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For all enquiries, complaints, threats and hate mail visit pestcontroloffice.com. Banksy is not on Facebook, Twitter or represented by any other gallery or institution.

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Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.

Banksy displays his art on publicly visible surfaces such as walls and self-built physical prop pieces. Banksy no longer sells photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti, but his public "installations" are regularly resold, often even by removing the wall they were painted on. Much of his work can be classified as temporary art. A small number of Banksy's works are officially, non-publicly, sold through an agency created by Banksy named Pest Control. Banksy's documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) made its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. In January 2011, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the film. In 2014, he was awarded Person of the Year at the 2014 Webby Awards.

Banksy's name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. In a 2003 interview with Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian, Banksy is described as "white, 28, scruffy casual-jeans, T-shirt, a silver tooth, silver chain and silver earring. He looks like a cross between Jimmy Nail and Mike Skinner of The Streets." Banksy began as an artist at the age of 14, was expelled from school, and served time in prison for petty crime. According to Hattenstone, "anonymity is vital to him because graffiti is illegal". Banksy reportedly lived in Easton, Bristol, during the late 1990s, before moving to London around 2000.

The Mail on Sunday claimed that Banksy is Robin Gunningham in 2008, born on 28 July 1974 in Yate, 12 miles (19 km) from Bristol. Several of Gunningham's associates and former schoolmates at Bristol Cathedral School have corroborated this, and, in 2016, a study by researchers at the Queen Mary University of London using geographic profiling found that the incidence of Banksy's works correlated with the known movements of Gunningham. According to The Sunday Times, Gunningham began employing the name Robin Banks, which eventually became Banksy. Two cassette sleeves featuring his art work from 1993, for the Bristol band Mother Samosa, exist with his signature. In June 2017, DJ Goldie referred to Banksy as "Rob" in an interview for a podcast.

Other speculations on Banksy's identity include the following:

Robert Del Naja (a.k.a. 3D), a member of the trip hop band Massive Attack, had been a graffiti artist during the 1980s prior to forming the band, and was previously identified as a personal friend of Banksy.

In 2020, users on Twitter began to speculate that former presenter Neil Buchanan was Banksy. This was denied by Buchanan's publicist.

In 2022, Billy Gannon, a local councillor in Pembroke Dock was rumoured to be Banksy. He subsequently resigned because the speculation was affecting his ability to carry out the duties of a councillor. "I'm being asked to prove who I am not, and the person that I am not may not exist," he said. "I mean, how am I supposed to prove that I'm not somebody who doesn't exist? Just how do you do that?"

In October 2014, an internet hoax circulated that Banksy had been arrested and his identity revealed.

Early career (1990-2001)

A Banksy work from the Bristol underground scene

Banksy started as a freehand graffiti artist in 1990-1994 as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), with two other artists known as Kato and Tes. He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene with Nick Walker, Inkie and 3D. During this time he met Bristol photographer Steve Lazarides, who began selling Banksy's work, later becoming his agent. By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realising how much less time it took to complete a work. He claims he changed to stencilling while hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry, when he noticed the stencilled serial number and by employing this technique, he soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London. He was the goalkeeper for the Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls football team in the 1990s, and toured with the club to Mexico in 2001. Banksy's first known large wall mural was The Mild Mild West painted in 1997 to cover advertising of a former solicitors' office on Stokes Croft in Bristol. It depicts a teddy bear lobbing a Molotov cocktail at three riot police.

Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist, or anti-establishment. Subjects often include rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly.

In July 2011 one of Banksy's early works, Gorilla in a Pink Mask, which had been a prominent landmark on the exterior wall of a former social club in Eastville for over ten years, was unwittingly painted over after the premises became a Muslim cultural centre.

Exhibitions (2002-2003)

On 19 July 2002, Banksy's first Los Angeles exhibition debuted at 33 Gallery, a tiny Silver Lake venue owned by Frank Sosa and was on view until 18 August. The exhibition, entitled Existencilism, "an Exhibition of Art, Lies and Deviousness" was curated by 33 Gallery, Malathion LA's Chris Vargas, Funk Lazy Promotions' Grace Jehan, and B+. The flyer of the exhibition indicates an opening reception was followed by a performance by Money Mark with DJ's Jun, AL Jackson, Rhettmatic, J.Rocc, and Coleman. Some of the paintings exhibited included Smiley Copper H (2002), Leopard and Barcode (2002), Bomb Hugger (2002), and Love Is in the Air (2002).

Banksy mural in Bethlehem

In 2003, at an exhibition called , held in a London warehouse, Banksy painted on animals. At the time he gave one of his very few interviews, to the BBC's Nigel Wrench. Although the RSPCA declared the conditions suitable, an animal rights activist chained herself to the railings in protest. An example of his subverted paintings is Monet's Water Lily Pond, adapted to include urban detritus such as litter and a shopping trolley floating in its reflective waters; another is Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, redrawn to show that the characters are looking at a British football hooligan, dressed only in his Union Flag underpants, who has just thrown an object through the glass window of the café. These oil paintings were shown at a twelve-day exhibition in Westbourne Grove, London in 2005.

Banksy, along with Shepard Fairey, Dmote, and others, created work at a warehouse exhibition in Alexandria, Sydney, for Semi-Permanent in 2003. Approximately 1,500 people attended.

A stencil of Charles Manson in a prison suit, hitchhiking to anywhere, Archway, London

£10 notes to Barely Legal (2004-2006)

In August 2004, Banksy produced a quantity of spoof British £10 notes replacing the picture of the Queen's head with Diana, Princess of Wales's head and changing the text "Bank of England" to "Banksy of England". Someone threw a large wad of these into a crowd at Notting Hill Carnival that year, which some recipients then tried to spend in local shops. These notes were also given with invitations to a Santa's Ghetto exhibition by Pictures on Walls. The individual notes have since been selling on eBay. A wad of the notes was also thrown over a fence and into the crowd near the signing tent at the Reading Festival. A limited run of 50 signed posters containing ten uncut notes was also produced and sold by Pictures on Walls for £100 each to commemorate the death of Princess Diana. One of these sold in October 2007 at Bonhams auction house in London for £24,000.

The reproduction of images of the banknotes classifies as a criminal offence ( s.18 Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981). In 2016, the American Numismatic Society received an email from a Reproductions Officer at the Bank of England, which brought attention to the illegality of publishing photos of the banknotes on their website without prior permission. The Bank of England holds the copyright over all its banknotes.

Also in 2004, Banksy created a limited edition screenprint titled Napalm (Can't Beat That Feeling). In the print, Banksy appropriated the image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl who appeared in the iconic 1972 photograph " The Terror of War" by Nick Ut. Napalm shows the image of Kim Phuc as seen in the original photo, but no longer within the tragic war setting. Instead, he situates the young girl against an empty background, still screaming, but now accompanied by Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse. The two characters hold her hands as they cheerfully gesture to an invisible audience, seemingly oblivious to the terrified girl. The image of Kim Phuc is flat, grainy and monochromatic; in most of the prints, Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse are yellow. In a few limited prints, the corporate characters wear pink or orange. Banksy produced 150 signed and 500 unsigned copies of Napalm.

In August 2005, Banksy, on a trip to the Palestinian territories, created nine images on the Israeli West Bank wall.

There are crimes that become innocent and even glorious through their splendour, number and excess.

Banksy held an exhibition called Barely Legal, billed as a "three-day vandalised warehouse extravaganza" in Los Angeles, on the weekend of 16 September 2006. The exhibition featured a live " elephant in a room", painted in a pink and gold floral wallpaper pattern, which, according to leaflets handed out at the exhibition, was intended to draw attention to the issue of world poverty. Although the Animal Services Department had issued a permit for the elephant, after complaints from animal rights activists, the elephant appeared unpainted on the final day. Its owners rejected claims of mistreatment and said that the elephant had done "many, many movies. She's used to makeup." Banksy also made artwork displaying Queen Victoria as a lesbian and satirical pieces that incorporated art made by Andy Warhol and Leonardo da Vinci.

Peter Gibson, a spokesman for Keep Britain Tidy, asserts that Banksy's work is simple vandalism. Another official for the same organisation stated: "We are concerned that Banksy's street art glorifies what is essentially vandalism."

Banksy effect (2006-2007)

Naked Man image by Banksy, on the wall of a sexual health clinic[61] in Park Street, Bristol. Following popular support, the City Council has decided it will be allowed to remain. (wider view)

After Christina Aguilera bought an original of Queen Victoria as a lesbian and two prints for £25,000, on 19 October 2006, a set of Kate Moss paintings sold in Sotheby's London for £50,400, setting an auction record for Banksy's work. The six silk-screen prints, featuring the model painted in the style of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe pictures, sold for five times their estimated price. Their stencil of a green with real paint dripping from her eyes sold for £57,600 at the same auction. In December, journalist Max Foster coined the phrase, "the Banksy effect", to illustrate how interest in other street artists was growing on the back of Banksy's success.

On 21 February 2007, Sotheby's auction house in London auctioned three works, reaching the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction: over £102,000 for Bombing Middle England. Two of his other graffiti works, Girl with Balloon and Bomb Hugger, sold for £37,200 and £31,200 respectively, which were well above their estimated prices. The following day's auction saw a further three Banksy works reach soaring prices: Ballerina with Action Man Parts reached £96,000; sold for £72,000; Untitled (2004) sold for £33,600; all significantly above price estimates. To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that said, "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit."

In February 2007, the owners of a house with a Banksy mural on the side in Bristol decided to sell the house through Red Propeller art gallery after offers fell through because the prospective buyers wanted to remove the mural. It is listed as a mural that comes with a house attached.

In April 2007, Transport for London painted over Banksy's image of a scene from Quentin Tarantino's film Pulp Fiction (1994), featuring Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns. Although the image was very popular, Transport for London claimed that the graffiti created "a general atmosphere of neglect and social decay which in turn encourages crime" and their staff are "professional cleaners not professional art critics". Banksy painted the same site again and, initially, the actors were portrayed as holding real guns instead of bananas, but they were adorned with banana costumes. Sometime later, Banksy made a tribute artwork over this second Pulp Fiction work. The tribute was for 19-year-old British graffiti artist Ozone who, along with fellow artist Wants, was hit by an underground train in Barking, east London on 12 January 2007. Banksy depicted an angel wearing a bullet-proof vest holding a skull. He also wrote a note on his website saying:

Ozone's Angel

The last time I hit this spot I painted a crap picture of two men in banana costumes waving handguns. A few weeks later a writer called Ozone completely dogged it and then wrote "If it's better next time I'll leave it" in the bottom corner. When we lost Ozone we lost a fearless graffiti writer and as it turns out a pretty perceptive art critic. Ozone-rest in peace.

On 27 April 2007, a new record high for the sale of Banksy's work was set with the auction of the work Space Girl and Bird fetching £288,000 (US$576,000) around 20 times the estimate at Bonhams of London. On 21 May 2007 Banksy gained the award for Art's Greatest living Briton. Banksy, as expected, did not turn up to collect his award and continued with his anonymous status. On 4 June 2007, it was reported that Banksy'sThe Drinker had been stolen. In October 2007, most of his works offered for sale at Bonhams auction house in London sold for more than twice their reserve price.

Banksy has published a " manifesto" on his website. The text of the manifesto is credited as the diary entry of British Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO, which is exhibited in the Imperial War Museum. It describes how a shipment of lipstick to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp immediately after its liberation at the end of World War II helped the internees regain their humanity. However, as of 18 January 2008, Banksy's Manifesto has been replaced with Graffiti Heroes No. 03, which describes Peter Chappell's graffiti quest of the 1970s that worked to free George Davis from imprisonment. By 12 August 2009 he was relying on Emo Philips' "When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised God doesn't work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness." A small number of Banksy's works can be seen in the movieChildren of Men, including a stenciled image of two policemen kissing and another stencil of a child looking down a shop.

Banksy, who "is not represented by any of the commercial galleries that sell his work second hand (including Lazarides Ltd, Andipa Gallery, Bank Robber, Dreweatts etc.)", claims that the exhibition at Vanina Holasek Gallery in New York City (his first major exhibition in that city) is unauthorised. The exhibition featured 62 of their paintings and prints.

Banksy Swinger in New Orleans

In March, Nathan Wellard and Maev Neal, a couple from Norfolk, UK, made headlines in Britain when they decided to sell their mobile home that contains a 30-foot mural, entitled Fragile Silence, done by Banksy a decade prior to his rise to fame. According to Nathan Wellard, Banksy had asked the couple if he could use the side of their home as a "large canvas", to which they agreed. In return for the "canvas", the Bristol stencil artist gave them two free tickets to the Glastonbury Festival. The mobile home purchased by the couple 11 years earlier for £1,000, was priced at £500,000.

Also in March 2008, a stencilled graffiti work appeared on Thames Water tower in the middle of the Holland Park roundabout, and it was widely attributed to Banksy. It was of a child painting the tag "Take this-Society!" in bright orange. London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham spokesman, Councillor Greg Smith branded the art as vandalism, and ordered its immediate removal, which was carried out by H&F council workmen within three days.

In late August 2008, marking the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the associated levee failure disaster, Banksy produced a series of works in New Orleans, Louisiana, mostly on buildings derelict since the disaster.

