Pratt Lecture at the Banksy Museum: When Walls Speak — Protest & Conflict
A Pratt Institute lecture inside the Banksy Museum examining street art as political protest, tracing how public walls become sites of contested speech from Cold War murals to conflict zones.
Why we picked this
Staged inside New York's Banksy Museum, this Pratt Institute lecture puts the theory of art-as-dissent in direct conversation with work that embodies it — a setting that productively complicates every argument about walls as political speech.
Street art has long functioned as political speech that refuses the gatekeeping of gallery walls — and no artist has made that argument more globally visible than Banksy. This Pratt Institute lecture, delivered inside New York’s Banksy Museum, examines the broader tradition of public art as protest: how walls become canvases for dissent, how images in contested spaces carry different weight than those in sanctioned venues, and what happens when guerrilla art is institutionalized.
The lecture draws on case studies ranging from Cold War political murals to contemporary conflict zones, asking how meaning changes when an image migrates from illegal intervention to museum display. It engages seriously with the paradox at the heart of the Banksy Museum itself — the institutional framing of work defined by its rejection of institutions.
For those interested in the politics of public space, the history of visual activism, and the strange afterlife of street art, this is a rare evening that puts intellectual argument in unusually productive tension with its physical surroundings.