Brooklyn Jewish Graffitist Who Drew Hearts On City Streets Remembered For His Art

BROOKLYN (VINnews/Sandy Eller) – New York City’s street art lovers are mourning the death of an Orthodox Jewish artist, who passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of 41.

Hash Halper was known for drawing chalk hearts all over sidewalks, roadways and walls in Lower Manhattan in an effort to spread positivity and a spirit of love.

According to ABC 7 (https://7ny.tv/3zp0xkW), Halper first discovered that hearts brought smiles to people when he began drawing them on his customers’ bags while working the counter at Kossar’s Bagels & Bialys on the Lower East Side in 2014.

According to a post on Halper’s newyorkromantic Instagram page, he took his hearts to the streets to impress a woman he was dating, but while the relationship ended, Halper continued using chalk, his favorite medium, to spread joy through his hand-drawn hearts.

According to the New York Post (https://bit.ly/35spNZW), Halper saw his hearts as a means of imbuing the city with romance. In previous years, he used Manhattan as a canvas to express his feelings in a different way, chalking the initials of women who captured his hearts on city streets.

Halper’s newyorkromantic Instagram page is filled with images of his whimsical art, which is also featured as the backdrop for the cover of the current issue of MOEVIR, a Paris-based fashion and art magazine. A recent Instagram post encouraged his followers to attend his second solo art show which took place last week in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, four months after his work was displayed at a Greenwich Village gallery in a show titled “Blueberry Herring.” Despite being heavily immersed in the art world, Halper made no secret of his Jewishness, posting about the Holocaust, archeological discoveries in Israel and wishing his followers a “Shabbat Shalom.”

Halper grew up in Philadelphia and Washington Heights and attended Yeshiva University. A trained Reiki master, who also dabbled in Bitcoin, Halper was interviewed by the New York Times in 2018 and said in January that he had drawn more than 100,000 hearts throughout New York.

Friend Michelle Rose said that Halper’s hearts were his way of “stamping his magnetic charm” throughout Manhattan, the impermanence of chalk added to the mystique.

“Everyone felt like they were stumbling into something that was whimsical but also something that moved around and was never the same and would disappear,” said Rose.