The artwork, which depicts a posh young schoolboy spray-painting the phrase “Ghetto 4 Life” while a butler holds a tray of spray cans, was removed from the Melrose building at 651 Elton Avenue as part of the structure’s demolition to make space for a charter school.

The relocation of the mural, part of Banksy’s “Better Out Than In” residency in New York in October 2013, has stirred strong emotions among Bronx locals, with many lamenting the loss of a piece considered a source of community pride.

“Everybody was crying around here. This is art,” Steve Jacob told The New York Post. “The gentleman made it for us, the community. I’ve lived all my life in the Bronx, and this was made for the Bronx people. And now someone’s taken it away from us.”

Despite the efforts of the building’s owner, David Damaghi, to keep the mural within New York City, including offers to local schools and institutions like MoMA, it was ultimately decided to relocate it to 800 Union Avenue in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which the New York Daily News identified as owned by Kiumarz Geula of Pillar Property Management.

In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Banksy said he didn’t think much about when his tags and murals are removed, “but for the art form as a whole it’s unhealthy. When you paint illegally you have so much to contend with—cameras, cops, Neighborhood Watch, drunk people throwing bottles at your head—so adding “predatory art speculators” to the mix just makes things even harder.”

A representative of Fine Art Shippers, who were hired to transport the work, told ARTnews the move to Bridgeport is temporary. “It is uncertain whether it will be sold or moved again in the future.”

Despite Banksy tagging buildings across the globe, some of which lead to million dollar sales of buildings and the removal of the murals, his true identity remains a mystery. A recently unearthed BBC interview from 2003 identified him as an artist named Robert Banks, however, there are other theories.

The recent absence of Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, from the public eye following a reported abdominal surgery has led to a deluge of conspiracy theories. On February 27, X user @LMAsaysno posted “not a single banksy since kate middleton disappeared. coincidence?”

Since Banksy adorned their home with the giant waterfowl in 2021, the homeowners, Garry and Gokean Coutts, have been plagued by vandals and forced to either pay for the bird’s protection and preservation, which would cost almost $50,000 per year. Otherwise, they could have the mural removed, which could cost up to a quarter of a million dollars.

In an interview with the Times, Mr. Coutts said “At first it was obviously incredible but as things have gone on it has become extremely stressful. I’m not sure Banksy realises the unintended consequences on homeowners. If we could turn back the clock, we would.”

Hooligans trying to paint over the mural, thieves chipping off painted sections to sell on Facebook, cracks in the wall, and county council members are just a few of the troubles the Couttses have had to deal with. After the theft, they had to hire a security guard to watch over the mural at night at their own cost. 

The only way forward, the Couttses say, is to have the 22-ton mural removed, a major undertaking which over the last month has involved “reinforcing it with 12 layers of resin, fibreglass [sic] and five tonnes [sic] of steel and using a 40ft crane to take it away.”

The Couttses hope to sell the massive work in order to offset the $250,000 cost. “We are just normal people,” Mr. Coutts told the Sun, “so we’d like to sell it and make something back on it.”

In 2021, a Banksy mural depicting a young girl using a bicycle tire as a hula-hoop was removed from a brick wall in Nottingham, England, was sold for six-figures to the Brentwood, England–based Brandler Galleries. 

Yet, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is uniquely suited for Diego Rivera’s America. It’s a museum specifically for American art  (unfortunately people often forget that the United States and Mexico are both part of North America) and Bentonville, where the museum is located, is among the fastest growing cities in the U.S. and the surrounding area has a rapidly growing Hispanic community. Sadly, the exhibition only hints at Rivera’s politics, which championed the working class and dreamed of a more equitable world, a missed opportunity in a society so focused on diversity and inclusion.

With over 130 works including easel paintings, pastels, watercolors, illustrations for print magazines, and of course the murals on which Rivera’s legacy is built, the show has the weight of a full-on retrospective, but that is definitely not what it is. Here, Rivera is presented fully formed. The works, as the title suggests, were all made in either Mexico or the United States between the 1920s and the early 1940s.

“There have been two major retrospectives of Diego Rivera, one in Detroit in the ’80s, and one in Cleveland in the ’90s,” James Oles, the exhibition’s curator, told ARTnews. “I didn’t want to repeat those models, so I chose to focus on about the period between 1921, when he returns to Mexico after this extended time in Europe and paints his first mural, to the beginning of the Cold War, when Rivera’s impact and influence in the United States in particular begins to wane because of the shifting political climate.”