Work on building in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, August 2008

A stencil painting attributed to Banksy appeared at a vacant petrol station in the Ensley neighbourhood of Birmingham, Alabama on 29 August as Hurricane Gustav approached the New Orleans area. The painting, depicting a hooded member of the Ku Klux Klan hanging from a noose, was quickly covered with black spray paint and later removed altogether. His first official exhibition in New York City,The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill, opened 5 October 2008. The animatronic pets in the store window include a mother hen watching over her baby Chicken McNuggets as they peck at a barbecue sauce packet, and a rabbit putting makeup on in a mirror.

The Westminster City Council stated in October 2008 that the work One Nation Under CCTV, painted in April 2008 would be painted over as it was graffiti. The council said it would remove any graffiti, regardless of the reputation of its creator, and specifically stated that Banksy "has no more right to paint graffiti than a child". Robert Davis, the chairman of the council planning committee told The Times newspaper: "If we condone this then we might as well say that any kid with a spray can is producing art." The work was painted over in April 2009. In December 2008, The Little Diver, a Banksy image of a diver in a duffle coat in Melbourne, Australia, was destroyed. The image had been protected by a sheet of clear perspex; however, silver paint was poured behind the protective sheet and later tagged with the words "Banksy woz ere". The image was almost completely obliterated.

Banksy has also been long criticised for copying the work of Blek le Rat, who created the life-sized stencil technique in early 1980s Paris and used it to express a similar combination of political commentary and humorous imagery. Blek has praised Banksy for his contribution to urban art, but said in an interview for the documentary Graffiti Wars that some of Banksy's more derivative work makes him "angry", saying that "It's difficult to find a technique and style in art so when you have a style and you see someone else is taking it and reproducing it, you don't like that."

The Cans Festival (2008)

In London, over the weekend 3-5 May 2008, Banksy hosted an exhibition called The Cans Festival. It was situated on Leake Street, a road tunnel formerly used by Eurostar underneath London Waterloo station. Graffiti artists with stencils were invited to join in and paint their own artwork, as long as it did not cover anyone else's. Banksy invited artists from around the world to exhibit their works.

The location of the damaged 1985 graffiti by Robbo in Camden, London allegedly painted over by Banksy and subsequently painted over by Robbo in retaliation

In May 2009, Banksy parted company with agent Steve Lazarides and announced that Pest Control, the handling service who act on his behalf, would be the only point of sale for new works. On 13 June 2009, the Banksy vs Bristol Museum show opened at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, featuring more than 100 works of art, including animatronics and installations; it is his largest exhibition yet, featuring 78 new works. Reaction to the show was positive, with over 8,500 visitors to the show on the first weekend. Over the course of the twelve weeks, the exhibition was visited over 300,000 times. In September 2009, a Banksy work parodying the Royal Family was partially destroyed by Hackney Council after they served an enforcement notice for graffiti removal to the former address of the property owner. The mural had been commissioned for the 2003 Blur single " Crazy Beat" and the property owner, who had allowed it to be painted, was reported to have been in tears when she saw it was being painted over.

In December 2009, Banksy marked the end of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference by painting four murals on global warming. One included the phrase, "I don't believe in global warming;" the words were submerged in water. A feud and graffiti war between Banksy and King Robbo broke out when Banksy allegedly painted over one of Robbo's tags. The feud has led to many of Banksy's works being altered by graffiti writers.

Exit Through the Gift Shop and United States (2010)

The world premiere of the film Exit Through the Gift Shop occurred at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on 24 January. He created 10 street artworks around Park City and Salt Lake City to tie in with the screening. In February, The Whitehouse public house in Liverpool, England, was sold for £114,000 at auction. The side of the building has an image of a giant rat by Banksy.

In March 2010, a modified version of the work Forgive Us Our Trespassing-a kneeling boy with a spray-painted halo-was displayed at London Bridge Station on a poster. This version of the work did not possess the halo due to its stylistic nature and the prevalence of graffiti in the underground. After a few days the halo was repainted by a graffitist, so Transport for London disposed of the poster.

Banksy paints over the line between aesthetics and language, then stealthily repaints it in the unlikeliest of places. His works, whether he stencils them on the streets, sells them in exhibitions or hangs them in museums on the sly, are filled with wit and metaphors that transcend language barriers.

In April, to coincide with the premiere of Exit Through the Gift Shop in San Francisco, five of his works appeared in various parts of the city. Banksy reportedly paid a San Francisco Chinatown building owner $50 for the use of their wall for one of his stencils. In May 2010, seven new Banksy works of art appeared in Toronto, Canada, though most have been subsequently painted over or removed.

In May, to coincide with the premiere of Exit Through the Gift Shop in Royal Oak, Banksy visited the Detroit area and left his mark in several places in Detroit and Warren. Shortly after, his work depicting a little boy holding a can of red paint next to the words "I remember when all this was trees" was excavated by the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios. They claim that they do not intend to sell the work but plan to preserve it and display it at their Detroit gallery. There was also an attempted removal of one of the Warren works known as Diamond Girl. While in the United States, Banksy also completed a painting in Chinatown, Boston, known as Follow Your Dreams.

In late January 2011, Exit Through the Gift Shop was nominated for a 2010 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Banksy released a statement about the nomination, stating, "This is a big surprise... I don't agree with the concept of award ceremonies, but I'm prepared to make an exception for the ones I'm nominated for. The last time there was a naked man covered in gold paint in my house, it was me." Leading up to the Oscars, Banksy blanketed Los Angeles with street art. Many people speculated if Banksy would show up at the Oscars in disguise and make a surprise appearance if he won the Oscar. Exit Through the Gift Shop did not win the award, which went to . In early March 2011, Banksy responded to the Oscars with an artwork in Weston-super-Mare, UK, of a little girl holding the Oscar and pouting. Many people think that it is about 15-month-old Lara, who dropped and damaged her father's ( The King's Speech co-producer Simon Egan) Oscar statue. Exit Through the Gift Shop was broadcast on British public television station Channel 4 on 13 August 2011.

Banksy was credited with the opening couch gag for the 2010 The Simpsons episode " MoneyBart", depicting people working in deplorable conditions and using endangered or mythical animals to make both the episodes cel-by-cel and the merchandise connected with the program. His name appears several times throughout the episode's opening sequence, spray-painted on assorted walls and signs. Fox sanitised parts of the opening "for taste" and to make it less grim. In January 2011, Banksy published the original storyboard on its website. According to Banksy, the storyboard "led to delays, disputes over broadcast standards and a threatened walkout by the animation department." Executive director Al Jean jokingly said, "This is what you get when you outsource."

In May 2011 Banksy released a lithographic print which showed a smoking petrol bomb contained in a ' Tesco Value' bottle. This followed a long-running campaign by locals against the opening of a Tesco Express supermarket in Banksy's home city of Bristol. Violent clashes had taken place between police and demonstrators in the Stokes Croft area. Banksy produced the poster ostensibly to raise money for local groups in the Stokes Croft area and to raise money for the legal defence of those arrested during the riots. The posters were sold exclusively at the Bristol Anarchists Bookfair in Stokes Croft for £5 each. In December, he unveiled Cardinal Sin at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The bust, which replaces a priest's face with a "pixelated" effect, was a statement on the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

In May 2012 his Parachuting Rat, painted in Melbourne in the late 1990s, was accidentally destroyed by plumbers installing new pipes. In July, prior to the 2012 Olympic Games Banksy posted photographs of paintings with an Olympic theme on his website but did not disclose their location.

On 18 February 2013, BBC News reported that a recent Banksy mural, known as the Slave Labour mural portraying a young child sewing Union Flag bunting (created around the time of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II) had been removed from the side of a Poundland store in Wood Green, north London, and soon appeared for sale in Fine Art Auctions Miami's catalogue (a US auction site based in Florida). News of this caused "lots of anger" in the local community and is considered by some to be a theft. Fine Art Auctions Miami had rejected claims of theft, saying it had signed a contract with a "well-known collector" and that "everything was above board"; despite this, the local councillor for Wood Green campaigned for the work's return. On the scheduled day of the auction, Fine Art Auctions Miami withdrew the work of art from the sale.

On 11 May, BBC News reported that the same Banksy mural was up for auction again in Covent Garden by the Sincura Group. The auction was scheduled to take place in June, and was expected to fetch up to £450,000. On 24 September, after over a year since his previous piece, a new mural went up on his website along with the subtitle Better Out Than In.

Much criticism came forward during his series of works in New York in 2013. Many New York street artists, such as TrustoCorp, criticised Banksy, and much of his work was defaced. In his column for The Guardian, satirist Charlie Brooker wrote in 2006 that Banksy's "work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots."

On 1 October 2013, Banksy began a one-month "show on the streets of New York [City]", for which he opened a separate website and granted an interview to The Village Voice via his publicist.

A pop-up boutique of about 25 spray-art canvases appeared on Fifth Avenue near Central Park on 12 October. Tourists were able to buy Banksy art for just $60 each. In a note posted to his website, the artist wrote: "Please note this was a one-off. The stall will not be there again." The BBC estimated that the street-stall art pieces could be worth as much as $31,000. The booth was manned by an unknown elderly man who went about four hours before making a sale, yawning and eating lunch as people strolled by without a second glance at the work. Banksy chronicled the surprise sale in a video posted to his website noting, "Yesterday I set up a stall in the park selling 100% authentic original signed Banksy canvases. For $60 each." Two of the canvasses sold at a July 2014 auction for $214,000.

Asked about the artist's presence in New York, then- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had led a citywide graffiti cleanup operation in 2002, said he did not consider graffiti a form of art. One creation was a fiberglass sculpture of Ronald McDonald and a real person, barefoot and in ragged clothes, shining the oversized shoes of Ronald McDonald. The sculpture was unveiled in Queens but moved outside a different McDonald's around the city every day. Other works included a YouTube video showing what appears to be footage of jihadist militants shooting down an animated Dumbo; travelling installations that toured the city including a slaughterhouse delivery truck full of stuffed animals and a waterfall; and a modified painting donated to a charity shop which was later sold in an online auction for $615,000. Banksy also posted a mock-up of a New York Times op-ed attacking the design of the One World Trade Center after the Times rejected his submission. The residency in New York concluded on 31 October 2013; many of the pieces, though, were either vandalised, removed or stolen.

In February 2015 Banksy published a 2-minute video titled Make this the year YOU discover a new destination about his trip to Gaza Strip. During the visit he painted a few artworks including a kitten on the remains of a house destroyed by an Israeli air strike ("I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website-but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens") and a swing hanging off a watchtower. In a statement to The New York Times his publicist said,

I don't want to take sides. But when you see entire suburban neighbourhoods reduced to rubble with no hope of a future-what you're really looking at is a vast outdoor recruitment centre for terrorists. And we should probably address this for all our sakes.

Dismaland (2015), a "bemusement park" in Weston-super-Mare

Banksy opened Dismaland, a large-scale group show modelled on Disneyland on 21 August 2015. It lampooned the many disappointing temporary themed attractions in the UK at the time. Dismaland permanently closed on 27 September 2015. The "theme park" was located in Weston-super-Mare, United Kingdom. According to the Dismaland website, artists represented on the show include Damien Hirst and Jenny Holzer. In December, Banksy created several murals in the vicinity of Calais, France, including the so-called " Jungle" where migrants then lived as they attempted to enter the United Kingdom. One of the pieces, The Son of a Migrant from Syria, depicts Steve Jobs as a migrant.

In 2017, marking the 100th anniversary of the British control of Palestine, Banksy financed the creation of the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem. This hotel is open to the public and contains rooms designed by Banksy, Sami Musa, and Dominique Petrin, and each of the bedrooms face the wall. It also houses a contemporary art gallery. 2018 saw Banksy return to New York five years after his Better Out Than In residency. A trademark rat running around the circumference of a clock-face, dubbed Rat race, was torn down by developers within a week of it appearing on a former bank building at 101 West 14th Street, but other works, including a mural of imprisoned Kurdish artist Zehra Doğan on the famed Bowery Wall and a series of others across Brooklyn, remain on display.

In October 2018, one of Banksy's works, Balloon Girl, was sold in an auction at Sotheby's in London for £1.04m. However, shortly after the gavel dropped and it was sold, an alarm sounded inside of the picture frame and the canvas passed through a shredder hidden within the frame, partially shredding the picture. Banksy then posted an image of the shredding on Instagram captioned "Going, going, gone...". After the sale, the auction house acknowledged that the self-destruction of the work was a prank by the artist. The prank received wide news coverage around the world, with one newspaper stating that it was "quite possibly the biggest prank in art history." Joey Syer, co-founder of an online platform facilitating art dealer sales, told the Evening Standard: "The auction result will only propel this further and given the media attention this stunt has received, the lucky buyer would see a great return on the £1.02M they paid last night, this is now part of art history in its shredded state and we'd estimate Banksy has added at a minimum 50% to its value, possibly as high as being worth £2m+." A man seen filming the shredding of the picture during its auction has been suggested to be Banksy. Banksy has since released a video on how the shredder was installed into the frame and the shredding of the picture, explaining that he had surreptitiously fitted the painting with the shredder a few years previously, in case it ever went up for auction. To explain his rationale for destroying his own artwork, Banksy quoted Picasso: "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge". (Although Banksy cited Picasso, this quote is usually attributed to Mikhail Bakunin.) It is not known how the shredder was activated. Banksy has released another video indicating that the painting was intended to be shredded completely. The video shows a sample painting completely shredded by the frame and says: "In rehearsals it worked every time...".

