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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart, who's on medical leave. Hey, if you're listening, thanks so much for joining us on this rainy but beautiful Wednesday. We're happy to have you here. One of the reasons why it's a beautiful Wednesday is because today is the first day of our pledge drive. In between each segment, you're going to hear me and one of my partners at WNYC talk to you about why it's worth it for you to give to this organization so you can keep hearing the kinds of great content, kinds of great interviews that you've come to expect from this public radio station and this media outlet.

We've got a great show for you today to keep you entertained. First, we're going on be talking later on with National Youth Poet Laureate, the former National Youth Poet Laureate, Kara Jackson, who's in our area tonight and tomorrow, who just came out with a new music album. We'll have a little listening party. Then we're going on talk about a really great coming-of-age film that's set in the early '90s that talks about two young boys that are living in the Cabrini-Green Housing Complex in Chicago. We're going on have director Minhal Baig and Jurnee Smollett talk to us about the film. Then we're going on have artist Bonnie Ramirez talk to us about a new exhibit at the Newark Museum of Art. That's all coming up, but first, let's start the show with an exhibit, a museum about Banksy.

One of the things that makes New York so magical and why I love hosting this show is because there is always something new in creative happening from Broadway openings to film series, to art exhibitions. One art exhibition that opened just today is a collection of work from the enigmatic prolific street artist called Banksy. It's called The Banksy Museum. It first opened in Paris before spending time in Krakow, Brussels, and Barcelona. Here in New York, it's on Canal Street. It's housed in a former theater with over 15,000 square feet of space. William Meade is its director, and he's here with us to tell us a bit about the exhibit and what sets the New York installment apart from the others. Welcome to the show, William.

William Meade: Well, thank you so much. I've been a big fan of your show for a long, long time, so it's a pleasure to finally get on, and it's a pleasure to have such a great exhibition to be able to talk about.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, wonderful.

William Meade: I got to tell you one thing, one of the things I've always had a problem with, I've always tried to hum your theme music, but it just doesn't seem to work. I don't know why, it's a [laughs]-

Kousha Navidar: Well, you got a chance to do it live right now after the segment's over, so you can stay tuned for that. It's also great to have you on here too, very excited to talk about this exhibit. I think right at the top, one big question that would be great to delve into is who is Banksy?

William Meade: Banksy is actually a cultural phenomenon as well as-- he originally started out as an English-based street artist, and he was known for a stenciling technique and a provocative satirical work. He came from Bristol Underground basically in the late 1990s, and he got noticed very quickly because he has very sharp political and social commentary that was displayed on surfaces like walls and outside of theaters. The main thing about Banksy that you have to remember is that Banksy had this one thing that I really love, and it's called Better Out Than In, and that was in 2013 where he had a residency in New York. His feeling, and I agree with him completely, is that he doesn't want to control art. He wants the whole world to be able to control not to have, not to be forced into a museum, not to be forced into a frame, not to be forced that the art world controls it.

His idea really was like, "I'm going to put art on surfaces that never would have art, like on the side of buildings." In New York in 2013, he had every single day for a month he put art pieces. He put his artwork on every single building. The oddest thing is that, to this day only one of them exists in real, and that's the Hammer Girl up on 79th in Broadway. It's an amazing--This exhibition is 160 pieces of a lot of his art. Most of it has been destroyed or is lost. This is a place where you can go and see it in its actual-- it's done in the environment or the street environment. You can see the way it was originally done, and you can see pictures of how they were done. You're actually about as close to the artist as you can.

Kousha Navidar: Are there consistent themes that you can see in Banksy's work? Do you draw on any of those themes and show them explicitly in the exhibit?

William Meade: Well, actually, yes. I mean, there's Banksy deals on. I mean, he's very important for a number of reasons. One of them is his activism through his art. There's a number of pieces that he did for Ukraine, for Palestine, in New York City, for the problems that were going on back at that time for one of my favorites, of course, is where he celebrates rats. Because rats are the most reviled creature in the world, he decided to make rats fun. There's a whole series of rat photographs, not photographs, but rat pieces and stuff. I know it doesn't sound exciting, but it actually is a lot of fun.

Kousha Navidar: There are a lot of rats on display that I saw when I was looking through the materials for. There's rats on vacation, there's gangster rats, there's rats with picket signs. What's his connection to rats? Why rats?