Because of the specific nature of the exhibition, those unfamiliar with Rivera’s work would very much benefit from reading the labels, which give a great deal of arguably-needed context about Rivera’s life before the years covered in the exhibition. Without a doubt, the show is anchored by Rivera’s murals. It’s a tricky thing, showing murals anywhere other than on the walls where they were painted, but Oles found a way around that obstacle: projections.

The projections are a novel idea, giving visitors a life-sized view of Rivera’s most gripping stuff in more ways than one. That’s because they aren’t just projected stills but short films with accompanying sound. It’s so simple, so smart. But, as most creative types know, it’s often the simple things that are most difficult to get right. 

“I kind of timed it so that if you walked into the room, you might see nothing. But if you were a little patient, then suddenly somebody would appear or some action would happen,” said Oles. “One of the big things that a museum curator wants is for people to stop and look, instead of just walking by, looking at the label and moving on to the next work of art. But, with these videos people stop and look … kids just come in and sit on the floor and watch the film. There’s no story, no plot. But that someone can enjoy watching the whole thing for three or four minutes, that’s a huge success story.” 

Unfortunately, the projections just slightly miss their mark, sadly taking away from the grandeur of Rivera’s murals. To give these short films life, to show scale, and to inject some narrative, Oles hired actors that appear randomly during each loop. A preteen ensemble duo sits in front of one, sawing away at their instruments on an otherwise empty stage. During another, chicly dressed women and tuxedoed waiters walk up and down a set of stairs while in the background floats the clamor of a Roaring ’20s themed party. But it’s clear we aren’t at the party. And the people walk by so infrequently that one gets the feeling there actually isn’t a party at all, or a concert. It’s all a slightly distracting put-on that draws the eye aways from the murals.

The first projected mural you come across (the one with the string duo) is Creation (1923). Commissioned by José Vasconcelos, the first secretariat of public education after the revolution, it was Rivera’s first important mural. Heavily biblical, the fresco is aesthetically inspired more by Rivera’s time in Europe than the later murals, but his unique style is fully present. Thick, almost cartoonish hands and limbs that somehow project a solemn dignity and, at its center, a man who represents the “mestizaje,” that mixture of Indigenous and European cultures that makes Mexico unique.

Where the projected murals are beautiful and slightly awkward, the preparatory sketches and ephemera throughout the exhibition are elegant, subtle, and as powerful as the finished works. They provide a glimpse into Rivera’s mind, his processes, and reveal that Rivera was not just a singular painter but also an exceptional draftsman, illustrator, and storyteller. The chalk and charcoal studies for Creation are a grad school seminar in anatomy, and the chalk-on-paper version of The Corn Seller, which hangs right next to the oil-and-canvas version are worth the trip down south alone.

The exhibition is organized into thematic galleries, which put the objects, scenes, and cultural intricacies that set Rivera’s imagination to work in pleasant, digestible portions. A room dedicated to pictures of mothers and daughters not only shows Rivera’s gentle touch but also, if you’re paying attention, his revolutionary hope in a generation that at the time was still counting on their fingers and braiding each other’s hair. Another is focused on the rural customs and idyllic culture of Tehuantepec, a municipality in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Rivera first visited the area in 1922, shortly after joining the Mexican Communist Party, and like many before and after romanticized the area’s pastotal customs and traditions, which fell in line with the Communist goal of an economic system that would lead to an equitable society that still embraced cultural diversity.

Throughout the show, especially in the murals, is Rivera’s idealized version of Communism. As strange as it sounds now, in the 1930s, when the US economy was crippled by the Great Depression, the idea that Capitalism as an economic system was on its way out was commonly held and Communism seemed like a viable alternative. Throughout the exhibition, the labels hint at Rivera’s Communist ideals with words like “workers” and “working class” but there isn’t much mention of his political leanings until the gallery dedicated to “the proletariat.”

This feels another slightly missed opportunity in that the explanation of what Communism meant back then (as opposed to what it means in a post-Cold War society) feels like an afterthought, or worse, something that was intentionally avoided. Oles explained, however, that apart from the murals not much of Rivera’s work had overtly political themes or images, in large part because he survived on commissions from wealthy patrons who were (gasp!) more interested in “tranquil and idealized images of traditional life in Mexico” then radical left-wing imagery. And, of course, like Rivera, museums often rely on the whim of generous patrons and Oles pointed out that “that there simply aren’t many images that one can borrow with that [radical] theme.”