The woman who won the bidding at the auction decided to go through with the purchase. The partially shredded work has been given a new title, Love is in the Bin, and it was authenticated by Banksy's authentication body Pest Control. Sotheby released a statement that said "Banksy didn't destroy an artwork in the auction, he created one," and called it "the first artwork in history to have been created live during an auction." On 14 October 2021, the half-shredded painting was reported to have been sold for $25.4 million.

Season's Greetings was created by Banksy in Port Talbot, Wales, in December 2018, and was quickly provided with a temporary protective covering to prevent vandalism.

A two-sided graffiti piece, one side depicting a child tasting the falling snow, the other revealing that the snow is in fact smoke and embers from a dumpster fire, appeared on two walls of a steelworker's garage in Port Talbot in December. Banksy then revealed that the painting was in fact his via an Instagram video soundtracked by the festive children's song 'Little Snowflake'. Many fans of the artist went to see the painting and Plaid Cymru councillor for Aberavon, Nigel Thomas Hunt, stated that the town was "buzzing" with speculation that the work was Banksy's. The owner of the garage, Ian Lewis, said that he had lost sleep over fears that the image would be vandalised. A plastic screen, partially funded by Michael Sheen, was installed to protect the mural, but was attacked by a "drunk halfwit". Extra security guards were subsequently drafted to protect the graffiti piece. In May 2019, the mural was moved to a gallery in the town's Ty'r Orsaf building.

In early October 2019, Banksy opened a "pop-up shop" named Gross Domestic Product in Croydon, South London to strengthen his position in a trademark dispute with a greetings cards company who had challenged his trademark on the grounds that he was not using it. In a statement, Banksy said "A greetings cards company is contesting the trademark I hold to my art, and attempting to take custody of my name so they can sell their fake Banksy merchandise legally." Mark Stephens, arts lawyer and founder of the Design and Artists Copyright Society, called the case a "ludicrous litigation" and is providing the artist legal advice. Stephens recommended opening the shop to Banksy on the grounds that it would show he is making use of his trademark, saying: "Because [Banksy] doesn't produce his own range of shoddy merchandise and the law is quite clear-if the trademark holder is not using the mark, then it can be transferred to someone who will." On 4 October, greetings cards distributor Full Colour Black publicly revealed itself as the company involved in the trademark dispute whilst rejecting Banksy's claims as "entirely untrue". The company claimed it had contacted Banksy's lawyers several times to offer to pay royalties.

On 14 September 2020, the European Union Intellectual Property Office ruled in favour of Full Colour Black in the trademark dispute over Banksy's infamous "Flower Thrower". The European panel judges in (Full Colour Black Ltd v Pest Control Office Ltd [2020] E.T.M.R. 58) decided that Banksy's trademark was invalid as it had been filed in Bad Faith according to Regulation 2017/1001 art.59(1)(b). The judges were not convinced that the opening of the artist's "pop-up shop" demonstrated a real intention to legitimise the trademark, condemning it as "inconsistent with the honest practices of the trade" [at 1141]. The artist's choice to be represented anonymously was not received well by the court either, noting that even if they found in favour of Banksy, legal rights could not be attributed to an unidentifiable person [1151]. However, counsel for the defence strongly argued that to reveal his identity would diminish the persona of the artist [at 1135]. Although not binding, the judges also referenced Banksy's previously critical statements about copyright, which contributed to the lack of sympathy for the artist's case [at 1144].

In October 2019, a 2009 painting by Banksy entitled Devolved Parliament showing Members of Parliament depicted as chimpanzees in the House of Commons, sold at Sotheby's in London for just under £9.9 million. On Instagram, the artist said it was a "record price for a Banksy painting" and "shame I didn't still own it". At 13 feet (4.0 m) wide it is Banksy's biggest known work on canvas. The auction house stated: "Regardless of where you sit in the Brexit debate, there's no doubt that this work is more pertinent now than it has ever been."

On 13 February 2020, the Valentine's Banksy mural appeared on the side of a building in Bristol's Barton Hill neighbourhood, depicting a young girl firing a slingshot of real red flowers and leaves. In the early hours of Valentine's Day (14 February), Banksy confirmed this was his work on his Instagram account and website. The painting was defaced just days after appearing. Banksy dedicated a painting titled Painting for Saints or Game Changer to NHS staff, and donated it to the University Hospital of Southampton during the global coronavirus pandemic in May 2020. The painting was sold for £14.4m (£16.8m including buyer premium) on 23 March 2021, which is a record for an artwork by Banksy. The proceeds from the sale would benefit a number of NHS-related organisations and charities.

In March 2021, the image of an escaping prisoner appeared overnight on the side of Reading Prison. Two days later Banksy claimed the artwork. The former jail's next use had been disputed locally, some wanting it to be used as an arts hub, while developers proposed it could be sold to a housing developer. The escaping prisoner was said to resemble Oscar Wilde, who had been imprisoned in Reading Prison, with the "rope" as tied together bedsheets with a typewriter attached to the end.

In August 2021, several Banksy artworks, collectively titled A Great British Spraycation, appeared in several East Anglian towns. Banksy created an original artwork for the 2021 BBC One/ Amazon Prime Video comedy The Outlaws. The image of a stencilled rat sitting on two spray cans signed by Banksy featured in the sixth episode of the first series, and was painted over by the character Frank, played by Christopher Walken, while he was cleaning a graffiti-covered wall as part of his Community Payback sentence.

Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), Kyiv

A mural on the wall of a bombed building in Irpin, Ukraine

In November 2022, Banksy posted on social media images of a mural on the side of a damaged building at the town of Borodianka, appearing to confirm a visit to Ukraine following the Russian invasion. He also created six murals in Kyiv, Irpin, Hostomel and Horenka. One of the images he produced in Borodianka was of Russian president Vladimir Putin in a judo throw. The image has since been turned into a stamp in Ukraine.

Banksy was accused of being "inconsistent with honest practices" when trying to trademark his image of a protester throwing a bouquet of flowers. The European Union trademark office threw out his trademark claim, "saying he had filed it in order to avoid using copyright laws, which are separate and would have required [him] to reveal his true identity. The ruling quoted from one of his books, in which he said 'copyright is for losers'."

Other notable artworks

Banksy has claimed responsibility for a number of high-profile artworks, including the following:

At London Zoo, he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in 7-foot-high (2.1 m) letters.[192]

At London Zoo, he left the message "I want out. This place is too cold. Keeper smells. Boring, boring, boring." in the elephant enclosure.[193]

In 2004, he placed the piece Banksus Militus Ratus into London's Natural History Museum.[194]

In March 2005, he placed subverted artworks in the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan as well as the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn.[195]

In May 2005 Banksy's version of a primitive cave painting depicting a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping trolley was hung in gallery 49 of the British Museum, London.[196]

In August 2005, Banksy painted nine images on the Israeli West Bank barrier, including an image of a ladder going up and over the wall and an image of children digging a hole through the wall.[55][197][198]

In October 2005, Banksy designed six station IDs for Nickelodeon.[199]

In April 2006, Banksy created a sculpture based on a crumpled red phone box with a pickaxe in its side, apparently bleeding, and placed it in a side street in Soho, London. It was later removed by Westminster Council.[200]

In June 2006, Banksy created Well Hung Lover, an image of a naked man hanging out of a bedroom window on a wall visible from Park Street in central Bristol. The image sparked "a heated debate",[201] with the Bristol City Council leaving it up to the public to decide whether it should stay or go.[202] After an internet discussion in which 97% of the 500 people surveyed supported the stencil, the city council decided it would be left on the building.[201] The mural was later defaced with blue paint.[203]

In August/September 2006, Banksy placed up to 500 copies of Paris Hilton's debut CD, Paris, in 48 different UK record stores with his own cover art and remixes by Danger Mouse. Music tracks were given titles such as "Why Am I Famous?", "What Have I Done?" and "What Am I For?". Several copies of the CD were purchased by the public before stores were able to remove them, some going on to be sold for as much as £750 on online auction websites such as eBay. The cover art depicted Hilton digitally altered to appear topless. Other pictures feature her with her chihuahua Tinkerbell's head replacing her own, and one of her stepping out of a luxury car, edited to include a group of homeless people, which included the caption "90% of success is just showing up."[204][205][206]

In September 2006, Banksy dressed an inflatable doll in the manner of a Guantanamo Bay detainment camp prisoner (orange jumpsuit, black hood, and handcuffs) and then placed the figure within the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ride at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California.[207][208]

He makes stickers (the Neighbourhood Watch subvert) and was responsible for the cover art of Blur's 2003 album Think Tank.

In September 2007, Banksy covered a wall in Portobello Road with a French artist painting graffiti of Banksy's name.[209]

A guard/police officer with a balloon animal was painted in the Canadian city of Toronto in 2010, and has since been removed from its original location and preserved.[210]

In July 2012, in the run up to the London 2012 Olympic games he created several pieces based upon this event. One included an image of an athlete throwing a missile instead of a javelin, evidently taking a poke at the surface to air missile sites positioned in the Stratford area to defend the games.[211][212]

In April 2014, he created a piece in Cheltenham, near the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) headquarters, which depicts three men wearing sunglasses and using listening devices to "snoop" on a telephone box, evidently criticising the recent Global surveillance disclosures of 2013. This was only confirmed by Banksy as his work later in June 2014.[213] This piece 'disappeared' on 20 August 2016 during renovations to the building it was on, and may have been destroyed.[214]

In June 2016, a 14 ft painting of a child with a stick chasing a burning tyre was found in the Bridge Farm Primary School in Bristol with a letter from Banksy thanking the school for naming one of its houses after him. BBC News reported that a spokesman for Banksy confirmed that the artwork was genuine. In the letter, Banksy wrote that if the members of the school did not like the painting, they should add their own elements.[215][216]

In May 2017, Banksy claimed the authorship of a giant Brexit mural, painted on a house in Dover (Kent)[217]

Banksy's Dream Boat, originally made for the Dismaland exhibition, was donated to the NGO Help Refugees (now called Choose Love) to help raise funds for the charity. The artwork was displayed in Help Refugees' London Choose Love pop-up shop in the run-up to Christmas 2018, and members of the public could pay £2.00 to enter a competition to guess the weight of the piece. The person with the closest guess would win Dream Boat.[218] The 'guess-the-weight' competition was seen as 'deliberately school fair' in style.[219]

The Girl with the Pierced Eardrum

Damaged artwork

Many artworks by Banksy have been vandalised, painted over or destroyed.

In 2008, in Melbourne, paint was poured over a stencil of an old-fashioned diver wearing a trench coat. In April 2010, the Melbourne City Council reported that they had inadvertently ordered private contractors to paint over a rat descending in a parachute adorning the wall of an old council building behind the Forum Theatre.

Many works that make up the Better Out Than In series in New York City have been defaced, some just hours after the piece was unveiled. At least one defacement was identified as done by a competing artist, OMAR NYC, who spray-painted over Banksy's red mylar balloon piece in Red Hook. OMAR NYC also defaced some of Banksy's work in May 2010.

ATM attacking a girl, Rosebery Avenue, London, January 2008

Because of the secretive nature of Banksy's work and identity, it is uncertain what techniques he uses to generate the images in the stencils, though it is assumed he uses computers for some images due to the photographic quality of much of his work. He mentions in his book Wall and Piece that as he was starting to do graffiti, he was always either caught or could never finish the art in one sitting. He claims he changed to stencilling while hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry, when he noticed the stencilled serial number. He then devised a series of intricate stencils to minimise time and overlapping of the colour.

There exists a debate about the influence behind his work. Some critics claim Banksy was influenced by musician and graffiti artist 3D. Another source credits the artist's work to resemble that of French graffiti artist Blek le Rat. It is said that Banksy was inspired by their use of stencils, later taking this visual style and transforming it through modern political and social pieces.

Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. Subjects often include rats, apes, policemen, soldiers, children, and the elderly.

In the broader art world, stencils are traditionally hand drawn or printed onto sheets of acetate or card, before being cut out by hand. This technique allows artists to paint quickly to protect their anonymity. There is dispute in the street art world over the legitimacy of stencils, with many artists criticising their use as "cheating".

In 2018, Banksy created a piece live, as it was being auctioned. The piece, titled, Love is in the Bin, was originally the painting, Girl with Balloon, before it was shredded at Sotheby's. While the bidding was going on, a shredder was activated from within the frame, and the piece was partially shredded, thus creating a new piece.

Political and social themes

Shop Until You Drop in Mayfair, London. Banksy has said "We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves."[227]

Banksy once characterised graffiti as a form of underclass "revenge", or guerrilla warfare that allows an individual to snatch away power, territory and glory from a bigger and better equipped enemy. Banksy sees a social class component to this struggle, remarking "If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead." Banksy's work has also shown a desire to mock centralised power, hoping that their work will show the public that although power does exist and works against you, that power is not terribly efficient and it can and should be deceived.

Banksy's works have dealt with various political and social themes, including anti-war, anti-consumerism, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, anti-authoritarianism, anarchism, nihilism, and existentialism. Additionally, the components of the human condition that his works commonly critique are greed, poverty, hypocrisy, boredom, despair, absurdity, and alienation. Although Banksy's works usually rely on visual imagery and iconography to put forth their message, Banksy has made several politically related comments in various books. In summarising his list of "people who should be shot", he listed "Fascist thugs, religious fundamentalists, (and) people who write lists telling you who should be shot." While facetiously describing his political nature, Banksy declared that "Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world, I can't even finish my second apple pie."

