Nicolette Groome created Hip Hop Pigeons for the 2022 Trolley Square Mural Project, in Wilmington, Delaware. Organized by the Delaware Avenue Community Association, several artists created fun utility box murals to brighten up the neighborhood with art.
From more of Groome’s more recent work, also check out her Instagram.
Iván Argote created Dinosaur (2024) for the fourth High Line Plinth commission. The giant sculpture was cast in aluminum and celebrates one of NYC’s most common sights- the pigeon.
From the High Line’s website about the work-
Dinosaur was first submitted as a proposal for the High Line Plinth in 2020, among 80 proposals that included the third High Line Plinth commission, Pamela Rosenkranz’s Old Tree (2023). The meticulously hand-painted, humorous sculpture challenges the grandeur of traditional monuments celebrating significant historical figures, instead choosing to canonize the familiar New York City street bird. Posed on a concrete plinth that resembles the sidewalks and buildings that New York’s pigeons call home, Dinosaur reverses the typical power dynamic between bird and human, towering 21 feet above the Spur, over the countless pedestrians and car drivers that travel down 10th Avenue.
Reflecting on the work’s title, Argote notes, “The name Dinosaur makes reference to the sculpture’s scale and to the pigeon’s ancestors who millions of years ago dominated the globe, as we humans do today… the name also serves as a reference to the dinosaur’s extinction. Like them, one day we won’t be around anymore, but perhaps a remnant of humanity will live on—as pigeons do—in the dark corners and gaps of future worlds. I feel this sculpture could generate an uncanny feeling of attraction, seduction, and fear among the inhabitants of New York.”
Dinosaur, like the pigeons that inspired it, bears witness to the city’s evolution and confronts us with our ever-changing relationship with the natural world and its inhabitants. The oft-overlooked and derided creatures that seem to over-populate the city first arrived in the US via Europe, likely in the 1800s. They were kept as domesticated animals and were most notably used as reliable message carriers. Pigeons have an internal GPS, known as “homing,” that allows them to always find their way back home. This skill once made the bird indispensable in war—they served as military messengers in both World War I and World War II, saving hundreds of soldiers’ lives by transporting messages quickly to both the trenches and front lines. Many of these pigeons received gallantry awards and were celebrated as war heroes, before technology eventually rendered them obsolete.
Dinosaur recognizes this seemingly prosaic figure and celebrates its anonymity amongst the urban landscape, while also taking aim at classic monuments erected in honor of great men, who all too often are neither honorable nor great. Argote humorously suggests that, in fact, the not-wild—but no longer domesticated—birds are likely more deserving of being placed on a pedestal and celebrated for their contributions to society than most. Further, by highlighting their origins, Argote reminds viewers that, to some degree, everyone is an immigrant. Even the pigeon, a New York fixture, initially migrated here and made the city their home, like millions of other “native” New Yorkers.
Bass Drum of Death- Do Nothing
This song is from Bass Drum of Death‘s latest album, SIX.
They are currently on tour and playing at The Roxy in Los Angeles on Thursday, 11/6/25, with Gus Baldwin and The Sketch.
Castle Rat- “Wizard”
Every month I listen to the majority of bands and musicians who are playing in Los Angeles and select some for a monthly playlist. It includes a variety of genres and usually newer work by the artist.
The song above by Brooklyn medieval fantasy heavy metal band Castle Rat is from their 2025 album, The Bestiary.
Below are September’s selections-
Kashink was one of the many artists who created murals for Jeffrey Deitch’s Coney Art Walls in Coney Island, Brooklyn. You can find their most recent work on Instagram.
Below is Jeffrey Deitch‘s statement about the project from his website-
“Coney Art Walls was an outdoor museum of street art in the center of the Coney Island amusement park. Sixty-eight murals by leading and emerging artists from around the world were presented during the three year curatorial project from 2015 – 2017. Coney Art Walls was possibly the most visited contemporary art installation in the world during its run, experienced by many of the five million people who visit Coney Island each summer. Since the 1970s, when I would visit Coney Island with my punk rocker friends, I had a dream of creating a populist art installation there. Reading about a large vacant lot in the center of the amusement park, I approached the owner, Thor Equities, with my proposal for an outdoor museum of street art. They were enthusiastic about the concept and funded a remarkable three-year project. The mural project was enhanced by a Brooklyn food court with outdoor seating and a music program. It was thrilling to see hundreds of young people dancing in front of the murals on summer nights.”
Today’s flashback is to a few of the intricate works from Sofia Love‘s 2023 exhibition Vaquera at Shelter in NYC.
