Banksy’s Vanishing Act in the Lower East Side
By Tate Beech and Ira Gorawara
Street artist Tristan Eaton climbed on a lift, turned up the rock and roll music, and started spray painting. A psychedelic strawberry began to appear on the 70-foot-long wall on the corner of Bowery and Houston Streets. The fruit joined images of a woman in an astronaut helmet holding a gun, a lipsticked mouth and the giant words “BETTER THAN TV.”
The Bowery Houston Mural wall serves as an ever-changing canvas for muralists in the Lower East Side. Prior to Eaton’s work in progress, the world-renowned and anonymous street artist Banksy painted a piece depicting a Turkish political prisoner. Three weeks ago, Banksy requested to have his work whitewashed, making room for the next tenant — Eaton.
“Banksy’s old news,” Eaton, 40, asserted from his perch, referring to the disappearance of the work from the Lower East Side.
Banksy has been to New York twice, in 2013 and 2018. During these trips he created 33 pieces throughout the city, two of which were in the Lower East Side. Neither of these has lasted, unlike the dozens of murals by other artists whose works have survived for sometimes years.
Probably the most famous master of the genre, Banksy creates heavily detailed, stenciled pieces with politically charged topics such as police brutality, government surveillance, and child slave labor. Few people know much about him, other than the fact that he began tagging graffiti as a teenager in Bristol, England. He has painted walls from Paris to Bethlehem, Ontario to Salt Lake City.
Around the world, Banksy’s art is often removed — in some cases cut out of concrete walls — for sale to individuals or museums. Stolen Banksy pieces fetch between $20,000 and $1 million at auctions or when sold to private collectors, but Banksy also sells smaller pieces and silk screened prints of his more famous works, such as “Love is in the Air” and “Girl With Balloon.” A piece he created in 2013 on the Lower East Side at 159 Ludlow Street condemned the United States’ role in the Iraq War, depicting men brandishing weapons and powerful horses wearing night vision goggles. This somber grey piece, painted on an abandoned sedan and the back of a truck behind it, later saw parts removed and sold.
“If it’s physically possible to remove his work, someone will do it so they can sell it,” said Jeremy Wilcox, a 38-year-old graffiti tour guide.
Many people on the Lower East Side are appalled by the dismantling.
“The point is that everybody gets to enjoy it, and he doesn’t do it to get money. He does it to get messages across,”said Victoria Bennet, a 36-year-old social media manager, interviewed by the Bowery Wall.
Before Banksy’s work there was whitewashed and painted over, the wall featured 268 tally marks, representing days that Zehra Doğan, a Kurdish-Turkish political prisoner, had spent in jail. The mural featured a portrait of Doğan, who was imprisoned for painting a picture criticising the Erdogan regime, as she peered out from behind cell bars. Her eyes gazed resolutely ahead, as she held a pencil in one hand. Scrawled at the bottom were the words, “Free Zehra Doğan.”
The Bowery Houston mural is owned by the Goldman Group, which commissions a different artist to paint a new work every four months. However, according to Eaton, Banksy asked that his work be covered up two months earlier than scheduled for reasons unknown.
Katherine Lorimer, 45, a photographer who documents Banksy’s art, explained that people often destroy Banksy’s creations out of jealousy.
“Banksy’s works have become a lightning rod for destruction and vandalism for one very simple reason: there are people within the greater street art community who very much resent the amount of publicity Banksy generates.” These people include envious rival street artists who think Banksy gets too much fame, as well as “The Splasher,” an anonymous individual who vandalizes the works of famous artists like Shepard Fairey, Swoon, and Banksy by splashing paint over their art, according to Houston Press.
Less than four months have passed since the mysterious Banksy last visited the Lower East Side, and there is no physical trace of this elusive artist’s time there. Yet the legacy of his powerful images survives through documentation and memories.
