Banksy, (born 1974?, Bristol?, England), anonymous British graffiti artist known for his antiauthoritarian art, often done in public places.

Though Banksy’s identity was well guarded, he came to notice as a freehand graffiti artist in 1993. Using stencils since 2000 to enhance his speed, he developed a distinctive iconography of highly recognizable images, such as rats and policemen, that communicated his antiauthoritarian message. With wry wit and stealth, Banksy merged graffiti art with installation and performance. In the 2003 exhibition “Turf War,” he painted on the bodies of live pigs. At his “Crude Oils” exhibition in London in 2005, which featured altered replicas of the works of Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Edward Hopper, he released 200 live rats in the gallery. In 2005 Banksy, fully disguised, installed his own works on the walls of major museums in New York City and London, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Britain.

In 2005 Banksy also painted a wall on the Palestinian side of the West Bank: on the viewer’s side, children play on a forlorn patch of earth, while through an apparent hole in the wall there is a scene of a perfect tropical beach. Banksy described himself as a “quality vandal,” challenging the authority of political and art institutions on both the right and the left. In September 2006 his one-weekend Los Angeles warehouse installation “Barely Legal,” for which he decorated a live elephant, attracted large crowds despite a lack of publicity. In Bristol, England, in 2006 he depicted a naked man clinging to a windowsill on the side of a public family-planning clinic; local residents voted to keep the mural. In 2008 Banksy’s “Cans Festival”—a play on the Cannes film festival—encouraged visitors to add their own art to a south London rail tunnel on which he and 40 international artists had done airbrush paintings. The following year he staged a surprise show at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol. It featured animatronics, oil paintings, and an old ice-cream truck.