William Meade: Well, the thing about rats is that he's take everything that you assume that you know he's trying to flip to the other side. We all hate rats. We hate rats, we hate everything about it, but what he's doing is trying to give you a different sense of it. Tearing it around to make you look at a rat in a different way. Not that you're going to look at a rat in a different way, but have fun with the idea of the way that we revile rats. Now we're kind of, "Oh, let's take the images and see what we can do to them."

Kousha Navidar: Subversive.

William Meade: Yes. I think that that is the key thing about Banksy, is that he celebrates and promotes what we call subversive art.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking with William Meade, the director of the Banksy Museum which is opening today May 15th, if you're listening on the podcast after. It's on Canal Street at Broadway and it showcases, and in some cases, it recreates a lot of Banksy's work. William, I want to talk about that idea of recreation since many of Banksy's works that were on public spaces were covered over or destroyed or taken, somehow there are street artists that were hired to replicate them for this exhibit. What was the process of finding and commissioning these artists? They, like Banksy, also prefer to be anonymous.

William Meade: Well, you're absolutely right. It's actually quite an amazing story because Hazis Vardar, who was the founder and original creator who originally did the exhibition in Paris. He actually owned one or two pieces and he started to get to know street artists in the area in Paris and also in London. He was speaking to them and they wanted nothing to do with it. They finally said they agreed to do it. We bought over a whole group of street artists. We don't know who they are, we had no idea. We basically turned them loose, and we got this amazing exhibition. It's the craziest thing ever said, but it's as authentic as it can possibly be.

Kousha Navidar: You want to get a sense for people of how these pieces really looked on walls and in an urban setting. How did that influence the way the exhibition was set up and designed?

William Meade: The thing is is that there's very, very few pieces. Banksy has very few pieces that are actually in frames. When you come to the exhibition, you will see what it actually looked like when it sat on a part of a broken building or a lot of the work is on walls that are bricked, the bricked walls and stuff. It's an amazing because it's not the way that you normally look at art. It is very unusual. A lot of the art also was, some of it was done in Ukraine. The building was blown up afterwards and so around it, you can see where the rubble is, and so we recreated that whole environment.

Kousha Navidar: Another piece of it, I think is the connection to New York that I found very interesting in the exhibit. There are some of his most famous and irreverent pieces. I'm thinking of Kissing Coppers and the Girl With Balloon, which is the one that shredded itself at auction. There are also some that only the New York exhibit has. Can you talk a little about Banksy's connection to New York and what New York pieces there are in the show?

William Meade: Well, it's funny you say that. Is that we have, there's-- sorry. I hope there's have a little air conditioning over my head. I hope you're not hearing it.

Kousha Navidar: No, you sound great.

William Meade: Okay. Actually, there are some of them-- I'll just, off the top of my head we have Hammer Boy, we have The Robot with the Barcode, we have Waiting in Vain. Now, those three were the most recent ones. The Hammer Boy is on 79th Street, right around the corner from Zabar is right near Broadway. That still exists. That is one of the only ones that still exists. The Robot with the Barcode was out in Coney Island, and that one still exists. Partially, it was damaged. Then there was this one called Waiting in Vain, which was on the building on the Hustler Building, which was on the West Side Highway, and I just found out that it was actually removed and put inside the Hustler Building so the only way you can see it is you have to go inside the Hustler. The point is that what we did was that we went meticulously through all of the-- as I was saying, he had his own residency in New York in 2013, and so he did one. There were actually 30 of them. Back then Mayor Bloomberg and the group called it vandalism, they said that street art and street artists were not worthy of being able to exhibit their art this way so they painted over a lot of them. It's a wonderful experience that these things have come to life again at this point.

Kusha Navadar: Were you in touch with Banksy's Universe with his people at all in making this exhibit or have you had contact with his people in any way?

William Meade: The thing is everybody stays anonymous. It's the craziest thing. Everybody stays anonymous. We have had no direct contact with Banksy other than the fact that he has approved that his works are displayed and that he loves the fact that they're being recreated as much as possible but all of the artists that recreated these things, like I said, have been totally anonymous and so we don't even know what the connection is there. It's an elusive thing, and yes, people will spend a lot of money and track him down and say, "This is the guy," but in the end, it's actually a wonderful thing that we're talking about the artwork and less about the artist, even though the artist is.

Kusha Navadar: We're referring to Banksy as he is. Is that even fair to do? Do we know how Banksy identifies or what can we even say about that?

