What The Fuck is Street Dreams
Community. The most powerful word in the Web 3 and NFT space.
“The key is to build community” Everywhere we turn to and with everyone we speak with, things always circle around the concept of community. Again and again, this seems to be the challenge, or the advantage, depending on where you stand and what foundation you’ve built before today.
Street Dreams has been building a community for almost 10 years. And as our extended family grows with this exhilarating new chapter in our story, we’d like to tell you about our community and how it all started for us.
Street Dreams Magazine was established in 2014 as an online community, print publication and full-service creative studio co-founded by Steve “Sweatpants” Irby (a native New Yorker born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens), Eric Veloso, and Mike Cobarubbia- both seasoned Vancouver creatives. The three met in New York in one of those serendipitous and poetic ways (shout out AJ the Barber) and quickly established the bi-coastal brand.
Back then, the young creative community was budding and it all coalesced between the streets and Instagram. Street artists and photographers from all walks of life - Black, Brown, White, Asian, male, female - were getting together for impromptu photo walks, sharing each other’s work online, and democratizing photography with iPhones and social media along the way. Thousands and eventually millions followed along for inspiration and encouragement. People like Black Soap, JN Silva, Misshattan, Dave Krugman, and Monaris were uplifting each other in this fresh new space and creating some of the most iconic images of our generation. All this talent was developing and being discovered around the world, and Street Dreams was the glue.
So the community grew.
Things blew up fast. The Street Dreams brand was getting millions of impressions, and the team decided to create a quarterly magazine that would draw its contents from Instagram users. Each issue would feature 6 photographers- 3 men and 3 women- and the second half of the mag was filled with photos crowd-sourced from Instagram users using the #streetdreamsmag hashtag. The New York Times wrote about it. 7 years later, the hashtag has now garnered almost 13 million posts.
Each new issue came with a physical gallery and a proper party- the latter becoming notorious for huge turnouts and unmatched energy. As the years passed, the brand went global and different cities around the world became host to the next issue of Street Dreams Magazine. Chicago, Toronto, Seattle, Vancouver and eventually Tokyo in 2019 where Issue 015 of SDM was exclusively released at Daikanyama T-site and over 30 members of the collective made the trip for a full takeover.
Alongside our editorial work, Street Dreams was seen as a genuine bastion for the global creative community- photographers, designers, artists, DJs, all gravitated towards the movement. Cultural institutions took notice and partnerships began to form with the New York Public Library, Art Basel, Tribeca Film Festival, Photoville, The Keith Haring Foundation and many more. Brands like HBO, Nike, New Balance, Sony, Audi, and the NBA followed suit and came to Street Dreams for social impact work, experiential projects, and content/design.
And the community grew.
In 2020, as the world shut down and we were all forced to stay put, Street Dreams Radio came into the light- a series of weekly mixes and audio/visual mood boards designed to give people warmth, love, and amazing music on a regular basis. With 6 original music shows and a couple of podcasts steadily streaming throughout the planet during the most difficult year of our collective existence, we were able to keep the community together with the help of our friends. Again, the community grew and people from all over the world tuned into the soundtrack of our dreams.
This year, Street Dreams had the privilege to be invited by The Seaport to curate and present our biggest gallery show to date- Celebrating The Wins. The theme of the show centered around the joy and catharsis of being outside after all this time in isolation, and celebrating the victories of life no matter how big or small. The 3-month residency included 5 events throughout the summer with the first one being the official reunion for our crew, our community, our family. Hugs were flying, tears were shed, asses were shaking, and we were right back to our regular scheduled programming, stronger than ever.
So the community grew.
Now…what’s next? Street Dreams Cafe. The next chapter of our story and the topic of our next article.
Stay tuned.
