It's not all doom and gloom, but sometimes you may get that impression. In New York—like everywhere else—economic stress, global chaos, and general social burnout are just kind of… ever present. And yet we yearn to celebrate the New Year! Let's do it. The only fundamental mistake is assuming you’re alone in these gloomy feelings. You’re not. Say hi. Check in. Be decent. It won’t save the world, but it does mess with the algorithm. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 6 at Brooklyn Street Art.

Somewhere along the King’s Road, punk hardened into a classic ‘look’ - or dictionary of ‘looks’. Stripped of its insurgent force by decades of commercial smoothing, anarchy in the UK became as defiant as a Disney cartoon. Yet on a brisk late-summer evening this year, a red-mohawked youth stomped to his own march toward modernity on a Brooklyn street. Provocative or a unique stab at self-expression, this lad appeared to have a presence and resolve. Alternatively, he could have been late to the film set as an extra in a 1970s drama for Netflix. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 7 at Brooklyn Street Art.

“When I watch people holding their smartphones, I often ask myself: are they holding their phones because they want to, or because they have to?” This year, conceptual street artist Leon Reid gave that question physical form with a sculptural image of digital servitude that felt unsettlingly precise. The work struck a nerve with BSA readers, prompting a strong and immediate response. Reid’s question cuts to the core of behaviors that increasingly appear compulsory rather than chosen—habitual, addictive, and largely unexamined—and raises the issue of how deeply these technologies are reshaping society. It also invites a more complicated question: how many systems that began as entertainment or convenience will soon become unavoidable, even mandatory? Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 8 at Brooklyn Street Art.

This was the year that rappelling from high places tipped the balance in New York graffiti. No matter the style or anti-style, vertically executed pieces seemed to drop from above. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 9 at Brooklyn Street Art.

_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 2025. 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._ Continue reading Merry Christmas 2025 From BSA at Brooklyn Street Art.

This one caught our eye for the merging of classic graffiti nerve, blunt style execution, sentimental velvety roses, inspirational verses, and the organic smash of an evolving community wall. Not to mention the cross-generational name "Duster" being shared and executed completely differently. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 10 at Brooklyn Street Art.

Praise the labor of painting and painters: the technical mastery, the arduous strategic planning, the bodily toll. We usually encounter graffiti, street art, and murals only after they are complete, detached from—and largely unaware of—the conditions that produced them. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 11 at Brooklyn Street Art.

The splasher approach to graffiti has morphed into a kind of visceral graphic abstraction on the street, closer to Abstract Expressionism than to traditional tagging. Where the goal once might have been to weaponize a fire extinguisher for sheer scale, now it’s pure gesture—more Pollock drip, de Kooning slash, even a bit of Gutai thrown onto brick and metal. It gives your eye a new way to read the streetscape, turning motion and emotion into something immediate and bodily. The obvious gets re-framed through force and speed rather than letters. This red splash comes out of nowhere and suddenly feels unavoidable—an unannounced painting interrupting the city, or reframing it. Catch it while you can. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 12 at Brooklyn Street Art.

First thing on a Friday morning in the city, you might be hustling to the subway, walking a kid to school, or juggling coffee and a cranky toddler. Or, depending on the calendar, you might be lighting a small fire on the sidewalk. On the morning before Passover, Hasidic Jews in a few Brooklyn neighborhoods complete a religious ritual called biur chametz, the final removal of leavened food, traditionally by burning it before a specific hour. Fire here isn’t ceremonial or dramatic—it’s practical, deliberate, and brief – but there is always an audience. In a place like Brooklyn, that can mean flames and smoke billowing on the concrete, neighbors pausing, kids watching from a distance, a couple of cops standing by, and a whiff of smoke cutting across the usual mix of languages, routines, and lives—an ancient practice carried out calmly in the middle of a very modern city. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 13 at Brooklyn Street Art.

This Lincoln’s Sparrow by Peter Daverington is wise and approachable, its portrait framed by radiating action beams in a Manhattan micro-park. The site itself is barely 5,000 square feet—a triangulated scrap wedged between crisscrossing streets, a byproduct of chaotic city “planning” and rapacious real estate self-interest. Still, through care and intention, this public patch has been shaped into a small oasis. Daverington has spoken about broad painterly interests coalescing in his work, along with an awareness of cycles of collapse and renewal, class struggle, and the evolution of species. Here, one of his wise, enigmatic heads is rendered in portrait language—an intelligent presence meeting your gaze on a grey, cold winter's day. Continue reading Photos of BSA 2025 # 14 at Brooklyn Street Art.