Ojerime - Nothing

Benny Sings returns with “You Love Me,” a tender new single taken from his forthcoming album 22 Durnham Dew, out September 25 via Stones Throw / Sings Records. A love duet sung with his wife, Joline van Berkestijn, the track finds Benny turning everyday moments into something warm and deeply personal. Accompanying the release is a self-directed music video filmed in Paris, extending the song’s intimate feel through a simple, understated visual. Watch the music video for “You Love Me” now.

For Fête de la Musique 2026, Patta brought together some of the finest voices from the Paris underground scene for a live rap cypher. Wata MC, Dooky, James le J, Costa, Inférieurà3, Radou, D2R, L'Ultra, Oussoum, Robinin, Dre, Ismayyyel, Kun and Nanor took over the mic while DJ Cheetah held it down behind the decks. Special thanks to Oroko Radio for the broadcast, Le Cercle, Vicky R, and Daymolition for the artist curation, and to Café de l'Arc for the stage. 

Erykah Badu and The Alchemist link up on “Witch Doctor,” a hypnotic, slow-burning track that blends Badu’s unmistakable presence with Alchemist’s hazy, sample-driven production. Eccentric, soulful and effortlessly off-kilter, the collaboration feels exactly as strange and natural as you’d expect from two artists who have spent their careers creating worlds of their own. Watch the “Witch Doctor” music video now.

Victory Lap Radio presents Training Mode Vol.1 (2025) a documentary showcasing the new voices of the UK. Featuring 25+ artists and shot all over London in 2025.

Shawn Brauch, the visionary co-founder of Pen & Pixel, designed over 20,000 iconic album covers. Pen & Pixel hand-crafted the wildest, diamond-encrusted album art in music history. We’re diving into Shawn Brauch’s genius and the practical effects behind 90s rap’s most legendary visuals. Here is the story of the man who illustrated the bling era. In this episode of "LAYERS", Shawn Brauch walks us through how he designed album covers for Master P, Snoop Dogg, and Lil Wayne using Adobe.

Join us at Patta London to celebrate the launch of Free The Youth x Jordan. Thursday, August 13th, 18:00 - 20:00. Music by Selassie TBC. First come, first serve.

Photography by Andrea AmponsahThis past Sunday, August 9th, we had the pleasure of hosting the legendary Tiwa Savage at our Patta Amsterdam store for an exclusive meet-and-greet. Patta Amsterdam served as a vibrant bridge that brought together different circles and many new faces into the store. It was a unique opportunity for the community to connect with a global Afrobeats icon and one of Nigeria’s most influential artists in an intimate setting. As the first woman to win the MTV EMA for Best African Act, Tiwa Savage continues to shape the sound of a generation, and seeing that energy reflected in our space was a true victory for the Patta community. Thank you to everyone who came through and made this afternoon special. We look forward to continuing to expand our community and connecting with you all through more moments like this in the future.