William Meade: I've read just about everything you can read about him and about trying but there was some talk about that he was a he, but on the end, it's also a metaphorical thing too. You don't need to think of it as a he or a she or whatever. It's that this is a movement and this is what we call subversive art. Once again, less about the actual person because the art world always focuses on the Rembrandts and The Da Vincis which is fine but this also raises so many questions because it forces you to think more about the art itself [crosstalk].

Kusha Navadar: It's interesting because Banksy has shown a real disdain for the art world in some ways, even pranking it at times, like shredding the piece. We're talking with words like irreverent, subversive, yet he's presumably making money from his art. Do you get a sense of how he reconciles that?

William Meade: The thing about it is that the story around the shredding of The Girl with the Balloon is an amazing story where the second it's sold at Sotheby's-- and you have to realize this was a big thumb in the eye of the whole community. They finally have the banks, they finally have the most famous one, they finally have the biggest and finally, the guy buys it and then starts to shred itself. Then the kicker of the whole thing is that the shredder jams.

Kusha Navadar: Oh, right, right.

William Meade: The shredder jammed halfway through. You don't even have that effect but the craziest thing of all was that a few months later, that shredded piece sold for $24 million as opposed to one point. It turns everything in the standardized art world on its ear. That I think was the most provocative thing. Not that it shredded, not that it didn't but it gave everybody a whole different look same. Everybody in the world knew when it's shredded. It was an amazing thing so anyway.

Kusha Navadar: Yes. I do remember that. One of the reasons why it's important to bring up is the idea of studio pieces from Banksy. There's not a ton of them. He's not particularly known for studio work, but there are still some studio pieces that the exhibition also includes. How did you collect those that you have to exhibit?

William Meade: Once again, the anonymous artists made those decisions and they collected-- these are recreations. We said, "Go for it." It was that we were presented in some ways. We tried to give them directions and stuff, but they did the most authentic way that they could do it and so that's the way we went.

Kusha Navadar: We're talking about the cost of these studio pieces and how money is a part of this. One of the quotes I saw in the exhibit that I really enjoyed is from a rare interview with The Village Voice in 2013 I think it's about then. Banksy's quote is "Commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist." What do you make of that quote? Why was it important to you to include?

William Meade: I love that. I love that. In other words, obviously, there's the implication that you're selling out. Obviously, there's an implication that you are answering to somebody whether it's money or whether it's an institution or whatever. I believe that they always say everybody has a boss. I think that Banksy doesn't have a boss. I think he's in charge of his own future and by the fact that he doesn't hold copyrights and it's not all about commercialism there's nobody like him. That's the amazing thing about it.

I hope that one of the things that I also want to stress is that I think that this whole exhibition is a multi-generational family exhibit because I think that kids can come and see it on one level. I think that adults can come and see it on another level. I think that to bring because when my kids were young, we were always looking for fun things to do and everything. I think that it teaches about activism through art, it gives the kids a unique cultural experience. It fosters some creative thinking. It's experiencing art in a completely different way. Not that the MoMA and the Met are world-class institutions, but this is a whole different thing. This is a whole different thing. I think that it'll be well worth bringing the families and hearing the kind of conversations that we hear, amazing conversations where kids will be talking about this and that and see a lot more than you think they do.

Kusha Navadar: I'm so happy you brought that up because I want to make sure that we get to the nuts and bolts of the show. We've got about a minute left to wrap. In that minute, can you tell us just location, are tickets required, how do you get them? How can folks find and attend the museum?

William Meade: Sure. The first thing is that the website is museumbanksy.com. You can buy tickets through there or through Fiverr directly. The exhibition is open seven days a week which is a lot of time here. Let me tell you. It's seven days a week, and we're open from 10:00 to 8:00 every day. We're in the corner of Broadway and Canal Street, which is a whole universe unto itself down here. We're on the second floor above Bank of America. We used to be a gym. We have as you said, 15,000 square feet, lots of room to walk around, and lots of room to experience it. Tickets run from anywhere from $21 to $30. For specialized timing, it would be $40. Very affordable for the family. Bring the kids, bring the little guys, and bring everybody in between.

Kusha Navadar: We've been talking to William Meade, the director of the Banksy Museum. It's opening today, May 15th, and it's open seven days a week. William, thank you so much.

William Meade: Hey, this has been a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. I love for you guys to get your lit program down and we have an event space. Bring your program down here and we can talk more in person. That would be a big, big thrill to have you guys down here.

Kusha Navadar: Wonderful, William. Thanks so much.

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