Banksy's work has also critiqued the environmental impacts of big businesses. When speaking about his 2005 work Show me the Monet, Banksy explained:

"The vandalised paintings reflect life as it is now. We don't live in a world like Constable's Haywain anymore and, if you do, there is probably a travellers' camp on the other side of the hill. The real damage done to our environment is not done by graffiti writers and drunken teenagers, but by big business... exactly the people who put gold-framed pictures of landscapes on their walls and try to tell the rest of us how to behave."

Show me the Monet repurposes Claude Monet's Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, with the inclusion of two shopping carts and an orange traffic cone. This painting was later sold for £7.5 million at Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction in 2020.

During the 2017 United Kingdom general election, Banksy offered voters a free print if they cast a ballot against the Conservative candidates standing in the Bristol North West, Bristol West, North Somerset, Thornbury, Kingswood and Filton constituencies. According to a note posted on Banksy's website, an emailed photo of a completed ballot paper showing it marked for a candidate other than the Conservative candidate would result in the voter being mailed a limited edition piece of Banksy art. On 5 June 2017 the Avon and Somerset Constabulary announced it had opened an investigation into Banksy for the suspected corrupt practice of bribery, and the following day Banksy withdrew the offer stating "I have been warned by the Electoral Commission that the free print offer will invalidate the election result. So I regret to announce that this ill-conceived and legally dubious promotion has now been cancelled."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Banksy referenced medical advice to self-isolate by creating an artwork in his bathroom.

Philanthropy and activism

Banksy has donated a number of works to promote various causes, such as Civilian Drone Strike, which was sold in 2017 at £205,000 to raise funds for Campaign Against Arms Trade and Reprieve. It was part of the exhibition "Art the Arms Fair" set up in opposition to the DSEI arms fair. In 2018, a sculpture titled Dream Boat, which was exhibited in Dismaland in 2015, was raffled off in aid of the NGO Help Refugees (now called Choose Love) for a minimum donation of £2 for every guesses of its weight in a pop-up Choose Love shop in Carnaby Street. In 2002, he produced artwork for the Greenpeace campaign Save or Delete. He also provided works to support local causes; in 2013, a work titled The Banality of the Banality of Evil was sold for an undisclosed amount after a failed auction to support an anti-homelessness charity in New York, In 2014, an artwork on a doorway titled Mobile Lovers was sold £403,000 to keep a youth club in Bristol open, and he created merchandise for homeless charities in Bristol in 2019.

Banksy has been producing a number of works and projects in support of the Palestinians since the mid-2000s, including The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem. In July 2020, Banksy sold three paintings forming a triptych titled Mediterranean Sea View 2017, which raised £2.2 million for a hospital in Bethlehem. The paintings were original created for The Walled Off Hotel, and are Romantic-era paintings of the seashore that have been modified with images of lifebuoys and orange life jackets washed up on the shore, a reference to the European migrant crisis.

Banksy gifted a painting titled Game Changer to a hospital in May 2020 as a tribute to National Health Service workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was later sold for £14.4m in March 2021 to benefit a number of NHS-related organisations and charities.

In August 2020, it was revealed that Banksy had privately funded a rescue boat to save refugees at risk in the Mediterranean Sea. The former French Navy boat, renamed after Louise Michel, has been painted pink with an image of a young girl holding a heart-shaped safety float.

Banksy has published several books that contain photographs of his work accompanied by his own writings:

Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Existencilism, and Cut It Out were a three-part self-published series of small booklets.

Pictures of Walls is a compilation book of pictures of the work of other graffiti artists, curated and self-published by Banksy. None of them are still in print, or were ever printed in any significant number.

Banksy's Wall and Piece compiled large parts of the images and writings in his original three-book series, with heavy editing and some new material. It was intended for mass print, and published by Random House.

The writings in his original three books had numerous grammatical errors, and his writings in them often took a dark, and angry, and a (self-described) paranoid tone. While the content in them was almost entirely kept in Wall and Piece, the stories were edited and generally took a less provocative tone, and the grammatical errors were resolved (presumably to make it suitable for mass market distribution).

References

Further reading

External links

Official websites:

Slideshows and galleries:

News items

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Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique.

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The images on the walls of the Lighthouse Art Space in Minneapolis are familiar to anyone who has followed the art world in recent years.

"They are very recognizable. And, of course, they are audacious," said Art of Banksy show representative Nick Harkin. He says as a street artist, Banksy has been poking a finger in the eye of things he does not like for a long time.

"And he has very pointed views about the Royal Family in Britain. He has pointed views about war and pacifism. And those are all reflected in his artwork."

Banksy, who famously remains anonymous despite creating pieces known to millions, often just using stencils, in public spaces around the world. Harkin stresses this show, in the spirit of Banksy, is unauthorized.

"If we waited for Banksy to authorize a show there wouldn't be one," he said with a grin.

The pieces in the Minneapolis show are all genuine Banksy works, screen prints based on those works which he sells to collectors. Harkin says the owners want people to see them. The show organizers say taken together, the work on the walls is worth some $35 million.

Laid out in roughly chronological order, the show also includes representations of some of Banksy's famous stunts, including when he began slipping pieces he had made into displays at major museums. Harkin leads the way to a photo of what appears at first glance to be an ancient pictograph. But there is something odd about it.

"The Peckham rock shows a supposed prehistoric figure pushing a shopping trolley. It was placed in the British Museum in 2005, accompanied by an authentic looking information label. And it took three days for anyone in the museum to realize that something wasn't right. There is actually a YouTube video of him installing this in the museum," Harkin said.

But the main attractions are the Banksy images, including his "Girl with Balloon." It's a stenciled figure of a young girl with an arm stretched out towards a heart-shaped balloon trailing a string. It's monochromatic except for the balloon which can be one of many different bright colors.

"We have two 'Girl with Balloon' screen prints, one pink and one red" said Harkin. "And of course, this is one of the most beloved pieces of contemporary art in the world. In fact, there was a recent poll where people asked what was their favorite piece of contemporary art and this ranked is number one. Whether or not the girl is reaching for the balloon, or whether or not she let it go, that's subject to your interpretation."

It was a "Girl with Balloon" image which notoriously self-destructed at a Sotheby's auction moments after being sold for $1.4 million. Harkin points out the shredded remains are now worth even more.

There are more pointed political works in the show too.

"A lot of work that references war, or references police, you can see that in some cases, the soldiers, the armed soldiers, have smiley faces on them," said Harkin. "And he's making commentary about police activity and also about war and aggression. One of the most iconic pictures is a policeman searching through Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz's basket with Toto looking on."

And being Banksy there are many images of rats, which Harkin points out is "an anagram for the word art."

He relates a story about how different people react to Banksy's work. He slipped into the London Underground, popularly known as the Tube, and stenciled several of his favorite rodents on the walls

Harkin said they were soon discovered after Banksy departed. "Now, the custodians saw the graffiti and very quickly cleaned it up, not realizing that it was Banksy. And then the the transit authority in London the next day asked him to please come back and do that. But unfortunately, he declined."

When asked, Harkin doesn't want to predict how many people might come to the show. He's more inclined to answer whether there will be much crossover from the people who came to see the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit.

"There's humor in the show. There's certainly controversial content. That's what Banksy is about," he said. "And I think that will attract many people that may not have been interested in Van Gogh. But hopefully, a lot of those same people who enjoyed Van Gogh will come back to see it as well."

And of course there is always the question lingering in the back of some people's minds as to whether Banksy might be in the crowd

"You might be standing next to him. If you don't like the artwork, don't say it too loudly," Harkin says. "He remains elusive. No one really knows who he is. It's a little bit like when a magician does a trick. And you don't really want to know how the magician did it. That's a little bit how I look at Banksy."

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The images on the walls of the Lighthouse Art Space in Minneapolis are familiar to anyone who has followed the art world in recent years. "They are very recognizable. And, of course, they are audacious," said Art of Banksy show representative Nick Harkin.

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Arguably the most controversial street artist in the world, Banksy's works have become a subculture in their own right. Banksy's political statements and disruptive vision have impacted cities across the globe at vital moments in modern history, provoking alternative viewpoints and encouraging revolution in the art world. His identity remains unknown, even after more than 30 years of involvement in the global graffiti scene. He has worked in many street art mediums and in many styles, breaking down the boundaries and expectations of street art critics. His work includes powerful, often controversial images, encouraging the rapid spread of his name and work across the internet. Today, his iconic works have been re-shared and repurposed beyond measure.

Banksy's early days in graffiti art

Banksy began his graffiti career by admiring the works of Blek Le Rat. He often recycled the artist's old ideas, moulding his own distinctive voice and style as he went. Initially, he was part of a graffiti crew in Bristol by the name of DryBreadZ Crew or DBZ. Soon after, he began to partner with Inkie, another notable graffiti street artist.

At the age of 18, Banksy was nearly caught vandalizing public spaces by police. As his crew fled from the scene, Banksy was stuck hiding beneath a dustbin van. Banksy noticed stencil letters sprayed onto the truck, and, as he had been looking for a faster way to paint at the time, he decided stencilling would be his new graffiti style.

Banksy's works often take the form of multi-layered stencils combined with other media sources. He sometimes includes objects that already exist on his chosen 'canvas,' such as street signs and fire hydrants, to turn his work into striking street art installations. His artwork is often satirical, combining dark humour with messages about art, philosophy, and politics.

By the early 2000s, Banksy had relocated from Bristol to London, where he began to gain notoriety; but, at the same time, his international work was taking off. He soon decided to travel to Palestine and the West Bank, where he stencilled nine now-iconic images onto the newly-erected West Bank Wall, including 'Love is in the Air.' These images were an instant hit and exploded online.

At this time, Banksy's silkscreen prints and stencil paintings were racking up record-breaking sales in storied art auctions such as Sotheby's and Bonhams of London. These successful sales marked Banksy's dramatic entry into the commercial art world. In 2010, Banksy assumed the role of author and filmmaker for his film 'Exit Through the Gift Shop.'

Who is Banksy?

Very little is known about Banksy himself, as he refuses to be interviewed and carefully maintains his anonymity. A world-renowned mystery man, Banksy has risen through the ranks to become one of the world's greatest street artists partly by cultivating in his collectors an urgency and desire to unveil his character. Street art fanatics are consistently impressed by the far-reaching scope, variety, and bravery of every artwork he delivers, but are always left wanting more. This tactic encourages viewers to explore a completely new perspective or idea, often inspiring both amateur and professional artists. This inspiration is also known as the " Banksy Effect."

A number of claims have been made over Banksy's identity, fuelling media interest. Most recently, many sources, including an entire newspaper publication, suggested he was a Bristol native by the name of Robin Gunninham. Though the prospect of uncovering Banksy's identity would allow for a greater understanding of his motives and mission, no claim had ever been confirmed. His identity has reputedly even been concealed from his family.

Banksy artwork

In October 2013, Banksy undertook a month-long residency in New York entitled 'Better Out Than In. ' During this time, he unveiled a new piece of work every day. On Day 13, the artist disguised himself as a typical street vendor and set up a stand in Central Park, where he sold black-and-white original paintings for $60. Only eight pieces of art were sold. The following day, Banksy authenticated those eight canvases on his website, alongside the message: "Yesterday I set up a stall in the park selling 100% authentic original signed Banksy canvases. For $60 each". A year after, 'Winnie the Pooh', purchased during Banksy's New York residency, sold for £56,250 on July 2nd 2014 at Bonhams in London.

In the summer of 2015, Banksy opened the dystopian theme park Dismaland in the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare. Prepared entirely in secret, the project unveiled 10 new works by Banksy as well as works from 58 other artists.

Banksy went on to participate in the designing of the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem in 2017, opposite the Israeli West Bank Barrier. With nine rooms designed by Banksy himself, guests could literally sleep inside a work of art. Originally intended as a temporary and provocative piece of installation art, the Walled Off Hotel rapidly became a top tourist attraction. Alongside the spot on which Jesus was reputedly born, a traditional pilgrimage site, the controversial 700 km-long wall is now a surprising tourist site.

Banksy's relationship with tourism is a complex one; while he often stimulates it, he also regularly denounces it because of its negative effects. To criticise the mass tourism that is endangering the Italian city of Venice at the Biennale in 2019, Banksy unveiled 'Venice in Oil,' a series of nine oil paintings which, when placed together, depict a large cruise ship.

In October 2018, a painting by the anonymous street artist sold at Sotheby's auction house in London for £1.04 million. Shortly after the hammer came down, the print of Banksy's 2006 'Girl with Balloon' began to pass through a shredder installed in the frame, destroying half of it. "It appears we just got Banksy-ed," reported Alex Branczik, Sotheby's Senior Director and Head of Contemporary Art in Europe. The piece was a famous Banksy print known as ' Girl with Balloon' created back in 2006. Banksy's balloon girl, which was voted UK's best-loved work of art in 2017, became the first instance of a self-destructing painting. Banksy posted a video to his Instagram account to confirm the move was intentional and demonstrate how he built a shredding device into the large golden frame. The work was then given a new title: " Love is in the Bin ". One less than savvy Banksy owner actually shredded their own Banksy print in the hope the stunt would add value to their investment, but was very disappointed.