Words by Andy Thomas In 1978, Lee Quiñones’ iconic mural Howard the Duck appeared on a handball court wall in the Lower East Side near where the 18-year-old had lived since arriving as a child from Ponce, Puerto Rico.The first freestanding urban mural to appear in New York was a symbolic moment for graffiti art’s emergence out of the underground, with walls replacing metal as the young artist’s urban canvas.Quiñones began spray-painting subway trains at 14 in 1974, creating ambitious murals in train yards on the Lower East Side. Two years later, Quiñones and the Fabulous Five crew had the audacious plan to paint an entire 10-car subway train with a mural that would make them folk art heroes across the five boroughs.These acts of artistic genius and ingenuity would prove as important to the evolution of hip-hop culture as DJ Kool Herc’s Back to School Jam at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in 1973, fellow Bronx schoolboy Grand Wizzard Theodore inventing scratching in 1975, and the arrival of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang in 1979.Another big moment in hip-hop was Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style, which starred Quiñones as the semi-autobiographical Zoro. Ahearn became aware of Quiñones when he came across the Howard the Duck mural while filming his martial arts movie The Deadly Art of Survival on the Lower East Side with his Super 8 camera.In June 1980, Ahearn and his cohorts in the arts collective Colab transformed a three-storey building on 41st Street and Seventh Avenue into The Times Square Show, a DIY exhibition that, in the words of the Village Voice, was “the first radical art show of the ’80s”.It was also an important moment in the history of graffiti art, with Lee Quiñones and his Fabulous Five partner Fred Brathwaite (AKA Fab 5 Freddy) displaying works alongside around 100 other artists, including Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring. It was there that Ahearn met Brathwaite, who would introduce the filmmaker to Quiñones.Through his social commentary and poetry used in his expressionistic work with messages like “If we don't use our heads now we may lose our tails later” Quiñones had been speaking directly and profoundly to the marginalized from the streets where he was raised. But Quiñones had ambitions for his art and culture that went well beyond the Lower East Side.The December before The Times Square Show, an art collector named Claudio Bruni had invited Quiñones and Fab Five Freddy to exhibit at his Galleria La Medusa in Rome. It was the first step towards propelling Quiñones into the international art market and giving graffiti art the same attention and respect as other art movements - from pop art to abstractionism.By the mid-’80s, Quiñones was participating in groundbreaking group shows like Arte di Frontiera: New York Graffiti in Italy and Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. As the graffiti art he pioneered became recognized as a serious art movement in the years that followed, Quiñones continued to expand his artistic vision. Today, his works are displayed in the world’s leading museums - from MoMA in New York and Pérez Art Museum Miami to Museum Ludwig in Köln.In October 2025, he held his first solo exhibition in London for 40 years, Outside Is America, an intersection of old and new works that spanned his career - from iconic spray paint pieces like the self-titled Lee from 1979 to contemporary mixed material works such as Heart in a Hurricane from 2025, created from his Bushwick studio.With a lineage that reaches back to the mid ’70s, these works continue Quiñones'mission to communicate using a combination of striking visual symbols and written messages. Through empathy and resistance, his addressing of political and socio-economic issues in the age of Trump and the dark dystopian forces of ICE is needed more than ever.As Outside Is America drew to a close, we caught up with the artist to talk about the works displayed at Woodbury House and how they speak to contemporary America.“Art arrives at the time it deserves”, says Lee Quiñones. “I’ve always been at the forefront of something while also realizing I’m just following a lead of something bigger than myself. I think every artist has a responsibility to be committed to what they do in their time. Art does percolate under the surface until it comes up with something to say at a particular point in time. Creating art is in itself a political act. In some cases, a rebellious act; in most cases, an urgent act.“Titles have always been important to my work and they often speak to me before the work becomes a tangible thing. I want the work to correspond to the title and vice versa.  With this show, I wanted to talk to people outside of my country as an American with what we are going through today. This is nothing new, though. We’ve always lived in the abyss of the hypocrisy of humankind. But I’m a firm believer that the forces of good can be more powerful than the forces of evil.”HEART IN A HURRICANE“I had found this old vintage flag in the Brooklyn Navy Yard back in the mid-’90s that had been sewn together, not printed. This was a beautiful piece - it was more than a piece of fabric, it was the fabric of the country. But it started to get me thinking about all the atrocities over time in America. When you think about personal moments, you can go back to Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple in the ’50s who married and went through hell just for being in love. Then, into today with Colin Kaepernick (of the 49ers). He’s not stepping on the flag or burning the flag; he is kneeling to bring a justifiable awareness of this country’s issues with its dirty dishes. Now I’m Puerto Rican, and we have our very rightful gripes and rifts with our country for obvious reasons. So I’m always going to have a rebellious part of me. But in this piece, which is a self-portrait, I’m not rebelling or lashing out; it’s a very tender moment. I’m lying down with a rose in my hand to show a love of country. But you can’t love a country if you can’t question the country.”UNFOLDED“Ori Carino is an Italian American who, like me, grew up on the Lower East Side and was inspired by my art. But he was also a huge inspiration to me, another man from the Lower East Side with whom I shared concerns and pride. Here are two men of Puerto Rican and Italian descent. The main reference of these two things combined is West Side Story. As beautiful as that story is, it's also a tragic story of migration. The real genius behind that painting is Ori Carino - he said to me, ‘Lee, I’m making these paintings on these layers of synthetic silk.’ So I went down to his studio, and I was floored. He told me he wanted to do a collaborative piece about the layers and layers of immigration and the different conversations and arguments over the centuries. So I was like, ‘Wow, this is great karma for us coming together.’ It was a beautiful collaboration even before we pulled the trigger on the paint. And the results were amazing.”TABLET #9 “These writings taken from studio walls are what I call soundboards. I think of them as liquid daily diaries of my thoughts, my isms, my poetry, that come to me now and then. Sometimes I feel as dumb as a church mouse. I just can’t talk, spell, or remember anything. Then the next day, I wake up, and I just spill out all this poetry. Lots of it makes sense, and much of it doesn’t at that time. But maybe it will become something that I will work out later in another painting. These ideas can be playfully funny or darkly poetic. The idea is you don’t hit people over the head with things, but you get them to think through the usage of words. I heard Basquiat say once that he would cross out words so people would be attracted to them. It got people thinking, ‘Why did he cross that out? What did he write?’ And sometimes the lack of words is more powerful and gets people thinking, ‘What is that about?’”LEE“This was one of a batch of paintings that I created between 1979-80, trying to exorcise myself from the fringes of the subway art era. That time was so powerful and special for me. It saved my life even though I was always putting my life on the line. It saved me from the abyss of my neighbourhood. I had painted in the dark about dark times for years. But in that darkness, I painted in the brightest colours because I wanted to bring this banquet of flowers to people. Lee featured in the 1979 exhibition The Fabulous Five at Galleria La Medusa in Rome [the first European exhibition to showcase artists from the graffiti movement], organized by gallerist Claudio Bruni. When we write, something comes out through us.”HONEST GEORGE“Honest George is rooted in the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood. It’s one of a series of pieces I’m doing based on all these follies and tales we hear as children, and on how we structure our beliefs about them and relate them to the real world as it unravels. My moral compass is angry, so my work relates to the hypocrisy of the human experience. But today my work goes all over the place. There are times that I do go into a rhythm, but I only stay there as long as I need to. My art will never be repetitive or redundant. I never want to be put in a corner. As artists, we have to switch gears; otherwise, we are going to burn the clutch.”  

