NEW YORK – Last fall residents of Bed-Stuy, Clinton Hill, Bushwick and Williamsburg in Brooklyn began to notice a different kind of street art, this time with an activist bent, among the colorful tags, murals and wheatpastes that generally grace neighborhood walls. The posters, by teacher, oil painter and illustrator Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, put in images and words what many women wish they could say out loud to men who cat call them on the street: “My name is not Baby.” “Women are not seeking your validation.” “Stop telling women to smile.”

Each poster has a gray and white charcoal portrait of a woman above those statements, giving a face to their powerful demands. The portraits are just as direct as the statements, with the barest hint of gray shadows illuminating the otherwise sharp features of the subjects. There’s no abstraction here, in the messages or in the images.

The posters disappeared when the weather got colder. As Fazlalizadeh told the New York Times, cold weather is not a friend to wheatpaste. Fortunately, just as the warmer weather has returned so have the posters, most recently on the corner of Tompkins Avenue and Halsey Street in Bed-Stuy. The posters were also displayed at Fresthetic, a gallery in Williamsburg, in an exhibit called “Stop Telling Women to Smile.”

Of course, no one exhibit is going to stop street harassment on its own, but it’s nice to see an artist, and a female one at that, using the positive force of street art to combat the negative presence of street harassment.

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