In October 2019, another Banksy artwork took the country by storm. Amidst the political controversy at the time, Banksy released 'Devolved Parliament;' a painting that depicts the House of Commons overtaken by apes. It sold at Sotheby's for an astonishing £9.9 million, making it the most expensive Banksy painting sold up to this date. In typical Banksy fashion, he responded to the sale on Instagram with a line from Robert Hughes: "But the price of a work of art is now part of its function, its new job is to sit on the wall and get more expensive."

In a move that was characteristically charitable, Banksy donated a series of three paintings to auction in 2020, entitled 'Mediterranean Sea View', to raise money for a hospital in Bethlehem. The oil paintings were in a detailed, traditional style that had grown more prominent in Banksy's work around this time. Of course, the stunning landscapes came with a Banksy twist: life jackets washed up on the shore, intended to highlight the growing European migrant crisis.

Banksy's ability to consistently break and challenge his own records continued to amaze the art market when, in October 2020, Banksy's reinterpretation of Monet's famous waterlilies, entitled 'Show Me The Monet' sold at auction for £7.5 million. This made it the second most expensive of his works to sell at auction. The piece was part of a series of remixed masterpieces and commented on the threat that society's wasteful consumerism poses to the natural world.

In response to the global Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, Banksy hung a brand-new black and white artwork, depicting a young boy playing with a 'superhero' NHS nurse doll, in the foyer of Southampton General Hospital. He released a statement thanking the NHS for their work and hoping that the painting brightened up the hospital. The piece was later titled 'Game Changer.' On the one-year anniversary of the UK entering into lockdown, 'Game Changer' sold at auction for £16.8 million, with all proceeds donated to the NHS. This price far exceeded all expectations and firmly secured this piece as the most expensive Banksy ever sold.

Banksy's artistic endeavours continue to take him around the world. Artworks have cropped up in Australia, France, Italy, the United States, Canada, Jamaica, and Israel, and are instantly protected and revered.

Banksy links

Banksy pictures

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Banksy Biography & Artwork | Artists | Street Art Bio

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Arguably the most controversial street artist in the world, Banksy has developed an entire art subculture devoted to his works.

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Frida Kahlo: The woman behind the legend - Iseult Gillespie

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Considered one of Mexico's greatest artists, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family's home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer. He immigrated to Mexico where he met and married her mother Matilde. Her mother is half Amerindian and half Spanish. Frida Kahlo has two older sisters and one younger sister.

Frida Kahlo has poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at the age of 6 and had to be bedridden for nine months. This disease caused her right leg and foot to grow much thinner than her left one. She limped after she recovered from polio. She has been wearing long skirts to cover that for the rest of her life. Her father encouraged her to do lots of sports to help her recover. She played soccer, went swimming, and even did wrestle, which is very unusual at that time for a girl. She has kept a very close relationship with her father for her whole life.

Frida Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the year of 1922. There are only thirty-five female students enrolled in that school and she soon became famous for her outspokenness and bravery. At this school she first met the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera for the first time. Rivera at that time was working on a mural called The Creation on the school campus. Frida often watched it and she told a friend she will marry him someday.

In the same year, Kahlo joined a gang of students who shared similar political and intellectual views. She fell in love with the leader Alejandro Gomez Arias. On a September afternoon when she traveled with Gomez Arias on a bus the tragic accident happened. The bus collided with a streetcar and Frida Kahlo was seriously injured. A steel handrail impaled her through the hip. Her spine and pelvis are fractured and this accident left her in a great deal of pain, both physically and physiologically.

She was injured so badly and had to stay in the Red Cross Hospital in Mexico City for several weeks. After that, she returned home for further recovery. She had to wear full-body cast for three months. To kill the time and alleviate the pain, she started painting and finished her first self-portrait the following year. Frida Kahlo once said, "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best". Her parents encouraged her to paint and made a special easel made for her so she could paint in bed. They also gave her brushes and boxes of paints.

Frida Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928. She asked him to evaluate her work and he encouraged her. The two soon started the romantic relationship. Despite her mother's objection, Frida and Diego Rivera got married in the next year. During their earlier years as a married couple, Frida had to move a lot based on Diego's work. In 1930, they lived in San Francisco, California. Then they moved to New York City for Rivera's artwork show at Museum of Modern Art. They later moved to Detroit while Diego Rivera worked for Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 1932, Kahlo added more realistic and surrealistic components in her painting style. In the painting titled Henry Ford Hospital(1932), Frida Kahlo lied on a hospital bed naked and was surrounded with a few things floating around, which includes a fetus, a flower, a pelvis, a snail, all connected by veins. This painting was an expression of her feelings about her second miscarriage. It is as personal as her other self-portraits.

In 1933, Kahlo was living in New York City with her husband Diego Rivera. Rivera was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to create a mural named as Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center. Rivera tried to include Vladimir Lenin in the painting, who is a communist leader. Rockefeller stopped his work and that part was painted over. The couple had to move back to Mexico after this incident. They returned and live in San Angel, Mexico.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's marriage is not a usual one. They had been keeping separate homes and studios for all those years. Diego had so many affairs and one of that was with Kahlo's sister Cristina. Frida Kahlo was so sad and she cut off her long hair to show her desperation to the betrayal. She has longed for children but she cannot bear one due to the bus accident. She was heartbroken when she experienced a second miscarriage in 1934. Kahlo and Rivera have been separated a few times but they always went back together. In 1937 they helped Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia. Leon Trotsky is an exiled communist and rival of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Kahlo and Rivera welcomed the couple together and let them stay at her Blue House. Kahlo also had a brief affair with Leon Trotsky when the couple stayed at her house.

In 1938, Frida Kahlo became a friend of Andre Breton, who is one of the primary figures of the Surrealism movement. Frida said she never considered herself as a Surrealist "until André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one." She also wrote, "Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself". "Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself."

In the same year, she had an exhibition at New York City gallery. She sold some of her paintings and got two commissions. One of that is from Clare Boothe Luce to paint her friend Dorothy Hale who committed suicide. She painted The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), which tells the story of Dorothy's tragic leap. The patron Luce was horrified and almost destroyed this painting.

The next year, 1939, Kahlo was invited by Andre Breton and went to Paris. Her works are exhibited there and she is befriended with artists such as Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. She and Rivera got divorced that year and she painted one of her most famous paintings, The Two Fridas(1939).

But soon Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera remarried in 1940. The second marriage is about the same as the first one. They still keep separate lives and houses. Both of them had infidelities with other people during the marriage. Kahlo received a commission from the Mexican government for five portraits of important Mexican women in 1941, but she was unable to finish the project. She lost her beloved father that year and continued to suffer from chronic health problems. Despite her personal challenges, her work continued to grow in popularity and was included in numerous group shows around this time.

In the year of 1944, Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous portraits, The Broken Column. In this painting, she depicted herself naked and split down the middle. Her spine is shattered like a column. She wears a surgical brace and there are nails all through her body, which is the indication of the consistent pain she went through. In this painting, Frida expressed her physical challenges through her art. During that time, she had a few surgeries and had to wear special corsets to protect her back spine. She seeks lots of medical treatment for her chronic pain but nothing really worked.

Her health condition has been worsening in 1950. That year she was diagnosed with gangrene in her right foot. She became bedridden for the next nine month and had to stay in hospital and had several surgeries. But with great persistence, Frida Kahlo continued to work and paint. In the year of 1953, she had a solo exhibition in Mexican. Although she had limited mobility at that time, she showed up on the exhibition's opening ceremony. She arrived by ambulance, and welcomed the attendees, celebrated the ceremony in a bed the gallery set up for her. A few months later, she had to accept another surgery. Part of her right leg got amputated to stop the gangrene.

With the poor physical condition, she is also deeply depressed. She even had an inclination for suicide. Frida Kahlo has been out and in hospital during that year. But despite her health issues, she has been active with the political movement. She showed up at the demonstration against US-backed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala on July 2. This is her last public appearance. About one week after her 47th birthday, Frida Kahlo passed away at her beloved Bule House. She was publicly reported to die of a pulmonary embolism, but there is speculation which was saying she died of a possible suicide.

Frida Kahlo's fame has been growing after her death. Her Blue House was opened as a museum in the year of 1958. In the 1970s the interest in her work and life is renewed due to the feminist movement since she was viewed as an icon of female creativity. In 1983, Hayden Herrera published his book on her, A Biography of Frida Kahlo, which drew more attention from the public to this great artist. In the year of 2002, a movie named Frida was released, staring alma Hayek as Frida Kahlo and Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. This movie was nominated for six Academy Awards and won for Best Makeup and Original Score.

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Considered one of Mexico's greatest artists, Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family's home where was later referred to as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Her father is a German descendant and photographer.

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Frida Kahlo, who painted mostly small, intensely personal works for herself, family and friends, would likely have been amazed and amused to see what a vast audience her paintings now reach. Today, nearly 50 years after her death, the Mexican artist's iconic images adorn calendars, greeting cards, posters, pins, even paper dolls. Several years ago the French couturier Jean Paul Gaultier created a collection inspired by Kahlo, and last year a self-portrait she painted in 1933 appeared on a 34-cent U.S. postage stamp. This month, the movie Frida, starring Salma Hayek as the artist and Alfred Molina as her husband, renowned muralist Diego Rivera, opens nationwide. Directed by Julie Taymor, the creative wizard behind Broadway's long-running hit The Lion King, the film is based on Hayden Herrera's 1983 biography, Frida. Artfully composed, Taymor's graphic portrayal remains, for the most part, faithful to the facts of the painter's life. Although some changes were made because of budget constraints, the movie "is true in spirit," says Herrera, who was first drawn to Kahlo because of "that thing in her work that commands you-that urgency, that need to communicate."

Focusing on Kahlo's creativity and tumultuous love affair with Rivera, the film looks beyond the icon to the human being. "I was completely compelled by her story," says Taymor. "I knew it superficially; and I admired her paintings but didn't know them well. When she painted, it was for herself. She transcended her pain. Her paintings are her diary. When you're doing a movie, you want a story like that." In the film, the Mexican born and raised Hayek, 36, who was one of the film's producers, strikes poses from the paintings, which then metamorphose into action-filled scenes. "Once I had the concept of having the paintings come alive," says Taymor, "I wanted to do it."

Kahlo, who died July 13, 1954, at the age of 47, reportedly of a pulmonary embolism (though some suspected suicide), has long been recognized as an important artist. In 2001-2002, a major traveling exhibition showcased her work alongside that of Georgia O'Keeffe and Canada's Emily Carr. Earlier this year several of her paintings were included in a landmark Surrealism show in London and New York. Currently, works by both Kahlo and Rivera are on view through January 5, 2003, at the SeattleArt Museum. As Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and one of the organizers of a 1993 exhibition of Kahlo's work, points out, "Kahlo made personal women's experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries. Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers-men and women-be moved by them."

Kahlo produced only about 200 paintings-primarily still lifes and portraits of herself, family and friends. She also kept an illustrated journal and did dozens of drawings. With techniques learned from both her husband and her father, a professional architectural photographer, she created haunting, sensual and stunningly original paintings that fused elements of surrealism, fantasy and folklore into powerful narratives. In contrast to the 20th-century trend toward abstract art, her work was uncompromisingly figurative. Although she received occasional commissions for portraits, she sold relatively few paintings during her lifetime. Today her works fetch astronomical prices at auction. In 2000, a 1929 self-portrait sold for more than $5 million.

Biographies of the artist, which have been translated into many languages, read like the fantastical novels of Gabriel García Márquez as they trace the story of two painters who could not live with or without each other. (Taymor says she views her film version of Kahlo's life as a "great, great love story.") Married twice, divorced once and separated countless times, Kahlo and Rivera had numerous affairs, hobnobbed with Communists, capitalists and literati and managed to create some of the most compelling visual images of the 20th century. Filled with such luminaries as writer André Breton, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, playwright Clare Boothe Luce and exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Kahlo's life played out on a phantasmagorical canvas.

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón July 6, 1907, and lived in a house (the Casa Azul, or Blue House, now the Museo Frida Kahlo) built by her father in Coyoacán, then a quiet suburb of Mexico City. The third of her parents' four daughters, Frida was her father's favorite-the most intelligent, he thought, and the most like himself. She was a dutiful child but had a fiery temperament. (Shortly before Kahlo and Rivera were wed in 1929, Kahlo's father warned his future son-in-law, who at age 42 had already had two wives and many mistresses, that Frida, then 21, was "a devil." Rivera replied: "I know it.")

A German Jew with deep-set eyes and a bushy mustache, Guillermo Kahlo had immigrated to Mexico in 1891 at the age of 19. After his first wife died in childbirth, he married Matilde Calderón, a Catholic whose ancestry included Indians as well as a Spanish general. Frida portrayed her hybrid ethnicity in a 1936 painting, My Grandparents, My Parents, and I (opposite).

Kahlo adored her father. On a portrait she painted of him in 1951, she inscribed the words, "character generous, intelligent and fine." Her feelings about her mother were more conflicted. On the one hand, the artist considered her "very nice, active, intelligent." But she also saw her as fanatically religious, calculating and sometimes even cruel. "She did not know how to read or write," recalled the artist. "She only knew how to count money."

A chubby child with a winning smile and sparkling eyes, Kahlo was stricken with polio at the age of 6. After her recovery, her right leg remained thinner than her left and her right foot was stunted. Despite her disabilities or, perhaps, to compensate for them, Kahlo became a tomboy. She played soccer, boxed, wrestled and swam competitively. "My toys were those of a boy: skates, bicycles," the artist later recalled. (As an adult, she collected dolls.)

