Accompanied by stunning full-page, full-color reproductions and photographs of works in situ-including many that have been lost to time photographer and street art expert Alessandra Mattanza's impassioned and informed text follows Banksy's career trajectory from creator of message-laden stencils on London's city walls to a sought-after champion of human and environmental rights. She investigates many of the key images that populate Banksy's work-animals, children, historic figures, balloons, cartoon characters, police officers, and others. She shows how Banksy's oeuvre has expanded beyond graffiti and stenciling and how his art has helped support his activism in a variety of causes-from calls for peace in the Middle East to the preservation of the natural environment. Readers will come away with a new understanding of how Banksy helped transform an illegal act of criminal damage into a high art form, and how, by ridiculing institutionalized art, he has achieved enormous fame within those very institutions.