Homesick's mother lost their Williamsburg apartment when he was a teenager. The block kept changing after that, and so did the people on it. He picked a name that says exactly what happened, then started writing it on every wall he could reach.
A name built out of loss
Homesick grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the years the neighborhood got rebuilt around its old residents rather than for them. His mother was evicted as rents climbed and new buildings filled the gaps between the old ones. Friends left as their own families got priced out. The name he settled on tracks straight back to that stretch of years: longing for a Williamsburg that's still on the map but doesn't match the one he grew up in.
His tags, wheatpaste posters, and gallery installations all carry the same charge. The work runs on gentrification, displacement, and the job of keeping a neighborhood's memory intact after the people who built it have been priced out of it.
Bombing the city that priced him out
The creative studio Populist spent a week following Homesick around New York, filming him bombing the city and digging into the story behind one of its most recognizable handstyles. His rollers, the wide flat-brushed letters writers use to cover big surfaces fast, function less as a signature now and more as a public record. People from the same blocks read them as a marker of who used to live there before the rent doubled.
The bolt cutters and the zine
Homesick released a limited zine titled "In a Pair of Bolt Cutters I Found the Keys to the City," a run of 200 signed copies. The title flips a break-in tool into a set of keys, the same reversal that runs through the rest of his work: access to a city that has otherwise locked people like him out of it. The zine surfaced as part of the Please Post Bills exhibition series at LAAMS in New York.
Watching Style Wars on 16mm
Homesick has written about catching a 16mm print of "Style Wars" at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the 1983 documentary Tony Silver made with photographer and filmmaker Henry Chalfant on the first generation of New York subway writers. He's cited Chalfant's 1986 book with James Prigoff, "Spraycan Art," as a direct influence. Chalfant spent the seventies and eighties photographing subway cars that don't exist anywhere else anymore. Homesick is running a version of the same job for a Brooklyn that's disappearing just as fast, aboveground instead of on the trains.
Part of a bigger record
Homesick isn't working alone in that effort. New York writers have been chronicling their own vanishing blocks for as long as the city has been rezoning them, going back to the same subway era Chalfant shot. What's changed is the audience. A documentary crew and a signed zine put that record in front of people who'd otherwise only ever see the finished condo, not the walk-up it replaced.
What a wall covered in his name says now
A Homesick tag on a Williamsburg wall isn't nostalgia for its own sake. It's a claim. The neighborhood got renamed by developers and marketing copy years ago. Every roller he lays down over a construction fence or a shuttered storefront puts the old name back, at least until that wall comes down too.
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