Everything about NEW YORKERS.

NEW YORKERS is a painted census of New York City by the artist MLow. He has painted 7,541 characters so far, across 19 chapters he calls eras, and he is still painting. Every one of them is a New Yorker: the heroes, the strangers, the animals, the villains. Each gets a number, a name, a story and a place on the city map. All of it is published free on this site, and parts of it are sold in named releases.

MLow, an artist born in New York City who works with AI. He has lived here 27 years and paints from a personal photography archive built over those years. He trains his own AI models on that archive, generates at volume, then finishes every piece by hand in Photoshop. His art has run on more than 5,000 New York City taxis and has been shown on the streets of ten major cities in ten countries.

Because the work is about being seen. Eight million people share this city and most of them go uncounted. NEW YORKERS gives a portrait to the ones a census would only tally: the bodega cat, the night nurse, the landlord, the kid off the bus with two suitcases. If you have ever lived here, somebody in it is you.

Parts of it are, in named releases, never all at once. The first is THE MARKS: 90 pieces, each one unique, on SuperRare and Transient Labs. The second is THE CENSUS RELEASE: 6,666 tokens on OpenSea about two weeks later. Each release is sized and closed before it opens, nothing is added to a release after it closes, and no New Yorker is ever sold twice. Nothing is on sale yet and no date is confirmed.

He made it to count the people the city forgets to count. The work draws on 27 years of living here and on a photography archive he built the whole time, so the streets behind the characters are streets he stood on. He painted through cancer, and the eye flower, the flower with a human iris that recurs in the art, came out of that. Chai Lifeline, the project's charity partner, supported him through treatment. One question holds every piece together: what does it mean to be seen in a city of eight million.

The eye flower is a flower with a human iris, and it stands for the city's attention. It blooms in a frame where a moment was truly witnessed. The iris is human because the city's eyes are its people. A flower open beside a character means somebody was watching, and watching with love.

The blue evil eye is protection. It watches so you can stop watching your back. In the stills it never moves and never blinks. It is also MLow's sovereign mark, the signature that runs through every collection he makes.

The circle grid flower sigil is community. It is the Blossom mark, and it appears where people have built something together. In the lore a figure called the Sigil Writer paints them at 4am and has never been seen. Blossom itself is the wider ecosystem around MLow's work rather than a collection with a piece count.

It means the census runs both ways. Every census counts people. This one looks back at them. The eyes in the art are the city's eyes, and the city's eyes are its people: the neighbor at the window, the driver who waits, the stranger who helps you up the subway stairs. THE CITY IS WATCHING BACK is the campaign line, and it is a promise rather than a threat.

Because a city is not only its heroes. The landlord, the broker fee, the machine and the money shaped New York as much as anyone who saved it. Villains here are painted with the same care as everyone else and played with style rather than cruelty. Some earn a redemption in a later era. The one line for the whole project says it: every New Yorker gets a portrait, even the villains.

An era is a chapter of the census, a run of numbers painted under one idea. There are 19 so far. They open with The Originals at number 1 and run to The Trait Layer, which ends at 7,990. Each carries a title: The Eye Flower Era, The Masterworks, The Mythos, The Deep City, The Twenty Houses, The Ten Rooms, The MLow Show. Characters carry forward, so a face from one era can return in a later one, and more eras are still being painted.

Thirteen, and each one is a tribe rather than a category. They are Ticker Tape, The Machine, Corner Hustle, Alley Cats, Third Rail, Front Steps, Hard Hats, After Hours, Two Suitcases, Eight Million, The Blocks, Made Here, Open Notebook. Every character belongs to exactly one. The family is part of what the piece is, so it travels with the work as a trait.

Every character holds an address on four axes: borough, time band, family and register. Borough is identity rather than location: Manhattan the stage, Brooklyn the soul, Queens the world in one borough, the Bronx the origin, Staten Island the ferry. The time band is the city's emotional clock: morning, afternoon, golden hour, witching hour. The register is the key the portrait is played in, from reverent to comic to menacing to tender. Name all four and you have the character's address in the census.

A set is a named group of characters covering a block of numbers, and there are 160. They come from two places. Some were designed as collections in their own right: The Hours, The Months, The Moons, The Seasons, The Elements, The Decades, The Subway Lines, The Bridges, The Lost Buildings, The New York Tarot. The rest come from the eras themselves, where each era's houses and arcs become sets automatically. Sets are the quests of the collection: own your hour, own your line, own your month.

A monument is a milestone number, a piece that carries a turn in the story. Every hundred mark is one, so 100, 200, 300 and every hundred after it. So is the closing number of every era, the era openers, and the lead characters of the houses and rooms in the later eras. The census marks 204 of them. THE MARKS, the 90 ones of one, are drawn from part of that list.

