Banksy Archive Gets an Update
Not to bury the lede, Stencil Archive's Banksy archive has been updated with one new image added.
Banksy may be the most famous artist of the 20th century, complete with a couch gag on the Simpsons and rip offs of his artwork by anyone who wants to make a buck off the artist's popularity. Some of this ripping off literally happened across the world, and here in San Francisco, one man somehow thought he was saving Banksy by taking a large rat stencil off an Upper Haight wall... and into a storage space somewhere out of the public eye.
Speaking of the public eye, theories abound about the actual identity of Banksy. While I was poking around the location of the Upper Haight rat piece, the manager of the Red Vic Bed and Breakfast swore that Banksy checked in when the piece went up. "We had a guest from England the same time," the manager excitedly said. Just after Banksy wandered through SF that last time, I knew an artist from Europe that knew Banksy's people. She was a bit cagey about details, but did say that Banksy liked to find locals to help set up logistics, scope out sites and walls for art, and most likely pretend that they were the artist. I'd even guess that they'd get arrested for Banksy. My contact said that the local folks worked 24/7, sometimes spending hours at walls to check for cops, security, crowd traffic, etc. It was unclear if they all got to meet Banksy, but my contact had. She said has a nice person who was into collaboration.
I have been asked many questions about Banksy, even in front of audiences and video cameras. The most asked question is "do you know Banksy?", followed up by "do you know who Banksy is?". I do not know Banksy, nor know who he is, but he did directly email me once! My claim to fame came when I was reaching out to artists I was featuring in my 2008 book "Stencil Nation".
I had an email for Banksy (still do!) that he used for an early-2000s email newsletter. Back then, I had just started Stencil Archive and was still learning how the rules of illegal art worked. Someone emailed me with a link to photos of Banksy getting up in Jamaica, saying that we all now knew what the already-infamous unidentified artist looked like - basically a pale bloke from England. I was craving content for Stencil Archive, so I posted the email text and the link to the photos. Soon after, via that official Banksy email address, I got a very polite "cease and desist" email from Banksy, saying it wasn't proper to expose the identity of a vandalizing artist. The email asked to please take down the post, and I did, learning a great lesson that exposing the identity of vandals can get them in big trouble.