Education stands as one of Patta’s core pillars. The reality is that Black and POC perspectives are often excluded from mainstream narratives, yet they are vital to understanding history, culture, and identity. Reading is power, and access to diverse stories is essential. That’s why Patta is launching Patta Open Source bookshelves, a literary collection curated by Team Patta in collaboration with Athenaeum Bookstore, that centers the voices of those too often overlooked.We’re not just putting books on a shelf. Patta Open Source is making room for stories that challenge the way we think and push us to see the world from different perspectives. Some books will spark curiosity, others will raise difficult questions, and many will offer inspiration. But most importantly, they will all contribute to a broader conversation, one that breaks old narratives and builds new ones. Each One, Teach One.Express YourselfTourmaline : The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. JohnsonMarsha P. Johnson was more than an icon of the Stonewall uprising — she was a living symbol of radical joy, resistance, and humanity. In The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, artist and activist Tourmaline brings her story to life with equal parts tenderness and fire. Johnson’s voice, so often drowned out in official histories, is finally given the space it deserves. This is not a conventional biography, but a poetic tribute to what it means to live freely in a world that keeps denying that right. Tourmaline writes with rhythm and warmth, celebrating both the flamboyant and the fragile. The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what it truly means to be yourself — in full color, against the current.Must Read Ta-Nehisi Coates: The MessageWith The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates returns as the clear, uncompromising voice of contemporary Black consciousness. Best known for Between the World and Me, Coates here explores what remains of hope, truth, and community in a world so often divided. His writing is lucid and lyrical, probing what it means to stay human amid noise and regression. Coates traces the legacy of hip-hop, politics, and spirituality as forces of both resistance and beauty. This is no manifesto but a meditation — fierce and tender at once. The Message is a book to read and to feel: a call for dignity, nuance, and resilience.His StorySudhir Hazareesingh: Daring to be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic WorldSudhir Hazareesingh reminds us that the history of slavery is not only a story of oppression, but also of defiance. In Daring to Be Free, he recounts the courage and rebellion of the enslaved across the Atlantic world — from Haiti to Brazil, from Cuba to the United States. He shows that freedom was never granted, only fought for. Drawing on testimonies, songs, and diaries, Hazareesingh weaves a powerful tapestry of human dignity. This book is a tribute to the men and women who revealed the foundations of the modern world — not as victims, but as thinkers, dreamers, and revolutionaries. Daring to Be Free is history that breathes, glows, and inspires.Non-Fiction Be The Real Hip HopRobin Givhan: Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil AblohIn Make It Ours, Pulitzer-winning journalist Robin Givhan pays tribute to the incomparable Virgil Abloh — designer, visionary, and bridge-builder between street culture and haute couture. Givhan traces how Abloh rewrote fashion’s codes and cracked open the doors of white institutions. This is no glossy portrait but a sharp, affectionate essay on creativity as liberation. She frames Abloh’s legacy as an act of cultural reclamation: from Off-White to Louis Vuitton, from Chicago to Paris. Make It Ours is a celebration of Black brilliance — and of the right to define beauty on one’s own terms.Brand New FunkZadie Smith: Dead and AliveZadie Smith is at her best when she writes from the inside out — about art, life, and the fragile boundaries between them. In Dead and Alive, she explores the fine line between creation and destruction, freedom and fear, identity and form. Smith reflects on the artist’s role in times of crisis, and on the constant reinvention of self in a shifting world. Her prose is, as ever, supple, witty, and layered — attuned to both rhythm and thought. Dead and Alive is a meditation on surviving with style, on the moral duty of beauty, and on how art keeps the human heart in motion.Music PleaseAnnie Zaleski: Queens of Disco In Queens of Disco, Annie Zaleski revives the glittering history of disco — this time through the women who made it legendary. Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Grace Jones: their voices became the soundtrack of freedom, sensuality, and pride. Zaleski writes with energy and insight, but most of all with love for the music and the subcultures it nurtured — from the ballroom scene to New York’s queer clubs. Queens of Disco shows that disco, often dismissed as kitsch, was in fact a revolution: a stage for expression, a celebration of identity. A sparkling, rhythmic tribute to the power of beat and self-liberation.The Patta Open Source Bookshelf will appear as a recurring feature in the Patta Magazine, showcasing a curated selection of titles available at our bookshelf at Athenaeum store in Amsterdam.

A self-portrait series by Tirino Yspol with lighting by Raphael Mapwata