Traits are objects a character wears, and they live in one era: Era XIX, The Trait Layer, at numbers 7491 to 7990. There are 31 of them: hoodie, beanie, gold chain, 3D glasses, pit vipers, eye patch, clown nose, laser eyes, halo, crown, third eye and more. Each is painted as a real object in the frame rather than pasted on as a layer. A weighted script dealt the exact set across the 500 numbers, so the published rarity table is a count and not an estimate. Counts run from 43 hoodies down to 2 third eyes.

A state is one finished version of a character. The same New Yorker can exist as Night Street, the default house style, and as Stencil, Saturday Morning, Dream State, Motion or Witching Hour. Witching Hour is earned in person and is never shown online. Every character has at least one finished state, and 97 carry more than one today. THE CENSUS RELEASE will mint tokens that hold a stack of states: the artist adds new ones over time and the owner picks which one the token shows.

A glitch edition is a corrupted loop of a piece, made with the treatment from MLow's STILL WAITING collection. The still is broken into an endlessly looping CRT and VHS collapse: the signal degrades, the city persists. 699 pieces carry one, in the numbers 767 to 1466. On the site they load only when you pick them.

MLow trains custom AI models on his own photography, generates at volume, then finishes every piece by hand in Photoshop. He calls the method digital alchemy. The generation is raw material and the selection is the work: most of what comes out never becomes a piece. Every record in the census shows the prompt it came from, under FROM THE STUDIO.

It means the model was trained on MLow's own pictures rather than used off the shelf. 27 years of New York photography is the training material, so the light, the wet asphalt and the street furniture come from frames he shot himself. A stock model gives you a generic city. This one gives you his.

The open notebook is the project's promise to show its work. The prompts, the successive versions of the house style, the refires, the cost ledgers and the pieces that were cut are all published. Most AI work hides what it threw away. This one publishes it, because the choosing is the work.

Work gets cut when it fails the standard, and the cuts stay published rather than buried. A piece is refired when the anatomy breaks, when the style drifts, or when stray lettering appears in the frame, which a text check catches across every era. One finished piece has been rejected outright in curation, and its record is still on the site. The much larger cut happens earlier, among the generations that never became pieces at all.

Glossy vinyl toy figures with clean white sticker outlines, set down in a photoreal New York night. Neon on wet asphalt, steam off the grate, a bridge behind. The blue is the evil eye blue, a mark of protection rather than a wash. Everyone gets the toy treatment, which is why even the villains read as affectionate.

The Atlas is the map of the census, and it puts the pieces on the real city. 7,307 of the 7,541 are placed. Placement comes from the work itself: the borough field, the title, the story and the prompt, then a curated read where a person looked at the scene and named the block. Some pins are anchored to a known address and some are read from the scene, and the map marks which is which.

The museum is a walkable gallery of 111 New York rooms, built in the browser. The Bowery after hours, the Guggenheim ramp, the Rose Reading Room, the crown of the Statue, Studio 8H, the whale at Natural History. Each room hangs the characters the census recorded at that place first, then any era, family or set you choose. The light follows the real New York clock and the hang reshuffles daily. No room is a scan or a replica: every one is an interpretation.

The reading room is the history layer of the site. It holds 20 sourced articles about the real city, including the subway of 1904, the consolidation of 1898, the blackout of 1977 and the birth of hip hop, plus a history page for each of the 111 museum rooms. Every fact is tied to an institution you can check. The census paints the city and the reading room explains it.

The number is a character's line in the census, the way a real census gives every person a line. Numbering runs from 1 to 7,990, because the eras painted so far reserve that many lines. Not every line is painted yet, and most of the open ones sit in Era I, the oldest era and the least filled. Numbers carry structure too: eras are runs of numbers, sets are runs of numbers, and every hundredth number is a monument.

THE COUNT is the census taken in person. The Census Office opens at NFT.NYC, where you answer the questions, get counted, and leave with the New Yorker the city matched you with, held in your name on a paper Resident Card. It costs nothing and needs no wallet. The number of people counted is not public, and it will not be estimated.

THE CLAIM is the day the character held in your name becomes yours onchain, the mint. It is recommended for Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 11:11 AM ET. That date is not signed and not confirmed, so read it as a recommendation until the project says otherwise. Every surface on this site says the same.

Answer six questions on the GET COUNTED page. The city matches you with a character, you can download a Resident card, and you can register so the match is held in your name for THE CLAIM. No wallet is needed. You can also get counted in person at the Census Office.

The quiz is six questions and no wallet. It asks what you do with a locked door, who you are when the train stops between stations, which hour belongs to you, what deserves protection, who your witness is, and which sentence sounds like home. Your answers weight you toward a family, and the city hands you a character from it. Era I is left out of the pool, because it holds named real people.

