First look: NYC’s new Banksy Museum is a love letter to the artist
The door leading into the new Banksy Museum at 277 Canal Street looks just like you’d imagine the entrance to a space dedicated to the most elusive character in street art would look like: industrial, anonymous, almost mysterious.
Head up a flight of stairs, though, and you’ll be greeted with what is meant to be Banksy’s ideal canvas: a city of walls.
“We recreated the street to respect the rule of street art because the work has to be reproduced on a wall and can’t be sold,” says museum founder Hazis Vardar during a recent walkthrough of the new destination.
Vardar’s devotion to his new project and the artist that inspires it is made clear through the precision of the works on display: all reproductions, also made by anonymous artists, minutely resemble the original works they are inspired by, despite the fact that many of them may no longer even exist.
Banksy’s murals, after all, are just as ephemeral as the artist himself.
Whether painted over, removed or damaged, his street art often gains attention because of its temporary nature and unpredictable locations. Banksy himself has, in the past, commented on the impermanent nature of the form, acknowledging that it may not last forever.
“Almost 80% of these works have been destroyed already or white washed,” explains Vardar. “You can’t see them anymore.”
At the new museum—which has previously been mounted in Barcelona, Brussels, Krakow and Paris—the street art, cloned on actual walls, shares space with framed copies of Banksy’s paintings and a reproduction of the artist’s famous Walled Off Hotel, originally designed by Banksy and other creatives in 2017 as a temporary exhibition in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
The Canal Street exhibit, which Vardar refers to as a museum because he hopes will stay put permanently, is loosely split into geographical regions.
Visitors will first get to look through murals that Banksy installed throughout London (“we started with London because he’s from there,” notes Vardar), moving onto France, New York—including the “Hammer Boy” mural that remarkably still stands today on the Upper West Side—and the Middle East. The lower level of the warehouse-like space is dedicated to Banksy’s work in Ukraine, reminding viewers that, at its core, the artist’s creative pursuits are political commentary.
“To me, Banksy is a revolutionary and his work has a meaning, something inside of it,” says Vardar. “I’m an Albanian son of immigrants so I understand his position on immigration, women’s rights [and more]. His work touches me more and more.”
Although representative of Banksy’s craft with over 160 works on display, the new museum feels more like a celebration of the artist rather than an objective exploration of his output. Not necessarily a flaw, the obvious allegiance to the enigmatic Banksy might, though, say more about the founder of the museum than the subject itself—a fact that might not be lost on Vardar.
“If I could talk to Bansky, I would say ‘well done,’,” he confesses. “Thanks for shaking people’s brains.”