From the gallery about the exhibition-
Vaquera – not determined by an article, the word becomes both a noun and an adjective, an iconic figure and a way of being in the world. For Brooklyn-based painter Sofia Love’s debut solo exhibition in New York, vaquera is both a manifesto of queer self-fashioning and a patron saint.
Born and raised in Boston, but with deep family ties to the Mexican community of Laredo, TX, Love’s acrylic paintings serve as a negotiation between ancestral memory and contemporary identity. The titular cowgirl recurs throughout the exhibition – gun-slinging, brown, and frequently nude – framed by expanses of desert. She’s a real, historical cowgirl. She’s the artist traversing her own imagination. She’s a badass dyke. For Love, vaquera is an object of desire and an extension of herself.
While there are traditional canvases, the majority of works on view take the form of nichos, intimate yet elaborately decorated altars that can be found in homes across Mexico. Dedicated to deceased ancestors or particular saints, nichos blend folk spirituality with Catholicism, smuggling pre-Colombian vernacular traditions into contemporary, Westernized culture. Love’s nichos draw on this history to produce art objects that exist at the border of painting and sculpture, with frames that extend the content and imagery of the paintings they enshrine.
The resulting works each have interiors and exteriors, the painting and the frame, in which ambivalent scenes are surrounded by totems and animals that seem to hint at the psychological subtext of the central image. Figures reappear across the framed nichos like characters in a narrative, each with its own personal connotation for the artist. Skulls, moths, storks tell stories that are only partially legible from an external perspective. Like the vaquera herself, Love’s layered compositions refuse any easy interpretation.
Mural by Reid Jenkins and Scott Hillis, located in Pinellas Park, Florida.
It is one of several murals outside a group of buildings that includes Studios at 5663 and Saint Paint Arts.
Betsy Lester, “The Weyward Sisters”, Acrylic and collage on canvas
Florida artist Betsy Orbe Lester‘s mixed media work blends the familiar with the mysterious. The works pictured are from a 2023 visit to her studio at ArtLofts in St. Pete.
“Pianist’s Dress Impression”, 2005, cast glass, cold-worked
This ghostly glass sculpture by Karen LaMonte is part of Palm Springs Art Museum‘s exhibition Meditations in Glass, on view until 11/23/25.
From the museum about the work-
This life-size figure of a pianist projects a ghostly aura, yet the sculpture holds light in its mass like the spirit is held in the physical body. We can see how flesh once filled out the figure, noting how the buttons of the dress strain over the chest. Glass is “air, ethereal, material/non-material, ungraspable, fleeting, spiritual,” says LaMonte. “The absent figure is important to me because it tempers the undemanding pleasure of beauty with insinuations of loss and mortality.”
Brooklyn-based artists Doug Cunningham and Jason Noto (aka Morning Breath) created the mural above for the 2019 edition of SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida.
Below are a few of the references in the mural from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance website–
At 250 Dr. Martin Luther King Junior Street North, a scattering of images in the style of a “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” ad spreads out on a light blue wall, as if the wall were an old comic book-style pamphlet held out wide.
The design was brush painted, inspired by the business that’s been at this location since 1926 — the Coney Island Sandwich Shop. That business and the artists have roots in New York, so there are subtle nods to the city throughout.
On the left is a large cartoon man’s face tilted slightly, with a garish, wide-open grin. Hair parted in the middle with old-fashioned waves on each side of the temple, arched black eyebrows over wide red eyes. The mad grin is missing a tooth.
This face is the artists’ version of the iconic Coney Island Steeplechase “Funny Face” that welcomed guests from 1908 through 1964. So the family who founded this shop would have seen it, when they visited. Even now, that grinning face appears on shops and merchandise at Coney Island.
Just below the face, the word “Look” in red, with white snow resting on the letters, next to an arrow pointing to the left, that points to a small cut-out in the wall. This was where African Americans would be served if they came to the restaurant in its early days.
To the right of Popeye, in another section of the wall, is a large pair of old-fashioned glasses with angled black frames and red lenses, and wide-open white eyes. The glasses are a tribute to the artist Casey Paquet, who passed away in 2018. Below the glasses, the phrase “Ideas are a Dime a Dozen” is painted above a red hand pointing to the left, and a large hardback book with a black cover. The spine of the book reads “CP 1977 through 2018,” another tribute to Paquet. The front cover spells out “Para CP” vertically, in red, beside a line drawing of a sword swallower, a trick Casey practiced.
In the center of the wall, a huge red hand holds a pamphlet almost as tall as the wall, that reads “Welcome to Fear City,” with a skeleton in a black cowl. This is a reference to a 1970s scaremongering pamphlet called “Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” published by the New York Council on Public Safety.
You can also find Morning Breath on Instagram. For more on the SHINE murals including the upcoming 2025 festival in November, head here.