Her father taught her photography, including how to retouch and color prints, and one of his friends gave her drawing lessons. In 1922, the 15-year-old Kahlo entered the elite, predominantly male NationalPreparatory School, which was located near the Cathedral in the heart of Mexico City.

As it happened, Rivera was working in the school's auditorium on his first mural. In his autobiography- My Art, My Life -the artist recalled that he was painting one night high on a scaffold when "all of a sudden the door flew open, and a girl who seemed to be no more than ten or twelve was propelled inside. . . . She had," he continued, "unusual dignity and self-assurance, and there was a strange fire in her eyes." Kahlo, who was actually 16, apparently played pranks on the artist. She stole his lunch and soaped the steps by the stage where he was working.

Kahlo planned to become a doctor and took courses in biology, zoology and anatomy. Her knowledge of these disciplines would later add realistic touches to her portraits. She also had a passion for philosophy, which she liked to flaunt. According to biographer Herrera, she would cry out to her boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, "lend me your Spengler. I don't have anything to read on the bus." Her bawdy sense of humor and passion for fun were well known among her circle of friends, many of whom would become leaders of the Mexican left.

Then, on September 17, 1925, the bus on which she and her boyfriend were riding home from school was rammed by a trolley car. A metal handrail broke off and pierced her pelvis. Several people died at the site, and doctors at the hospital where the 18-year-old Kahlo was taken did not think she would survive. Her spine was fractured in three places, her pelvis was crushed and her right leg and foot were severely broken. The first of many operations she would endure over the years brought only temporary relief from pain. "In this hospital," Kahlo told Gómez Arias, "death dances around my bed at night." She spent a month in the hospital and was later fitted with a plaster corset, variations of which she would be compelled to wear throughout her life.

Confined to bed for three months, she was unable to return to school. "Without giving it any particular thought," she recalled, "I started painting." Kahlo's mother ordered a portable easel and attached a mirror to the underside of her bed's canopy so that the nascent artist could be her own model.

Though she knew the works of the old masters only from reproductions, Kahlo had an uncanny ability to incorporate elements of their styles in her work. In a painting she gave to Gómez Arias, for instance, she portrayed herself with a swan neck and tapered fingers, referring to it as "Your Botticeli."

During her months in bed, she pondered her changed circumstances. To Gómez Arias, she wrote, "Life will reveal [its secrets] to you soon. I already know it all. . . . I was a child who went about in a world of colors. . . . My friends, my companions became women slowly, I became old in instants."

As she grew stronger, Kahlo began to participate in the politics of the day, which focused on achieving autonomy for the government-run university and a more democratic national government. She joined the Communist party in part because of her friendship with the young Italian photographer Tina Modotti, who had come to Mexico in 1923 with her then companion, photographer Edward Weston. It was most likely at a soiree given by Modotti in late 1928 that Kahlo re-met Rivera.

They were an unlikely pair. The most celebrated artist in Mexico and a dedicated Communist, the charismatic Rivera was more than six feet tall and tipped the scales at 300 pounds. Kahlo, 21 years his junior, weighed 98 pounds and was 5 feet 3 inches tall. He was ungainly and a bit misshapen; she was heart-stoppingly alluring. According to Herrera, Kahlo "started with dramatic material: nearly beautiful, she had slight flaws that increased her magnetism." Rivera described her "fine nervous body, topped by a delicate face," and compared her thick eyebrows, which met above her nose, to "the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes."

Rivera courted Kahlo under the watchful eyes of her parents. Sundays he visited the Casa Azul, ostensibly to critique her paintings. "It was obvious to me," he later wrote, "that this girl was an authentic artist." Their friends had reservations about the relationship. One Kahlo pal called Rivera "a pot-bellied, filthy old man." But Lupe Marín, Rivera's second wife, marveled at how Kahlo, "this so-called youngster," drank tequila "like a real mariachi."

The couple married on August 21, 1929. Kahlo later said her parents described the union as a "marriage between an elephant and a dove." Kahlo's 1931 Colonial-style portrait, based on a wedding photograph, captures the contrast. The newlyweds spent almost a year in Cuernavaca while Rivera executed murals commissioned by the American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow. Kahlo was a devoted wife, bringing Rivera lunch every day, bathing him, cooking for him. Years later Kahlo would paint a naked Rivera resting on her lap as if he were a baby.

With the help of Albert Bender, an American art collector, Rivera obtained a visa to the United States, which previously had been denied him. Since Kahlo had resigned from the Communist party when Rivera, under siege from the Stalinists, was expelled, she was able to accompany him. Like other left-wing Mexican intellectuals, she was now dressing in flamboyant native Mexican costume-embroidered tops and colorful, floor-length skirts, a style associated with the matriarchal society of the region of Tehuantepec. Rivera's new wife was "a little doll alongside Diego," Edward Weston wrote in his journal in 1930. "People stop in their tracks to look in wonder."

The Riveras arrived in the United States in November 1930, settling in San Francisco while Rivera worked on murals for the San Francisco Stock Exchange and the California School of Fine Arts, and Kahlo painted portraits of friends. After a brief stay in New York City for a show of Rivera's work at the Museum of Modern Art, the couple moved on to Detroit, where Rivera filled the Institute of Arts' garden court with compelling industrial scenes, and then back to New York City, where he worked on a mural for Rockefeller Center. They stayed in the United States for three years. Diego felt he was living in the future; Frida grew homesick. "I find that Americans completely lack sensibility and good taste," she observed. "They are boring and they all have faces like unbaked rolls."

In Manhattan, however, Kahlo was exhilarated by the opportunity to see the works of the old masters firsthand. She also enjoyed going to the movies, especially those starring the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy. And at openings and dinners, she and Rivera met the rich and the renowned.

But for Kahlo, despair and pain were never far away. Before leaving Mexico, she had suffered the first in a series of miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. Due to her trolley-car injuries, she seemed unable to bring a child to term, and every time she lost a baby, she was thrown into a deep depression. Moreover, her polio-afflicted and badly injured right leg and foot often troubled her. While in Michigan, a miscarriage cut another pregnancy short. Then her mother died. Up to that time she had persevered. "I am more or less happy," she had written to her doctor, "because I have Diego and my mother and my father whom I love so much. I think that is enough. . . . " Now her world was starting to fall apart.

Kahlo had arrived in America an amateur artist. She had never attended art school, had no studio and had not yet focused on any particular subject matter. "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best," she would say years later. Her biographers report that despite her injuries she regularly visited the scaffolding on which Rivera worked in order to bring him lunch and, they speculate, to ward off alluring models. As she watched him paint, she learned the fundamentals of her craft. His imagery recurs in her pictures along with his palette-the sunbaked colors of pre- Columbian art. And from him-though his large-scale wall murals depict historical themes, and her small-scale works relate her autobiography-she learned how to tell a story in paint.

Works from her American period reveal her growing narrative skill. In Self-Portrait on the Borderline betweenMexico and the United States, Kahlo's homesickness finds expression in an image of herself standing between a pre-Columbian ruin and native flowers on one side and Ford Motor Company smokestacks and looming skyscrapers on the other. In HenryFordHospital, done soon after her miscarriage in Detroit, Kahlo's signature style starts to emerge. Her desolation and pain are graphically conveyed in this powerful depiction of herself, nude and weeping, on a bloodstained bed. As she would do time and again, she exorcises a devastating experience through the act of painting.

When they returned to Mexico toward the end of 1933, both Kahlo and Rivera were depressed. His RockefellerCenter mural had created a controversy when the owners of the project objected to the heroic portrait of Lenin he had included in it. When Rivera refused to paint out the portrait, the owners had the mural destroyed. (Rivera later re-created a copy for the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.) To a friend Kahlo wrote, Diego "thinks that everything that is happening to him is my fault, because I made him come [back] to Mexico. . . . " Kahlo herself became physically ill, as she was prone to do in times of stress. Whenever Rivera, a notorious philanderer, became involved with other women, Kahlo succumbed to chronic pain, illness or depression. When he returned home from his wanderings, she would usually recover.

Seeking a fresh start, the Riveras moved into a new home in the upscale San Angel district of Mexico City. The house, now the Diego Rivera Studio museum, featured his-and-her, brightly colored (his was pink, hers, blue) Le Corbusier-like buildings connected by a narrow bridge. Though the plans included a studio for Kahlo, she did little painting, as she was hospitalized three times in 1934. When Rivera began an affair with her younger sister, Cristina, Kahlo moved into an apartment. A few months later, however, after a brief dalliance with the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Kahlo reconciled with Rivera and returned to San Angel.

In late 1936, Rivera, whose leftist sympathies were more pronounced than ever, interceded with Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to have the exiled Leon Trotsky admitted to Mexico. In January 1937, the Russian revolutionary took up a two-year residency with his wife and bodyguards at the Casa Azul, Kahlo's childhood home, available because Kahlo's father had moved in with one of her sisters. In a matter of months, Trotsky and Kahlo became lovers. "El viejo" ("the old man"), as she called him, would slip her notes in books. She painted a mesmerizing fulllength portrait of herself (far right), in bourgeois finery, as a gift for the Russian exile. But this liaison, like most of her others, was short lived.

The French Surrealist André Breton and his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, also spent time with the Riveras in San Angel. (Breton would later offer to hold an exhibition of Kahlo's work in Paris.) Arriving in Mexico in the spring of 1938, they stayed for several months and joined the Riveras and the Trotskys on sight-seeing jaunts. The three couples even considered publishing a book of their conversations. This time, it was Frida and Jacqueline who bonded.

Although Kahlo would claim her art expressed her solitude, she was unusually productive during the time spent with the Trotskys and the Bretons. Her imagery became more varied and her technical skills improved. In the summer of 1938, the actor and art collector Edward G. Robinson visited the Riveras in San Angel and paid $200 each for four of Kahlo's pictures, among the first she sold. Of Robinson's purchase she later wrote, "For me it was such a surprise that I marveled and said: 'This way I am going to be able to be free, I'll be able to travel and do what I want without asking Diego for money.'"

Shortly after, Kahlo went to New York City for her first one-person show, held at the Julien Levy Gallery, one of the first venues in America to promote Surrealist art. In a brochure for the exhibition, Breton praised Kahlo's "mixture of candour and insolence." On the guest list for the opening were artist Georgia O'Keeffe, to whom Kahlo later wrote a fan letter, art historian Meyer Schapiro and Vanity Fair editor Clare Boothe Luce, who commissioned Kahlo to paint a portrait of a friend who had committed suicide. Upset by the graphic nature of Kahlo's completed painting, however, Luce wanted to destroy it but in the end was persuaded not to. The show was a critical success. Time magazine noted that "the flutter of the week in Manhattan was caused by the first exhibition of paintings by famed muralist Diego Rivera's . . . wife, Frida Kahlo. . . . Frida's pictures, mostly painted in oil on copper, had the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds and yellows of Mexican tradition, the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child." A little later, Kahlo's hand, bedecked with rings, appeared on the cover of Vogue.

Heady with success, Kahlo sailed to France, only to discover that Breton had done nothing about the promised show. A disappointed Kahlo wrote to her latest lover, portrait photographer Nickolas Muray: "It was worthwhile to come here only to see why Europe is rottening, why all this people-good for nothing-are the cause of all the Hitlers and Mussolinis." Marcel Duchamp- "The only one," as Kahlo put it, "who has his feet on the earth, among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the Surrealists"-saved the day. He got Kahlo her show. The Louvre purchased a self-portrait, its first work by a 20th-century Mexican artist. At the exhibition, according to Rivera, artist Wassily Kandinsky kissed Kahlo's cheeks "while tears of sheer emotion ran down his face." Also an admirer, Pablo Picasso gave Kahlo a pair of earrings shaped like hands, which she donned for a later self-portrait. "Neither Derain, nor I, nor you," Picasso wrote to Rivera, "are capable of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo."

Returning to Mexico after six months abroad, Kahlo found Rivera entangled with yet another woman and moved out of their San Angel house and into the Casa Azul. By the end of 1939 the couple had agreed to divorce.

Intent on achieving financial independence, Kahlo painted more intensely than ever before. "To paint is the most terrific thing that there is, but to do it well is very difficult," she would tell the group of students-known as Los Fridos-to whom she gave instruction in the mid-1940s. "It is necessary . . . to learn the skill very well, to have very strict self-discipline and above all to have love, to feel a great love for painting." It was during this period that Kahlo created some of her most enduring and distinctive work. In self-portraits, she pictured herself in native Mexican dress with her hair atop her head in traditional braids. Surrounded by pet monkeys, cats and parrots amid exotic vegetation reminiscent of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, she often wore the large pre-Columbian necklaces given to her by Rivera.

In one of only two large canvases ever painted by Kahlo, The Two Fridas, a double self-portrait done at the time of her divorce, one Frida wears a European outfit torn open to reveal a "broken" heart; the other is clad in native Mexican costume. Set against a stormy sky, the "twin sisters," joined together by a single artery running from one heart to the other, hold hands. Kahlo later wrote that the painting was inspired by her memory of an imaginary childhood friend, but the fact that Rivera himself had been born a twin may also have been a factor in its composition. In another work from this period, Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), Kahlo, in a man's suit, holds a pair of scissors she has used to sever the locks that surround the chair on which she sits. More than once when she discovered Rivera with other women, she had cut off the long hair that he adored.