(Incidentally, another reason Crystal Bridges is so perfect for this Rivera exhibition is that the museum is a public non-profit founded by Alice Walton of the Walmart family, exactly the kind of patrons that Rivera relied on throughout his life.)

Still, the proletariat room highlights Rivera’s illustrations for magazines like Fortune and reminds viewers that, back then, communists and capitalists were united against fascist threats like Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain. And, it would be remiss to leave out the studies and cartoons made in preparation for the mural Man at the Crossroads, a fresco commissioned by the Rockefellers in 1932 for the lobby of the RCA building at Rockefeller Center. The work was harangued by the media as “anti-capitalist propaganda” before it was completed, which ultimately led to its destruction.

In his day, Rivera was considered equal to modern art giants like Picasso and Modigliani, a reputation that has undeservedly waned. An exhibition of this magnitude and depth is well deserved and will hopefully encourage not only an interest in Rivera’s work but also in his revolutionary ideals, class consciousness, and his cultural empathy.

Editors note: a previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Crystal Bridges as a private institution.

On Micklegate, a street in the ancient northern England city of York, contractors uncovered a biblically themed fresco behind a wall while installing new cupboards in an apartment as part of a renovation project, according to CNN.

Then they did what any responsible contractor would do—snap a picture, call their client, and say, “did you know there’s a painting behind here?” And of course, install the new cupboards.

The apartments owner, Luke Budworth, was “disappointed” that the contractors recovered the mysterious painting, the report said, but “suspected that a similar ‘bit of paneling’ on the other side of the open plan living area may be hiding something too.” 

He was right. Behind that paneling was a matching fresco that measured 9 feet by 4 feet, though the topmost section was cut off by the ceiling.

The scene features a man in a cage which is being dragged by an angel and another man in a white cart who “looks like he’s riding to the kingdom of heaven,” Budworth told CNN. Following the discovery, Budworth contacted Historic England, a public institution that, according to their website, “looks after England’s historic environment.”

“This was a total and complete surprise,” Budworth told ARTnews. “I knew we lived in an old building (ca. 1747) on an old street (ca. roman era) and within the city walls of an ancient city, so it is not totally unprecedented, but to have history like that inside the flat was a massive shock.”

Historic England visited the apartment to survey and document the paintings, then passed the images on to the Conservation of Wall Painting department at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art. They also advised Budworth and his partner, Hazel Mooney, to recover the fresco “in order to preserve it,” and gave the couple a life-sized photographic replica of the work.

Budworth, who works as a research data analyst at the University of Leeds, decided to do some digging and learned that the both works featured scenes from Emblems, a book first published in 1635, written by the poet Francis Quarles.

Budworth told CNN that through internet research he learned that the artwork had been executed on the wall of a building that was once connected to his, but that no longer exists. According to Historic England, the works were made between 1635 when Emblems was first published and 1700, “when such artwork fell out of fashion.”

According to Budworth, since the story was first reported, an “expert conservator” from University College London has reached out with a tentative offer to assist in writing a report about the newly discovered paintings and provide further advice on next steps.

“University College London – one of the UK’s best universities, and I’m not just saying that because I did masters there,” Budworth told ARTnews.

The Big B Liquor Party Store, which holds down the northeast  corner of the intersection of Trumbull Ave and the I-94 freeway in Detroit’s Woodbridge neighborhood, has taken on a different character of late. The third-story windows on the eastern facade, once boarded up, now display a series of recognizable figures. It’s a collection of Detroit-born poets and publishers, the second cohort of figures in artist Nicole Macdonald’s “Detroit Portrait Series”–an ongoing public art project.

Macdonald’s intention is “to tell the history of Detroit from the ground up, honoring leaders and everyday heroes from the city’s past and present through large-scale portraiture,” and using completed panels to board up windows in abandoned buildings throughout the city. The series at the Big B features activist writers and minority publishers from Detroit: Robert Hayden, the first African-American to be named poet laureate of the United States; Sixto Rodriguez, musician and subject of the 2012 breakout hit documentary, Searching for Sugar Man; Terry Blackhawk, poet and founder of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project; and others. This series was first installed in the main shed of the Detroit Eastern Market last summer, accompanied by a series of readings and workshops, and its permanent installation at the Big B coincides with an exhibition featuring Macdonald’s latest series, which features cultural activists and entertainment legends of Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhood.

