was largely inaccessible during the early 1970s.
Text: Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo Fotos: Sebastian Kläbsch
Books In The MCL: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora. Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón.
Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora. Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón. 2018. New York. New York University Press.
From BSA:
“Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora” by Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón provides an insightful look into the world of women graffiti artists, challenging the perception that graffiti is a male-dominated subculture. This book highlights the contributions of over 100 women graffiti artists from 23 countries, showcasing how they navigate, challenge, and redefine the graffiti landscape.
From the streets of New York to the alleys of São Paulo, Pabón-Colón explores the lives and works of these women, presenting graffiti as a space for the performance of feminism. The book examines how these artists build communities, reshape the traditionally masculine spaces of hip hop, and create networks that lead to the formation of all-girl graffiti crews and painting sessions. This aspect is particularly useful in understanding how digital platforms have broadened the reach and impact of women graffiti artists, facilitating connections and collaborations worldwide.
Text: Steven P. Harrington & Jaime Rojo Fotos: Sebastian Kläbsch
ESCIF / “The Foundations of Harmony and Invention”
FROM BSA:
It would be challenging to extricate Escif’s work from the city and its daily routines. The city, with its cacophonous soundtrack created by its inhabitants’ constant movement and the fluidity of their industry and agency, remains central to the artist’s focus and relevance.
For Escif, the city is not just a muse but the bedrock of his artistic inspiration, a canvas, and an outlet for addressing its contradictions and inequalities. In his work, the city is not an abstract subject but a perpetual, tangible, and knowable presence, manifested in myriad encounters, journeys, dreams, observations, and experiences, later reassigned onto paper, canvas, or concrete.
Urban Nation’s Love Letters to the City, curated by Michelle Houston, is both an exhibition and a fulsome, sophisticated incantation. It invites audiences to confront the layered realities of urban life through the interpretation of its anonymous visual rebels, graffiti writers, and street artists and a generous representation of activists.
The show embraces the chaotic energy of unsanctioned art in the streets while seeking to decode its deeper meanings. It moves beyond the aesthetic to probe the social and political forces that shape these messages, sometimes manifestos. With themes ranging from urbanization and gentrification to environmental degradation and social inequality, Houston challenges visitors to imagine and reimagine the role of art in public spaces and consider its potential to transform the everyday into something with weight and impact.
“Painting in public spaces is inherently political,” Houston says, emphasizing the power of public art to reflect and react to the environment in which it exists. This exhibition showcases that power, exploring how artists navigate and reinterpret public spaces to create works that are as much about dialogue as they are about visual impact. The concept of “love letters” broadens here to encompass affection, critique, sarcasm, and hope—as multifaceted as the modern city.
One of the exhibition’s defining features is its indoor and outdoor elements integration. Lady Pink’s monumental mural on Urban Nation’s façade is a vivid testament to her approximately fifty-year legacy of painting on city walls and the interconnected histories of New York and Berlin. Her work, swirling with trains and iconic tags, serves as a personal love letter and a broader commentary on the universal city—a place of movement, reinvention, and resilience. Inside, installations like Moses & Taps’ suspended parcel truck and Rocco and His Brothers’ reconstructed graffiti writers’ benches disrupt the museum space with some of the raw energy of the street, blurring the lines between the institution and the public sphere.
The show also delves into Berlin’s complex history with walls and paint, with artifacts from the Stiftung Berliner Mauer prompting viewers to consider the dualities of oppression and liberation that define the city’s narrative.
“What is it about the glorification of a symbol of oppression by painting one side, and how was that commercialized?” Houston asks, pushing audiences to think critically about how art interacts with history and commodification. These questions resonate deeply in a city where the walls bear witness to decades of struggle and transformation.
The exhibition combines an impressive roster of artists, from early pioneers like Blek le Rat and Shepard Fairey to contemporary innovators like Bordalo II and Jazoo Yang. Each work offers a distinct perspective on the urban experience, whether through critiques of environmental decay, explorations of social identity, or celebrations of urban resilience. Houston’s curation creates space for these voices to intersect, offering unity and tension as the exhibition’s themes unfold.
At its heart, Love Letters to the City is a call to reconsider how we interact daily with the designed/built/neglected/destroyed human-made environment. It asks us to see the city as a backdrop and an active participant in our lives—a canvas where personal and collective histories collide.