Despite the divorce, Kahlo and Rivera remained connected. When Kahlo's health deteriorated, Rivera sought medical advice from a mutual friend, San Francisco doctor Leo Eloesser, who felt her problem was "a crisis of nerves." Eloesser suggested she resolve her relationship with Rivera. "Diego loves you very much," he wrote, "and you love him. It is also the case, and you know it better than I, that besides you, he has two great loves-1) Painting 2) Women in general. He has never been, nor ever will be, monogamous." Kahlo apparently recognized the truth of this observation and resigned herself to the situation. In December 1940, the couple remarried in San Francisco.

The reconciliation, however, saw no diminution in tumult. Kahlo continued to fight with her philandering husband and sought out affairs of her own with various men and women, including several of his lovers. Still, Kahlo never tired of setting a beautiful table, cooking elaborate meals (her stepdaughter Guadalupe Rivera filled a cookbook with Kahlo's recipes) and arranging flowers in her home from her beloved garden. And there were always festive occasions to celebrate. At these meals, recalled Guadalupe, "Frida's laughter was loud enough to rise above the din of yelling and revolutionary songs."

During the last decade of her life, Kahlo endured painful operations on her back, her foot and her leg. (In 1953, her right leg had to be amputated below the knee.) She drank heavily-sometimes downing two bottles of cognac a day-and she became addicted to painkillers. As drugs took control of her hands, the surface of her paintings became rough, her brushwork agitated.

In the spring of 1953, Kahlo finally had a one-person show in Mexico City. Her work had previously been seen there only in group shows. Organized by her friend, photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo, the exhibition was held at Alvarez Bravo's Gallery of Contemporary Art. Though still bedridden following the surgery on her leg, Kahlo did not want to miss the opening night. Arriving by ambulance, she was carried to a canopied bed, which had been transported from her home. The headboard was decorated with pictures of family and friends; papier-mâché skeletons hung from the canopy. Surrounded by admirers, the elaborately costumed Kahlo held court and joined in singing her favorite Mexican ballads.

Kahlo remained a dedicated leftist. Even as her strength ebbed, she painted portraits of Marx and of Stalin and attended demonstrations. Eight days before she died, Kahlo, in a wheelchair and accompanied by Rivera, joined a crowd of 10,000 in Mexico City protesting the overthrow, by the CIA, of the Guatemalan president.

Although much of Kahlo's life was dominated by her debilitated physical state and emotional turmoil, Taymor's film focuses on the artist's inventiveness, delight in beautiful things and playful but caustic sense of humor. Kahlo, too, preferred to emphasize her love of life and a good time. Just days before her death, she incorporated the words Viva La Vida (Long Live Life) into a still life of watermelons. Though some have wondered whether the artist may have intentionally taken her own life, others dismiss the notion. Certainly, she enjoyed life fully and passionately. "It is not worthwhile," she once said, "to leave this world without having had a little fun in life."

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The Mexican artist's myriad faces, stranger-than-fiction biography and powerful paintings come to vivid life in a new film

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Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912. His father, LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the government. Jackson Pollock grew up in Arizona and Chico, California. During his early life, Pollock experienced Native American culture while on surveying trips with his father. Although he never admitted an intentional imitation or following of Native American art, Jackson Pollock did concede that any similarities were probably a result of his "early memories and enthusiasm."

In 1929, Jackson Pollock studied at the Students' League in New York under regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton. During the early 1930s, he worked in the Regionalist style, and was also influenced by Mexican muralist painter such as Diego Rivera, as well as by certain aspects of Surrealism - a 20th-century literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the workings of the subconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of the subject matter.

In November 1939, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted an important Picasso exhibition entitled: Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, which contained 344 works of Pablo Picasso and his famous anti-war mural, Guernica. The exhibit led Pollock to recognize the expressive power of European modernism, which he had previously rejected in favor of American art. He began to forge a new style of semi-abstract totemic compositions, refined through obsessive reworking.

In the decades following World War II, a new artistic vanguard emerged, particularly in New York, that introduced radical new directions in art. The war and its aftermath were at the underpinnings of the movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, among other Abstract Expressionists, anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, expressed their concerns in abstract art that chronicled the ardor and exigencies of modern life. By the mid-1940s, Jackson Pollock introduced his famous 'drip paintings', which represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century, and forever altered the course of American art. At times the new art forms could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. To produce in Jackson Pollock's 'action painting', most of his canvases were either set on the floor, or laid out against a wall, rather than being fixed to an easel. From there, Jackson Pollock used a style where he would allow the paint to drip from the paint can. Instead of using the traditional paintbrush, he would add depth to his images using knives, trowels, or sticks. This form of painting, had similar ties to the Surreal movement, in that it had a direct relation to the artist's emotions, expression, and mood, and showcased their feeling behind the pieces they designed.

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was."

- Jackson Pollock

In addition to the 'drip and splash' style, the All-over method of painting, is also one which is tied to Jackson Pollock, and many of the artworks he created. This art form avoids any clear and distinct points of emphasis, or any identifiable parts within the canvas being used to create the piece. The designs and images which were created using this style of painting, really had no relation to the size of the canvas that was worked on; the lack of dimensions, and disregard for size of the drawings, were some unique features which this form of art captured. Many of the pieces which Jackson Pollock created following this style, required him to trim or crop the canvas, in order for the image to fit in, and to work with the overall features of the art.

Pollock's radical methods and growing reputation quickly caught the attention of the mass media. In August 1949, Life magazine ran a feature story posing the question: "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The text was alternately mocking and respectful. In 1951, at the height of the artist's career, Vogue magazine published fashion photographs by Cecil Beaton of models posing in front of Pollock's drip paintings. Although this commercial recognition signaled public acceptance - and was symptomatic of mass culture's inevitable expropriation of the avant-garde - Pollock continuously questioned the direction and reception of his art. At the peak of his fame, Pollock abruptly abandoned the drip style. Pollock's work after 1951 was darker in color, including a collection painted in black on unprimed canvases. These paintings have been referred to as his 'Black pourings' and when he exhibited them at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, none of them sold. But later Pollock moved to a more commercial gallery by returning to using color and figurative elements. In 1960s, Jackson Pollock was viewed as one of the most important figures in the art world, and one of the innovators of the avant-garde styles that were beginning to emerge. Like many other famous figures, the issues which Jackson Pollock suffered from in his personal life, such as his strife with alcoholism, added to his "superstar" status. And, his premature death, which took place when he was killed in a car crash, also added to the legendary status which he is still known from in the art world today.

To this day Jackson Pollock is known as a leader in the most important 20th century American art movements. The risks and the creative approaches he took, led future artists to create with passion, as opposed to trying to follow set boundaries or guidelines. In addition, Pollock's radical paintings and dramatic persona helped draw attention to the broader group of Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is."

- Jackson Pollock

Just like Vincent van Gogh on Impressionism, Jackson Pollock's impact on American Abstract Expressionist movement is tremendous. Jackson Pollock made it possible for American painting to compete with European modernism by applying modernism's logic to new problem. He created a new scale, a new definition of surface and touch, a new syntax of relationships among space, pigment, edge, and drawing, displacing hierarchies with an unprecedented and powerful and fabulously intricate self-generating structure. Although actively engaged throughout his life in a serious dialogue with the history of world art which ranged from Paleolithic and Indian art to Renaissance art masters Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci; from Mexican muralists to the Surrealists Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and Max Ernst - Pollock's aspirations always remained courageously and even chauvinistically of this continent. Pollock's defiant refusal to stay within traditional bounds, violence, exasperation and stridency, all were paradigmatically New World. At a time - and in a guise that absolutely nobody expected - these were the unlikely characteristics that finally came together to produce an American Prometheus.

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Jackson Pollock: 100 Famous Paintings Analysis and Biography

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Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter, and the leading force behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

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Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an influential American painter who was instrumental in popularizing Expressionism in art. According to Britannica, Expressionism is a painting style whereby artists paint objects or events which induce certain emotions in people. In the art form, artists accomplish that through exaggeration, distortion, and primitivism. His contemporaries described Jackson as gentle while sober and violent while drunk. As a result, he was able to depict such extreme emotions in his paintings. He always believed that art must be derived from the unconscious; hence he saw himself as the essential subject of his paintings. Due to his unique painting style, he received widespread publicity and was able to get recognized in his lifetime. Now that we know about Jackson's paintings, it is time we mention his paintings. You will be shocked at their cost and wonder why they are costly. Truthfully, they are unique and original, and hence cannot easily be replicated. If you are curious about which of his paintings are expensive, here are five of them below.

5. Red Composition, 1946 ($18 million)

Jackson debuted his first drip painting with this painting. He made his painting as a sign that he was ready to depart from his previous painting techniques. From this year onwards, he abandoned paintbrushes completely. He sought to liberate himself from Surrealism and venture into Expressionism. Surrealism was a way of painting to elicit shock and curiosity. Surrealist paintings used distorted and bizarre imagery that was inspired by dreams and not by reality. By embracing Expressionism, he hoped to be as good as Picasso. Many people owned this painting. First, it was owned by his mentor and friend, Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy then gave it to James Ernst, the son of a painter named Max Ernst, in 1947. Later, the painting was acquired by Marshall Reisman, a New York businessman, in the 1950s. It remained in their collection for at least 40 years before donating it to the Everson Museum of Art in 1991, where it remains to this day.

4. Mural, 1943 ($140 million)

Based on its simplicity, most people have theorized that he painted this picture in one day. However, according to Guggenheim Bilbao, there was a restoration that revealed that it may have taken him several weeks to complete it. That is because the painting had many layers and at least 20 colors. Another reason it took so long is that the painting seems calculated. For instance, the author's gestures, drips, and brushstrokes are visible. Jackson claimed the mural represented a stampede of every animal in the American West. Currently, this painting is at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City.

3. Number 5, 1948 ($140 million)

The painting resembles a multi-colored bird nest. Some of the colors used in the painting include white, brown, black, grey, red and yellow. He made this piece during his drip period. According to Asking Lot, the drip period is a painting technique in which paint is dripped or poured onto a canvas. When he made this painting, he used new techniques to express emotions with colors and lines. Scholars tend to think that this painting displays excellent mathematical precision. It is evident from the angles he placed the colors. For instance, the colors interweave and cover the entire surface area. Additionally, the colors explode in multiple directions at once. Today, it is privately owned in New York.

2. Convergence, 1952 ($300 million)

There is a splatter of several colors like yellow, black, blue, and orange in this painting. When he made his painting, he abandoned his signature style of colorful abstract drip paintings in his work. For instance, he began making black the dominant color in his paintings; hence his paintings were called the "black period." When he made his painting, he anticipated that few people would like or understand this painting. His prediction turned out correct when many people were disinterested in it when it was first exhibited. Viewers termed the painting too subtle. However, the painting was appreciated posthumously. Critics began to appreciate the visuals of the painting without focusing too much on the reason behind the painting. This painting is housed at Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

1. Blue Poles, 1952 ($350 million)

The painting is one of the largest since it was painted on a canvas, 2 meters high and 5 meters wide. You can view it in the National Gallery of Australia. This painting is like solving a crossword puzzle, so you have to interpret what the lines mean. Jackson was an Abstract Expressionist, hence explains why he uses vague imagery in this painting. First, the painting contains dripped green, blue, silver, red, and silver lines. Next, there are eight blue pole-like lines down the canvas at different angles to each other. Lastly, there is a footprint on the top right. The presence of a footprint in the painting means he made it on the floor. There is an interesting backstory to this painting. Jackson made this painting when he was severely depressed. To distract himself from suicidal thoughts, he made this painting. While making this painting, his friend, Tony Smith, visited him. Together, they became drunk while Jackson was still painting this piece. They began splashing paint and broken glass on the canvas. The two men walked on their bare feet, and the glass cut them. That would explain the presence of the footprint on the canvas.

Conclusion

When we walk into a museum, we usually encounter paintings we do not understand. Furthermore, we wonder why they are highly-priced. Based on Jackson's story, you finally understand why his paintings are expensive. For instance, his paintings revolutionized the way people viewed paintings. He realized that he could not continue making the same kind of paintings. Even though some people did not understand his paintings at first, they eventually sold well since the viewers needed time to embrace the new painting styles. Also, his paintings are expensive due to his backstory. Consider the case of the Blue Poles painting. At the time, he was at his lowest moments. However, thanks to this painting, we understand this painting better. Very few painters can tell a story in their paintings as Jackson did with this one.

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The Five Most Expensive Jackson Pollock Paintings

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Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an influential American painter who was instrumental in popularizing Expressionism in art. According to Britannica, Expressionism is a painting style whereby artists paint objects or events which induce certain emotions in people. In the art form, artists accomplish that through exaggeration, distortion, and primitivism.

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How Jackson Pollock Changed Painting Forever

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Jackson Pollock - Major Painter In Abstract Expressionist Movement | Mini Bio | BIO

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"And a child to lead them. I want to be free. Out of the mouths of babes the words name. So many children acted on those words, and there was an overflow. All the jails were filled. The park was filled up. The only place not filled up was the fairgrounds' animal cages. Bull Connor didn't know what In do, so he put thousands of school children in the jails and the overflow ended up in the cages." -Joe Minter

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"And a child to lead them. I want to be free. Out of the mouths of babes the words name. So many children acted on those words, and there was an overflow. All the jails were filled. The park was filled up. The only place not filled up was the fairgrounds' animal cages.