Founded in the early twentieth century, Black Bottom and the adjoining entertainment district of Paradise Valley (known as “the Harlem of Detroit”) were wellsprings for African-American self-sufficiency and cultural innovation until they were razed in 1950s. This not-so-coincidentally dovetailed with the construction of the I-75 and I-375 freeways, which cut directly through the neighborhood’s main corridors, especially Hastings Street, the site of many of the 350 black-owned businesses that operated in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley during the neighborhood’s peak.

Some of this history is well-known, but much of it has been obscured, both as a passive consequence of the physical violence done to the neighborhood in the course of its transformation, as well as in a concerted effort to suppress narratives that might challenge the idea of Black Bottom as a slum that needed to be destroyed for the public good. This elided history includes the pre-Motown impact of Detroit’s musicians on American music, the influence of Detroit’s political organizers on American resistance movements prior to the Black Panthers, and the emergence of a strong black middle class for the first time in the northern United States. Key figures who contributed to the character of our nation have attained new visibility through Macdonald’s large-scale portraits.  Works from her new series are featured in an exhibition in the lobby of the Boll Family YMCA, in downtown Detroit, where they greet members and visitors as they enter. (The show is on view through February 28; a reception was held on February 1, the anniversary of the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.) Subjects include big names and lesser-knowns from Black Bottom’s heyday: Billie Holiday, John Lee Hooker, and Aretha Franklin, pioneering black record producer and shop owner Joe Von Battle, longtime civil rights organizer Ron Scott, and many others

The smell of chlorine from the downstairs lap pool permeates the air in the YMCA’s lobby, where five of Macdonald’s huge paintings on plywood are propped up on easel backs made of two-by-fours. The exhibition also includes small-scale, printed versions of the other ten portraits the series; the originals are installed above another liquor store on Gratiot Avenue, the historic boundary of Black Bottom. Her work is rarely displayed at eye level, so this show is an opportunity to see the craftsmanship that Macdonald invests in each piece before leaving them to weather the elements. The figures, which sit comfortably in upper-story windows, loom much larger when one stands directly before them, and Macdonald’s impressionistic method becomes clear as the viewer draws close enough to their surface to see the subjects as abstract mélanges of brushstrokes. Macdonald has numerous bodies of work that create taxonomies of Detroit natives in public spaces–such as “Birds of Detroit,” a series of stencils portraying avian species that have proliferated in Detroit– and her comfort with street art and ongoing practice as a mural painter have well-equipped her to work comfortably at a large scale, creating visuals that are as satisfying from thirty feet away as they are at thirty inches.

When I met Macdonald in the Boll Family YMCA lobby to discuss her work, she immediately rattled off a list of changes that she noticed on her walk through downtown Detroit from the coffee shop. Macdonald has a lively curiosity about the city where she was born and raised. Her efforts to uncover and showcase hidden histories hardly preclude her keen observation of the present-day narratives unfolding to create another layer in the strata of urban development. The appearance of her work in locations that are free and accessible is a key component of her process; it is Macdonald’s wish to return these narratives to the people who lived them.

Macdonald is asceticism personified: quiet, extremely focused, breakably slender. Her work ethic and her desire to constantly shift attention from herself to the subjects of her portraits reflect the heart of Midwestern humility that beats within the old guard of the Detroit art scene. After our meandering conversation, she calls me to make the sobering addendum that she views the 1954 razing of Black Bottom as “a crime against humanity.” The so-called “slum clearance,” supported by eminent-domain land grabs for public-works projects like the interstate highway system, displaced and dismantled some of the most thriving African-American communities in Detroit, as elsewhere. Those who point to the Detroit Race Riot of 1967 (more commonly known as “The Uprising,” among communities within the city limits) as the major psychic wound of the city are missing the seeds that were planted and driven into the earth by the bulldozers that tore apart Black Bottom thirteen years earlier.

But sometimes seeds planted with pain and sown in sprawling decay yield beautiful flowers. Macdonald’s portraits are the colors of Detroit: chicory blue, verdant green, rusty reds, grays, browns, and of course, black. As we go about our daily life as Detroiters–corner store, gym, bus ride–it is energizing to be reminded that we walk in the footsteps of titans, that our histories and theirs are still alive and being written, and that someone is paying close attention.