By Poetess Bethany Camille James
NYC, where the walls speak with vibrant murals, the sidewalks serve as living memory lanes, and every woman becomes part of the dynamic urban canvas.
In a recent New York City carousel, actress Skai Jackson transforms an ordinary walk into an iconic celebrity street-style moment. Dressed in a simple white top and oversized, embellished denim, she stands confidently amid bicycles, graffiti, storefronts, concrete barriers, and the restless movement of Manhattan. Her long black hair and composed expression bring polish to a setting that refuses to be polished smooth.
Nothing in the photographs appears overly staged. That is precisely what makes them feel so New York.
One image catches Jackson in motion against the familiar architecture of a brownstone. Another places her at street level, where restaurant signage, delivery bicycles, paint, pavement, and pedestrian traffic compete for attention. In the widest frame, however, the city reveals its co-star: a monumental mural rising above the block.
The artwork is Eduardo Kobra’s Black or White, a kaleidoscopic portrait of Michael Jackson that combines the musician’s younger and older faces. Painted at First Avenue and East 11th Street in the East Village, the mural transforms a building into a towering meditation on childhood, celebrity, race, transformation, and musical immortality.
Although the photograph was taken in the East Village rather than Harlem, it participates in a citywide artistic conversation whose Black cultural language can be heard especially powerfully uptown. Skai Jackson stands in front of a painted Michael Jackson while creating a new image of Black celebrity herself. The result is a portrait within a portrait: one Black performer framed by the public memory of another.
Whether that symbolism was intentional or simply produced by the instincts of a good photograph, the composition makes a statement. Black artistry does not remain behind museum glass. It walks across intersections. It leans against buildings. It wears denim. It carries a handbag. It enters the frame and recognizes itself already written upon the city.
When Music Becomes a Mural
Traditional fine art is often associated with controlled environments: curated galleries, private collections, guarded museum wings, white walls, and carefully printed labels. Music, by contrast, travels through sound. It occupies clubs, churches, headphones, block parties, subway platforms, and passing cars.
Street art interrupts that division.
A mural devoted to a musician turns sound into color and rhythm into composition. Kobra’s geometric planes operate almost like musical sampling: different periods of Michael Jackson’s life are cut, layered, repeated, and remixed into a single visual performance. The wall does not literally sing, yet viewers bring Jackson’s voice, choreography, controversies, and cultural history to the image. The audience supplies the soundtrack.
Graffiti works similarly. A tag possesses tempo. Repeated letters create rhythm. A sweeping line behaves like a sustained note, while sharp angles resemble percussion. Color produces mood, and overlapping images can operate like voices improvising over one another. The graffiti writer and the hip-hop artist share an essential instinct: take what the city has given you, reshape it, sign it, and make yourself impossible to ignore.
Graffiti emerged as one of hip-hop’s defining visual forms in 1970s New York, developing alongside DJing, emceeing, and breaking. Its artists carried their names across trains and walls before galleries and museums began treating their work as culturally significant.
That history complicates the border between “fine art” and “street art.” Once a graffiti-influenced work is removed from the street and sold inside a gallery, does it become more valuable, or merely more acceptable to people with institutional power? If the same visual language is praised on canvas but criminalized on brick, perhaps the real distinction is not artistic quality. Perhaps it is permission, property, money, and control.
Harlem and the Art of Cultural Memory
Harlem gives this conversation historical depth. During the Harlem Renaissance, poetry, painting, photography, dance, theater, and jazz did not develop in isolation. These forms spoke to one another. Langston Hughes found musical rhythm in language. Duke Ellington composed the atmosphere of Black metropolitan life. Zora Neale Hurston preserved the voices of Black communities. Aaron Douglas used bold geometry and African-inspired imagery to develop a modern visual language for Black identity.
Harlem became a center of Black artistic and political self-definition during the 1920s and 1930s, transforming American culture through literature, music, performance, and visual art.
Today, Harlem’s murals continue that interdisciplinary inheritance. They function as neighborhood monuments, open-air galleries, political testimonies, memorials, and declarations of cultural ownership. They preserve musicians, activists, writers, local heroes, and ordinary residents whose lives might otherwise disappear from the official record.
Unlike a museum, a mural does not require admission. It meets the grandmother returning from church, the child walking to school, the poet searching for language, and the visitor who did not expect to encounter history that afternoon. Its audience is created by proximity.
This is a rugged and renegade style of art, but it also emerged within a system rigged against many of its creators.
Black artists have repeatedly produced cultural forms before institutions were willing to respect, preserve, fund, or properly credit them. What was dismissed as noise became globally influential music. What was condemned as vandalism entered museums and auction houses. What appeared to be writing on a wall became evidence that a community had been present, imaginative, wounded, joyful, and unwilling to vanish.
Graffiti can certainly involve complicated questions about consent, ownership, and public space. Murals and graffiti are also distinct practices, even when their histories and visual languages overlap. Yet reducing all graffiti to destruction ignores why marginalized young people used names, symbols, and color to announce themselves across an environment that often treated them as disposable.
The tag said: I was here.
The mural answered: We have always been here.
A Woman Within the Urban Canvas
This is what makes Skai Jackson’s photographed moment more than a fashionable celebrity sighting. Her presence changes how the surrounding scene is read. The oversized mural represents public memory; Jackson represents a younger generation moving beneath its gaze. Michael Jackson’s image dominates the architecture, but Skai’s presence activates the street.
She is not swallowed by the scale of the city. She becomes part of its composition.
Her quiet confidence also resists the expectation that a woman must compete with her surroundings to command attention. She does not need a red carpet. The crosswalk becomes a runway, the storefront becomes a set, and the mural becomes an unspoken cultural inheritance.
New York’s greatest artwork has never belonged exclusively to museums. It lives inside jazz phrasing, church cadences, subway movement, spray-painted names, brownstone steps, fashion improvisation, and the faces painted several stories high.
The walls speak because generations have given them language.
The sidewalks remember because millions of lives have crossed them.
And when a Black woman walks through the frame, self-possessed, visible, and surrounded by the visual echoes of Black music, she does not merely pose before the city’s art.
For one iconic New York moment, she becomes part of it.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
If the walls of New York could tell the story of your life, what would you want them to remember?
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