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By Ryan Michaels
The Birmingham Times

Joe Minter stands with one boot on a cinder block path, one on grass.

His eyeglasses, the kind that go dark in the sun, sit halfway down his nose and let his tensed eyes peek out. His walking stick, taller than he, holds countless trinkets. Among them are a Casio digital watch, a Spongebob Squarepants keychain, and a belt that has "GIRL ATHLETIC" printed three times along its length.

Most crucially, Minter stands tall in his half-acre yard wearing one of his signature construction hard hats. He has named that yard, on his Woodland Park property, the "African Village in America," which is home to a collection of sculptures and other art that reflect the story of African struggle in America.

While the site itself features numerous found-object creations, visitors soon learn that Minter has a purpose for every item he collects, including his head coverings.

"To protect God's temple. That's what all of it comes from," Minter said, explaining the hard hat's purpose. "The temple is what controls the electronic part of what you are. Your heart beats at a rhythm that everybody's heart beats in, and what the beat is really a drum, and the drum is the main conductor of everything-it comes from the field and the vibrations that come through you when your heart beats."

Minter, 78, is a sculptor and longtime resident of Woodland Park, a neighborhood within Birmingham's North Titusville community. He was recently featured in a New York Times article, "Saving the Artwork of the South: Deep Investment, and a Drone," and his sculptures have been showcased across the United States in places like the Whitney Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Currently, the Birmingham Museum of Art has one piece from Minter currently on display: "'63 Foot Soldiers."

This summer, the University of Alabama used advanced geographic technology to document every square foot of the African Village, a project that will enable viewers to experience the installation in virtual reality. Meanwhile, thousands of visitors from around the world have visited Minter's yard collection and signed a guest book that he keeps memorialize their trips.
"Use What You Got"
The Birmingham Times recently visited Minter at his home of 50 years, a house that his wife, Hilda Jo Minter, "never liked," the artist said. She died in September, after living with kidney failure for many years, and is buried about 20 feet behind the house.

"She was a friend. She was a queen. She was, above all of that, an angel," said Minter, leaning on Hilda's headstone during our visit.

Minter even has a plot for himself next to his wife, to whom he was married for a half-century.

"She worked with me as far as she could go," he said. "She had love and pain at the same time. ... Everybody was drawn to her."

Also near his wife's grave are the burial sites of his son, Alfonzo, who was stabbed to death in 2014 while serving a life sentence at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, and his father, Lawrence Dunbar Minter, who died in 1959.

The graves are on land adjacent to his home and Woodland Park's Shadow Lawn Memorial Gardens, which Minter describes as "one of biggest Black cemeteries in the South, [one that] ought to be set up as a national shrine."

Minter's property houses the "African Village in America," which he started growing in 1989. His yard is a space for a variety of sculptures that often deal with racism and display reverence for African ancestors and spirituality, and he is the collector and architect of the layout for thousands of works of art spread across the property-an effort he embarked on with little money.

"I did the best I could do with that GI Bill money," said Minter, who was drafted into the military and served from 1965 to 1967. "You see all this, I done did all this bricklaying and everything, everything you see."

Over three decades, Minter has steadily built his sculpture garden with items he's found at flea markets, Salvation Army Thrift Stores, or just along the roadways.

"I'm a Chevrolet man," he said of his automobile preference. "I've owned two or three Chevrolet trucks, and I had to keep them trucks going. ... [I'd] pick up whatever I had enough money to get because me and my wife was on a set income. ... We really ain't never made no money, but this is called the theory of 'Use What You Got.'"

Sculptures in the Village are composed of various materials, including iron, wood, and tons of found objects that Minter has usually modified in some way, such as crutches he crafted into spears: "I could get that crutch for two or three dollars for a pair," he said.

During a series of tours conducted over a two-week period for The Birmingham Times, Minter pointed out that each piece on the property has some sort of meaning. Spears, for example, are a recurring theme in the "African Village in America," because they represent "the power and the soul of what you would call that part of what a man which is to protect and to provide," Minter said.

Then there are chains.

"I use chains in my artwork to signal [that this is a country] where Africans came in chains," he said. "I found out it was two blacksmiths in my family, so I seem to be attached to iron. ... I use iron to represent bondage and part of chains that had never been broken. ... We're still using chains on those who haven't done anything to anybody."

Minter began constructing the African Village after time of prayer and reflection.

"I asked God for a vision, so this is a vision of God and not only a vision of God. It's what a man got in his soul, and [I] used that power of that third spirit, which is that power of the Holy Spirit, so this is just what I could put my hands on," he said. "I could have built something as big as [a mountain], but God filtered to me what I could handle."

"Mech and Tech"
Joe Wade Minter Sr. was born in Birmingham on March 28, 1943, the eighth of 10 children to Lawrence Dunbar and Rosie McAlpin Minter. His father served in the U.S. Army's 366th Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit with all Black officers and personnel, during World War I and became a caretaker for Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery after being discharged. Minter attended Birmingham's Washington Elementary School, Center Street Middle School, and Ullman High School.

After graduating from high school, he worked a variety of jobs before beginning a life of sculpting and collecting artwork. He washed dishes at a drive-in restaurant in Birmingham and eventually became a messenger at University Hospital, which later became the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Hospital. In 1965, Minter was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he attended a "mech and tech" school, which prepares servicemembers for mechanical and engineering careers, in Virginia and became a specialist in operating generators.

Following his discharge from the military in 1967, Minter held positions involving construction, disassembling and reassembling trucks, and, perhaps most importantly, building things out of metal-like school furniture, exercise equipment, and truck beds. Unfortunately, he was forced to resign after 11 years because asbestos dust was hurting his eyes and eventually led to him developing glaucoma.

Minter recalled building toys, or rather putting stuff together that could be "used as a toy."

Those building skills came in handy when it came time to erecting the "African Village in America." That talent and something else, Minter said: "The power of the Holy Spirit, so this is just what I could put my hands on."
Christianity
Christianity is a pervasive theme of Minter's work, as well. One piece that serves as a sort of introduction upon walking into the "African Village in America" features the line "In the beginning God" before laying out a simple history of the site.

During the tour of his property, Minter also talked about the "heart-to-heart" nature of his work.

"Heart-to-heart means I can open up to you and the three best things, [the] formula for us to use now-the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, and, lastly, the Golden Rule: 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.'"

There is always a sense of optimism to Minter and his work.

"We are a beautiful race that cannot be ignored," he told William Arnett, the late art collector and founder of the arts nonprofit Souls Grown Deep. "We have gone through tribulation, but from that experience we learn patience and develop the strength of hope. When you take all the fruit off a tree, and there's one piece left, it is the sweetest piece because it has been through the most to survive. If God choose to bring us along last, we will come last. Something has to come last, to be the best."
Historian
Minter is as much a historian as he is an artist, and a tour of his property shows it. Having lived through the Civil Rights struggle in Birmingham during the 1960s, Minter has works that reference the first Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965, during which Alabama state troopers attacked voting rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Though a group of police officers brutalized the protestors upon their crossing the bridge, there was still peace amid the violence, Minter said.

"This was a scene of chaos and a scene of serenity. ... It was a lot of tears and a lot of hope left on the bridge here," he said. "The whole world saw it, and the world said, 'We gon' do something!'"

That first march, which took place on Feb. 16, 1965, is referred to as "Bloody Sunday." The events of that day and two following marches led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.

Minter also has a sculpture and art that pay homage to the four girls killed during the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing on Sept. 15, 1963, including four empty chairs on his property in honor of the girls.

Minter was in the vicinity of church when the bomb exploded. "I was across the street at a café called Jabbo's. They used to sell them big old bologna sandwiches, and you'd usually hang out down there because you would get such a big sandwich. I was there when the bomb went off. ... I saw the undertakers go in there, and they couldn't take it," he said, describing the reactions of first responders to the loss of life caused by the explosion.

A lot of Minter's works also pay homage to African history.

"My African ancestors built America on the sweat of their backs, in their blood, in their life-free slave labor-and the only pay is death," he told Arnett, of the arts nonprofit Souls Grown Deep. "I saw how the races was drifting further and further apart and how Black people ourselves was drifting apart. And I asked God to help me find a way that I could help bring people together as one, for understanding, even for the littlest child. Because America had started to lose the family, and when the family is lost, that is the end of all of us here as a people.

"And it finally came back to me that the only way was through art, art is the universal thing. Make the art and put a message with it that could heal the wounds everywhere. Communicate to the world a message of God-love and peace for all."
Minter's "African Village in America" is located at 931 Nassau Ave. SW, Birmingham, Alabama 35211 facebook.com/joeminterafricanvillage

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Artist Joe Minter's renowned "African Village in America" in SW Birmingham

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By Ryan Michaels The Birmingham Times Joe Minter stands with one boot on a cinder block path, one on grass. His eyeglasses, the kind that go dark in the sun, sit halfway down his nose and let his tensed eyes peek out. His walking stick, taller than he, holds countless trinkets.

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How To: Yard Show Art Making Inspired by Joe Minter

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Dalí on the Fly: Surreal Educational Documentary about Salvador Dalí

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Salvador Dali | Biography, Art, Paintings, Surrealism, & Facts

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Salvador Dali, Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker, influential for his explorations of subconscious imagery. He depicted with realistic detail a dreamworld where commonplace objects are often metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. His most famous of these works is The Persistence of Memory (1931).

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Understanding Surrealism | Art History 101

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The Dali Museum: An Unparalleled Experience

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The Surrealist Dalí evoked his dreams and hallucinations in unforgettable images. While his provocations and flamboyant personality made him an art star.

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The very act of carving out a space to engage in a creative dialogue with the canvas was defined as Action Painting by Harold Rosenberg.

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"I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."

Jackson Pollock

In 1947 Jackson Pollock arrived at a new mode of working that brought him international fame. His method consisted of flinging and dripping thinned enamel paint onto an unstretched canvas laid on the floor of his studio. This direct, physical engagement with his materials welcomed gravity, velocity, and improvisation into the artistic process, and allowed line and color to stand alone, functioning entirely independently of form. His works, which came to be known as "drip paintings," present less a picture than a record of the fluid properties of paint itself. Describing his action-based process, Pollock says, "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. ...I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own."

Though self-reflexive in nature, they readily inspire larger interpretations; the explosive, allover expanses of Number 1A, 1948 (1948) and One: Number 31, 1950 (1950) can be seen as registering a moment in time marked by both the thrill of space exploration and the threat of global atomic destruction. During the Cold War, Pollock's paintings and those of his Abstract Expressionist peers, including Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, were promoted, in exhibitions toured abroad by MoMA's International Council, as emblems of the freedoms fostered under liberal democracy.

Pollock came to New York in 1930, as a young art student from Los Angeles. While taking classes at the Art Students League, he pursued a close mentorship with painter Thomas Hart Benton and immersed himself in Surrealism and the subconscious; the mural painting of Mexican socialists David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco; and the work of Pablo Picasso, including his Girl before a Mirror and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. For several years, he worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Pollock enjoyed recognition beginning in the early 1940s, with the support of critic Clement Greenberg and collector-gallerists Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim. Under Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s directorship, MoMA became the first museum to acquire a painting by Pollock, The She-Wolf (1943), out of the artist's first solo show that year at Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery. In 1956, at the age of 44, the artist died behind the wheel of his car. His wife, painter Lee Krasner, would do much to further his legacy after his death, including donating major works to MoMA's unparalleled Pollock collection.

The profound influence of Pollock's approach-at once emphatically literal and radically open to the world-may be found in the words of his fellow artists. The experimental Gutai group, which formed in Japan in the mid-1950s, cited his work as a crucial encouragement to "impar[t] life to matter" and pursue "pure creativity." In 1958, Happenings impresario Allan Kaprow wrote in Art News in honor of the late artist: "[Pollock] left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life...these, I am sure, will be the alchemies of the 1960s." Nine years later, Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd would write in Arts Magazine, "It's clear that Pollock created the large scale, wholeness and simplicity that have become common to almost all good work."

Annie Ochmanek, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2016

Wikipedia entry

Getty record

Works

86 works online

Exhibitions

Publications

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“Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving” \ Exhibition Tour

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A Mysterious Story of Frida Kahlo That Reveals Her True Character

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HOW TO DRAW FACES FOR BEGINNERS [*EASY TUTORIAL*]

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Learn how to draw SALVADOR DALI MELTING CLOCKS : STEP BY STEP GUIDE! (Age 5 +)

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Banksy | Biography, Art, Auction, Shredded Painting, & Facts

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Banksy, anonymous British graffiti artist known for his antiauthoritarian art, often done in public places. He began using stencils in 2000 and developed a distinctive iconography of recognizable images such as rats and policemen. With wry wit and stealth, Banksy merged graffiti art with installation and performance.

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Frida Kahlo | Biography, Paintings, & Facts

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Frida Kahlo, Mexican painter known for her uncompromising and brilliantly colored self-portraits that confront such themes as identity, the human body, and death. Some of her notable paintings included Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and The Two Fridas (1939). Read more about Kahlo’s life and career.

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Jackson Pollock | Biography, Art, Paintings, Style, Death, & Facts

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Jackson Pollock, American painter who was a leading exponent of Abstract Expressionism, an art movement known for the free-associative gestures in paint sometimes referred to as ‘action painting.’ Pollock first used his characteristic process of pouring or dripping paint onto a flat canvas in the la…

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Learn how to draw portraits - How to draw a face step-by-step - Easy tutorial for kids