Within hours of its appearance on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk, the latest street art installation by rogue British artist Banksy was transformed by an anonymous, unauthorized collaborator into a visual statement of opposition to the administration of the city’s most famous — and beleaguered — art school.
Sometime last night or this morning, the priest in the painting was given a bushy white spray-paint beard which rendered him a dead ringer for Peter Cooper, the founder of the Cooper Union. At the same time, the cross that adorned his neck was replaced with a giant Flavor Flav style clock with a red face and hands set just prior to midnight, the symbol of the Free Cooper Union activist movement.
For more than a century Cooper Union, whose campus is just a stone’s throw away from the repurposed painting, has been free to all students accepted for admission. In the wake of a series of disastrous financial developments, however, the college’s administration has announced that they will begin charging admission next fall. The Free Cooper Union movement sprung up in the wake of the tuition announcement to fight to reverse that decision, and to bring other reforms to the university.
Banksy, the notorious and reclusive British graffiti artist, is currently in the middle of a monthlong “residency” in New York city. The new painting, entitled Concrete Confessional, depicts a weary priest.
Free Cooper Union has adopted Peter Cooper as a symbol of their struggle, deploying his likeness and statements in support of free higher education prominently in their campaign.
Image from @StreetArtNews on Twitter.
Update | Now wait just one goddamn minute.
New photos posted to Twitter appear to show a second painting next to Bansky’s original, in which someone who looks extraordinarily like Cooper Union President Jamshed Bharucha is making confession. Graffiti on the other side of the original piece reads “FREE COOPER.”
I haven’t been able to get down to the site to confirm that all of this is real, but if it is, what we have is a Banksy painting of a sad priest transformed into a triptych — Barucha praying for absolution to Peter Cooper, Cooper bowing his head in dismay, and then the movement’s slogan.
Holy crap.
Second Update | Yep. It’s real. It’s all real.
A photo from Banksy’s website shows that the original version of the piece didn’t include the painting of the Bharucha lookalike. And the photo at right, taken from a different angle than the previous ones, confirms that the Bharucha add-on isn’t just a photoshop job. (That photo also makes clear, as none of the others I’ve seen do, that the confessor the priest/Cooper figure are painted on the back wall of room-like enclosures, not on a slab inside a concrete frame.)
Someone, sometime last night, conceived and executed a revision of Banksy’s original piece that changed the priest into Peter Cooper and added a penitent Bharucha in exactly the place a confessor would be.
Wow.
Third Update | Commenter Bob Cooley believes that the Bharucha in prayer was painted over an image of an altarboy that Banksy put up last night, perhaps intended as today’s entry in the monthlong series. Images of the altarboy can be found here and elsewhere.
For whatever it may be worth, there’s no reference to the altarboy at the banksyny.com site, at least not yet. I have no information about whether that painting was by Banksy or was someone else’s addition. If I find out more, I’ll update again.
Oh, and one thing I missed earlier. The “FREE COOPER” graffiti on the right is actually “FREE COOPER: The Musical” graffiti, a play on the October 4 entry in Banksy’s monthlong series.
Fourth Update | Whatever the choirboy was, it wasn’t Banksy’s October 13 offering.
It appears, wacky as it may seem, that the choirboy was added to the piece by an unknown Banksy admirer and then painted over and replaced with the Bharucha image by the pro-Cooper Union folks.
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October 13, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Weekend Reading | Backslash Scott Thoughts
[…] New Banksy Street Art Turned Into Student Protest Propaganda. […]
October 13, 2013 at 3:03 pm
Bob Cooley
Part of what you missed (no fault – it would be easy to miss), and what is a real shame here is that the second piece (the likeness of Bharucha), was actually a piece that Banksy added (An Altar Boy) over night before it was defaced – it was seen by very few people, but the “activists” painted directly over it to add the Bharucha.
This is sad on a number of levels:
1) There was PLENTY of blank space all around the originals where they could have created complementary works without destroying the originals (the “Free Cooper, The Musical” tag, and the fake Shepard Fairey on the side good example of how they could have done this).
2) it shows an incredible lack of regard from art students to destroy someone else’s art – This makes the statement “we still want things for free, and if we don’t get them, we’ll destroy stuff” – great ethics, “activists”.
3) They’ve shot themselves in the foot, as having Banksy’s pieces destroyed now has far fewer people visiting and recording that site – so far fewer eyes on their message.
This is a shame – everyone loses.
October 13, 2013 at 3:14 pm
Bob Cooley
See Steve Stopparts Facebook for before and afters: https://www.facebook.com/steve.stoppert
October 14, 2013 at 11:13 am
Julia
I’m pretty sure Banksy has seen this because it says “The Musical” under FREE COOPER. Banksy has been going around adding “The Musical” to graffiti.
(Source: http://www.banksy.co.uk/2013/10/04/delancey-bushwick-williamsburg)
October 14, 2013 at 11:15 am
Julia
oh it says that in the article sorry
October 14, 2013 at 12:48 pm
Real Estate News NYC via Tigho | Bharucha and Banksy - Real Estate News NYC via Tigho
[…] “Cooper Confessional” depicts Cooper Union’s overpaid and visionless President, Jamshed Bharucha, as he confesses his transgression from a historically merit-based full scholarship model, to an expansionist tuition agenda. Hearing Bharucha’s lament is Peter Cooper, who founded the Cooper Union in 1859 and established the mission of the institution as necessarily providing free education to all admitted students while educating against the evils of debt. […]
October 23, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Holidays Girl
Wow, not sure if that’s cool! Poor old Banksy, getting his art painted over!
May 26, 2016 at 9:31 am
Understanding the Cult of Banksy | TheBlot
[…] to use the work as a vehicle for their own financially related activism. They turned the Banksy figure into a bearded representative of Cooper Union’s founding president, and sprayed “Free Cooper […]