🎨 Was Banksy admiring the new Hi-Lake murals this fall?

One of the underappreciated skills of a muralist is managing the number of people who want to talk to you while you work. On one hand, it's a perk of the job to get to chat with people who are curious about your craft, and to see the delight it produces in real time. But you can easily give up half your day to the practice if you're not careful, which is especially costly for a task that demands precision and benefits from long periods of unbroken focus.

The Hiawatha-Lake underpass mural generated a particularly steady stream of interlocutors during its time in action this fall, being both especially public and especially visually interesting. So mosaic artist Natchez Beaulieu didn't give it much thought when a slightly disheveled middle-aged man walked up to her motorized lift on October 17 and struck up a conversation about the project.

He was wearing sneakers and loose-fitting dress clothes, with an "Ireland" ballcap pulled low over reflective sunglasses, and carrying a reusable Aldi bag — a jumble of signifiers that made it hard to assume much about him. He had a British accent and accompanying cheeky humor, and seemed to have at least a baseline knowledge of mural painting.

He introduced himself as Banksy.

Banksy, as in the street artist Banksy, who, even if he's past the peak of his notoriety, is still among the world's most famous living artists, whose works have sold for as much as $25 million at auction, whose clandestine pieces have shown up on the West Bank wall and inside the Louvre, and who has remained steadfastly anonymous for the duration of a thirty year career, making him what Reuters describes as "arguably the most famous anonymous man in the world." The British-sounding guy in the oversized blazer was claiming to be that Banksy.

Natchez still didn't think much of it. In the scheme of conversations to be had in the Hi-Lake underpass, someone pretending to be a famous person — or even believing they're one — doesn't rank that high on the oddness scale. Plus, she and the handful of other artists on site that day were in the fog of a major time crunch to finish the project before winter. But being a chatty person herself, Natchez took some precious time away from grouting an intricate tile mosaic of the American Indian Movement flag to come down off the lift and indulge the conversation. The easy banter soon attracted a couple of the other artists.