Lower East Side
The Lower East Side has been a landing pad for immigrants and a laboratory for counterculture for 150 years — and its murals reflect both. From the tenement blocks where Jewish, Italian, and Chinese communities built their American lives, to the Puerto Rican and Dominican families who followed, to the punk and hip-hop scenes that claimed these streets in the 1970s and '80s, the neighborhood's walls carry the full weight of that history.
Featured Artists
All artists →Lady Pink
Ecuadorian-born Sandra Fabara began writing graffiti on NYC subway trains in 1979 at age 15, becoming one of the first women in the NYC graffiti movement. "Rivington Wall" was her first major legal mural commission — a 60-foot composition integrating her graffiti background with the figurative muralism she developed through the 1980s and '90s. It has been photographed over a million times.
Dasic Fernández
Chilean muralist based in New York whose swirling, fluid figures seem to be in constant motion across building surfaces. "The Tenement Speaks" on Orchard Street engages directly with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum one block away — Fernández painted figures emerging from the windows of a tenement building façade, the immigrant faces documented in the museum appearing to step back onto the street.
Tats Cru
"Delancey Dreaming" was Tats Cru's most explicitly historical Lower East Side commission — a mural depicting the neighborhood through three distinct eras, with figures from each period occupying the same wall space as ghostly overlays. The crew spent three months interviewing elderly LES residents before beginning work.