Wall and Piece

Wall and Piece collects the stencils, photographs, and captions that made Banksy the best-known street artist working under anonymity, gathering roughly a decade of unauthorized work into a single illustrated volume.

First published in the mid-2000s and built from Banksy's earlier self-issued books Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall, Existencilism, and Cut It Out, the collection adds material from gallery shows in London, New York, and Paris, plus documentation of his intervention on the separation wall in the West Bank. Photographs of the stencils in situ are paired with one-line captions and short texts, organized into loose chapters: Monkeys, Cops, Rats, Cows, Art, Street Furniture.

Banksy came up through Bristol's stencil graffiti scene in the late 1990s, and by the time Wall and Piece appeared he had moved from illegal night work into gallery exhibitions and international press coverage without ever revealing his identity. The book remains the clearest single record of the visual vocabulary, rats, policemen, monkeys, and children, that carried his work from the street into museums and auction houses.