ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of favourite artists and activists who celebrate difference with spectacular defiance and who have made a considerable impact, agitating and activating museum audiences to look again and reconsider their position as witnesses to skewed stories with missing voices in collections presented as ‘our’ heritage. It looks at the UK’s infamous urban hero, describes as an art terrorist and political commentator, whose fabulous works began in the grime of city streets, dilapidated civic buildings and contested public spaces: Banksy. Amid tight secrecy in 2009, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery hosted a sensational event curated and created by Banksy, the city’s notoriously elusive graffiti artist and activist. Banksy’s provocative exhibition reached into every spare inch of the museum’s revered spaces with an audacious mix of class rage, complex symbols of vegetarian protest and insolent humour, puncturing the pretensions of the elite.