As Houston asserts, “Paint in public space has a different potency in the city than anywhere else.” That potency lies in its immediacy, ability to provoke, offend, and inspire, and capacity to reflect urban life’s complexities. Through this exhibition, Urban Nation affirms the enduring relevance of this kind of public art and its power to illuminate the cities we call home.
2501, Banksy, Blek le Rat, Bordalo II, Carlos Mare aka Mare139, Chop ’em Down Films, Crash, Dan Witz, Daze, Drew. Lab_One, Elfo, Evol, HA Schult, HOGRE, Isaac Zavale, James Reka, Jaune, Jazoo Yang, Joel Daniel Phillips, Johannnes Mundinger, Jordan Seiler, Kenny Scharf, Lady Pink, Liviu Bulea, Martha Cooper, Matthew Grabelsky, MILLO, Moses & Taps, Nika Kramer, Octavi Serra, Owen Dippie, OX, PAINTING DHAKA Project, Mr. Paradox Paradise, Rocco and his brothers, Sebas Velasco, Shepard Fairey, Stephanie Buer, Stiftung Berliner Mauer, Stipan Tadić, Susanna Jerger, Tats Cru, THE WA, Vhils, and Zhang Dali.
Video credits: Commissioned by Stiftung Berliner Leben. Shot by Alexander Lichtner & Ilja Braun. Post-production, additional footage, graphics, and a final version by Michelle Nimpsch for YAP Studio/YES, AND… productions GmbH & Co. KG
LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY
September 14, 2024 – May 30, 2027. For a schedule of events, hours of operation, directions, and more details click HERE
It would be challenging to extricate Escif’s work from the city and its daily routines. The city, with its cacophonous soundtrack created by its inhabitants’ constant movement and the fluidity of their industry and agency, remains central to the artist’s focus and relevance.
For Escif, the city is not just a muse but the bedrock of his artistic inspiration, a canvas, and an outlet for addressing its contradictions and inequalities. In his work, the city is not an abstract subject but a perpetual, tangible, and knowable presence, manifested in myriad encounters, journeys, dreams, observations, and experiences, later reassigned onto paper, canvas, or concrete.
Escif’s keen commentary on essential subjects—the environment, social injustice, human rights, humanity, and beauty—is profoundly intertwined with the city. He neither backs away from its battles and challenges nor sugarcoats his art with glossy, shiny distractions that ignore the habitat around him. His elegant compositions, stripped of noise and clutter, present ideas rooted in reality and the inherent beauty of urban life’s ever-present comings and goings.
His new book, “The Foundations of Harmony and Invention,” is a 600-page tome compiling his work from the past 12 years. Crowd-funded, the project brings people together under a shared symposia of ideas and notes spearheaded by the artist. This spirit of collaboration is evident in the dozens of contributors featured in the book, including photographers, illustrators, artists, and writers.
Structured non-linearly, the book resembles an orchestral symphony, with every instrument—some homemade—and voice at play. Against this backdrop, Escif’s visual works, such as paintings, sculptures, and photographs, are combined with written contributions—cogitations, observations, anecdotes, manifestos, lamentations, odes, and protests—from himself and others. The result is a nutrient-rich, rumbling, and vital river of ideas and propositions that evolve into an expansive dialogue between the artist and the world around him.
We found the book’s description in the press release particularly compelling and share an excerpt here:
“So, this book, in a rectangular shape and hardcover, could well serve as a wedge with which to block the revolving doors of the Central Bank; as a companion for pleasure and adventures; as a small step to lean on to jump over a fence; as a cushion to sleep under a tree; as a throwing-object directed against a shop window; and also—why not—as a book, claiming pause, silence, and timelessness against the dominant paradigm of productivity.”
Somehow, Escif captures the everyday serenity and absurdity of life in these times—caught somewhere between the industrialization era and the algorithmic age, the imagination economy. For a man who may spend much time in his head, it is impossible not to feel his heart in these pages.
Hard cover: 600 pgs. approx. Year: 2024 Language: English & Spanish Edition: 900 copies
Click HERE to purchase ESCIF’s “The Foundations of Harmony and Invention”
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
