Portland Taggers Imagine They’ll Be Banksy

“All these taggers think they’re going to be the next Banksy.” So says Paul Watts, founder of Graffiti Removal Services, while driving around inner Southeast Portland, referring to the British street artist and provocateur.

So who exactly are they emulating?

Banksy got his start tagging walls in Bristol, England, in the 1990s and has (arguably) successfully concealed his identity through his present-day career. He is known for using stencils of recognizable imagery—a girl releasing a heart-shaped balloon, rats, Ronald McDonald—to make political points.

“There’s a power to his imagery and also a sense of notoriety,” says Sara Krajewski, the Portland Art Museum’s senior curator of modern and contemporary art. “He’s an invisible character just popping up and installing work under cover of darkness.”

He is often spoken of in the same breath as artists Shepard Fairey (founder of OBEY clothing and creator of former President Barack Obama’s 2008 “Hope” poster) and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Banksy’s work typically critiques the police state or contains messages about social justice and uplifting the oppressed, Krajewski says.

He also doesn’t shy from critiquing the art world itself. In 2018, his painting Girl With Balloon went up for auction at Sotheby’s London. When the hammer came down for the final bid of $1.4 million, a mechanism within the paintings’ frame triggered, and half of the painting went through a hidden shredder. Banksy renamed the work Love Is in the Bin; the half-shredded version sold for $25.4 million in 2021.

“To some, these are pranks, and to others, they are the height of conceptual art,” Krajewski says. “He’s always thumbing his nose at those art world powers.”

When Krajewski drives around Portland, she does not see budding Banksys ready to turn their street art into multimillion-dollar careers. Portland has impressive image-based public murals, but our graffiti is more the “‘70s and ‘80s New York subway style,” Krajewski says.

The highest praise Krajewski was willing to give: “There are some artists that I feel like have developed a really specific style….It’s interesting to see how their tags change over time.”