A celebration of hip hop and street art: Scenes from the Bushwick Collective block party

Ice-T and Dres from Black Sheep were among the headliners of the free concert on Saturday

Thousands of hip hop heads gathered along Troutman Street on Saturday afternoon for the 12th annual Bushwick Collective Block Party, an event that began as a mural painting exhibition but has evolved into a free, day-long music festival featuring some of the biggest names in old-school rap.

Headliners of recent years included the likes of Ghostface Killah and KRS-One. This year, the Englewood, New Jersey rapper Ice-T showed up in the wilds of Brooklyn with his own paramilitary-looking security force and did an hour-long set of classics.

Headliner Ice-T (Scott Lynch)

As always, the event was organized by the indomitable Joe Ficalora, whose vision of creating an open-air gallery for graffiti here a dozen years ago helped transform this industrial patch of Bushwick into both a destination party zone and an international tourist attraction.

“It’s special every year,” Ficalora tells Brooklyn Magazine. “It doesn’t get old, man. A new year, fresh paint, fresh music, the summer’s about to start, I’m surrounded by legends of graffiti, street art, and hip hop from all over the world. It’s amazing here, it’s just beautiful. I love the people coming together. This is my day. I lost my mother more than 12 years ago, it broke me in pieces, and the Bushwick Collective was the thing that put me back together.”

Bushwick Collective founder Joe Ficalora joins host D-Stroy on stage (Scott Lynch)

In addition to Ice-T (his wife and reality-TV co-star Coco could be seen hanging backstage during his set), performers such as Nems, Tony Touch, and Termanology also fired up the crowd. D-Stroy played host, DJ Evil Dee cranked classic crowd-pleasers, and producer Statik Selektah brought out a bunch of newer acts like Kota the Friend, who performed with his young son.

Kota the Friend performed with his son onstage (Scott Lynch)

Andres Vargas Titus, better known as Dres from Black Sheep, performed a short but inspired set earlier in the afternoon.

Dres from Black Sheep (Scott Lynch)

Street art still plays a big role in the day’s festivities. Several tributes to recently fallen heroes were among the newest works here, including portraits of Guru by SEPC, Tina Turner by Hodder, and De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove (aka Plug 2 aka Dave Jolicoeur) by Asia 82, Makro 79, Enjoy, Sure 78, and Brandy.

Hodder’s tribute to Tina Turner (Scott Lynch)

The big-ears king Sipros was back with a new cartoony piece, as was 11-year-old Rihanna “Riri” Gomez from Brownsville, who covered two walls with characters from the manga series Demon Slayer. And Danny Cortes got one of his sculptural miniatures of a bodega turned into a huge mural.

A mural of a miniature of a bodega by Danny Cortes (Scott Lynch)

The festival was free, though you could pay $101 for VIP access to the front row and unlimited beer in a backstage-adjacent area. Nutcrackers were readily available to all, of course, and about a dozen food vendors and even more merchants selling clothing and accessories lined Troutman.