The birthplace of graffiti, New York City, has evolved into a global center for street art. Its public surfaces host a range of media from handmade stickers and wheatpastes to huge installations and murals. Artists from across the globe routinely travel to New York City to grace its walls as they refashion the city into one huge never-ending unofficial street art festival. Among these are such contemporary urban legends as D'Face, Banksy, Os Gemeos, Case, MaClaim, Invader, Stik and Faith 47. Street Art NYC showcases both sanctioned and unsanctioned works captured in the course of a transformative decade that saw the emergence of over a dozen distinctly engaging projects. The hugely popular Bushwick Collective, L.I.S.A Project NYC and Welling Court Mural Project are highlighted with introductory essays. Local community-based projects and festivals, as well as those responding to specific environmental and social issues, are also represented. Banksy's one month 2013 residency, Better Out than In is documented with words and images. And homage is paid to the legendary 5 Pointz graffiti and street art mecca. Street Art NYC is is a beautifully designed hardcover book. The full color photographs by Lord K2 captures the art in the city, printed on thick coated paper, and Lois Stavsky's text provides the context. This is the only book to spotlight the transformational decade that marked the shift from largely unsanctioned to widely curated street art throughout New York City's five boroughs. This book is a collaboration between Lord K2, an award-winning photographer and curator of the online Museum of Urban Art and Lois Stavsky, a noted street art documentarian and editor of the popular blog, Street Art NYC.

"A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century."

The books shows the powerful work and international trajectory of Spanish urban artist Francisco de Pájaro aka Art is Trash.

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat's works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries--and sometimes collaborators--A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat's work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat's extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.

An inveterate traveler, painter of walls and canvases alike, sculptor of deranged toys and a fan of the color pink, the enigmatic artist Buff Monster surprises and amuses in all mediums. In his latest monograph, Stay Melty, Buff collects his works in progress, paintings, murals, posters, stickers, Melty Misfits trading cards and toys. As its hard to keep up with this energetic artists output, fans will be grateful to find much of his recent work in one compact volume. Buff Monster grew up in Hawaii, lived and worked in Los Angeles and currently resides in New York City.

Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists, and more, Alice Neel created forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues. In Alice Neel, Uptown, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel’s approach, the selection looks at those whose portraits are often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; “what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered,” Als writes. The publication, which opens with a foreword by Jeremy Lewison, advisor to The Estate of Alice Neel, explores Neel’s interest in the diversity of uptown New York and the variety of people amongst whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress, and author Alice Childress; the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr.; the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse; alongside more anonymous individuals of a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman, and a local kid who ran errands for Neel. In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective. A contemporary and personal approach to the artist’s oeuvre, Als’s project is “an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing.” This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibitions of Neel’s paintings and drawings at David Zwirner, New York, and Victoria Miro, London.