Use the nomination form on the GET COUNTED page. You give a name or an alias for the credit, the memory in your own words, an optional photo and your contact, then tick separate boxes: one saying the memory is yours to send, one to publish the story, one to allow it to be adapted into artwork. One nomination is picked every Sunday, painted on Monday and posted on Tuesday at 11:11 AM. The nominator is credited by alias and the subject is never tagged. The painting comes back to the nominator as a gift, and a gift piece is never sold and never used in an advertisement.

Yes, and it is a separate thing from getting counted. The allowlist page takes your details and the wallet you plan to mint with. The wallet needs to be at least a month old and hold more than 0.2 ETH or more than 10,000 dollars of digital art, checked against the chain after a snapshot rather than by the form. Getting counted is free, needs no wallet, and holds a character in your name. Doing both is the strongest position.

No price is set. A rising ladder has been discussed, where the price climbs as the city fills, but nothing is signed and no figure should be treated as real yet. The same holds for wallet limits and the length of the claim window. When the price is set, it will be published on the site.

You own a character, not one picture of them. In THE CENSUS RELEASE the token holds a stack of finished versions of that character, called states, and you decide which one shows. The artist adds new states over time and nothing already made is deleted. THE MARKS work the same way. They are unique, one owner each, and they sit on the same dynamic contract, so MLow can add new states to a Mark and the owner pins the one that shows. Unique does not mean finished.

ERC-7160 is a token standard for art where one token can hold more than one image. THE CENSUS RELEASE will use it: the token holds a stack of finished states of a character, the artist appends new ones over time, and the owner picks which one shows. Picking is called pinning, and you can change your pick. The standard comes from Transient Labs, and the census tokens list on OpenSea. No contract is deployed yet, so nothing can be pinned today.

No. A print is not a token and it is not a New Yorker. Prints are a separate product class, and MLow's print catalogue comes from different bodies of work. Buying a print gives you the print and nothing in this collection.

Rights are set out in writing rather than assumed. Contributors keep their own material: nominating a New Yorker hands over neither your story nor your photograph, and commercial use of a story or a likeness is a separate signed agreement, never a checkbox. Collector terms will publish with the contract and are not final. Era I is excluded from the sale, from advertising and from the quiz, because it holds named real people and licensed characters.

Chai Lifeline is the charity partner. They supported MLow through cancer treatment, which is where the eye flowers came from. He has raised more than $250,000 for children's cancer causes through Art Basel Miami auctions. The exact share of proceeds is not published yet.

Yes, and that is the plan from the start. The census is still being painted, new eras are still coming, and one nomination is chosen and painted every week. When a new release is announced it will say exactly what is in it, how many, in what format, on what platform and when. Nothing is ever quietly added to a release that has already closed.

Two things, and neither is a cap on the total. No New Yorker is ever sold twice, so nothing you own is reissued or diluted. And no release is ever reopened or topped up, so the release you bought into stays the size it was when you bought into it. Growth happens by adding new named releases in the open, not by quietly enlarging old ones.

It stays published free on this site and it is not for sale yet. It is not being withheld forever either. It is simply not its turn. Every character keeps its number, its story and its place on the atlas whether it has been released or not.

MLow's work has run on more than 5,000 New York City taxis and has been shown on the streets of ten major cities across ten countries. NEW YORKERS itself lives here: every character is published free on this site, on the atlas and in the museum, whether or not it is in a release.

NEW YORKERS is the largest body of work he has made and the most local. THE SOFT CONSPIRACY, a collaboration with the painter Andrés Del Vecchio, is the secret world of operatives and dossiers. fLOWers is roughly 1,800 collage flowers made after surviving cancer, and the eye flowers here grew out of them. Transdimensional Trippers paints the self in struggle and recovery. Impermanent Loss paints flux as abstraction. Tokenized Garbage keeps what the city throws away. STILL WAITING is the wait as a permanent condition, and its glitch treatment produced the 699 glitch editions in this collection. Blossom is the ecosystem around all of it rather than a collection with a count. The throughline across every one is Tripping and Rising.

Prints are sold through MLow's own shop, reached at mlow.xyz/prints. The catalogue holds 235 works from four bodies of work: Transdimensional Trippers, fLOWers, Impermanent Loss and Tokenized Garbage, with prices starting at $220. Editions are signed, numbered, capped, and retired when they sell out. None of them are NEW YORKERS.

His artist site is mlow.xyz and the census lives at mlow.nyc. On X he posts as @degens. The press room on this site carries the fact sheet, the image sheet and the contact for interviews and studio visits.