In the spring of 1973 a painter named Liz Christy and a group of friends began throwing what they called seed grenades over the fences of derelict lots on Manhattan’s Lower East Side: Christmas ornaments and balloons packed with seeds, fertiliser, and water, designed to shatter on landing and bloom by summer. They called themselves the Green Guerillas. The following year they cleared a rubble-filled corner at Bowery and Houston, and in May 1974 its first beds were planted. It is still there, renamed the Liz Christy Garden, and it is recognised as the first community garden in New York City. The Green Guerillas had 16 sites by the end of 1974 and 84 a year later. Nobody had given them permission for any of them.

That is guerilla art in one story. It is not a style, a medium, or a movement. It is a way of acting in public: unannounced, unsanctioned, temporary or not, and aimed at changing how a place feels to the people who use it. This guide, the third of CreARTivity’s three explainers on the urban arts after graffiti and street art, sets out what makes an intervention guerilla, traces the form from a Manhattan vacant lot to a Wall Street statue, and argues that its deepest roots in our part of the world are not in New York at all but in the carnival streets of Jacmel.

What guerilla art is

Guerilla art is any creative intervention placed in public space without authorisation, whose meaning depends on where it is and on the fact that nobody expected it. The word comes from guerrilla warfare: small, mobile, opportunistic action against a larger and slower opponent. In art, the opponent is usually the ordinary use of a place, the assumption that a lot stays empty, a plinth stays official, a lamppost stays grey, and a wall stays blank.

It differs from its two siblings in what it is made of. Graffiti is letters; the name is the content. Street art is images; the picture is the content. Guerilla art can be either of those, but it is far more often something else: a planted garden, a knitted sleeve on a bicycle rack, a bronze figure that appeared overnight, a fake museum label, a poster with a statistic on it, a performance that lasts ten minutes and leaves no trace. The content of a guerilla work is the intervention itself. Take the object out of its place and, unlike a graffiti piece or a stencil, it usually stops being art at all. A knitted cosy in a shop window is craft. The same cosy on a tank barrel is guerilla art.

The position this magazine takes is that guerilla art is the purest form of the three, because it cannot be bought without being destroyed. A graffiti piece can be cut from a wall and sold. A stencil can be reproduced on canvas. A seed grenade cannot be collected, and a statue that was placed without permission becomes something else the moment a city grants it one.

Where it came from

The Green Guerillas gave the form its name and its first great success. The Guerrilla Girls gave it a face, or rather a mask. Founded in New York in 1985 to protest the absence of women from galleries and museums, the anonymous collective began by pasting text-only posters listing the numbers: how many women each gallery represented, how many a museum had shown. In 1989 the Public Art Fund commissioned a poster from them and then rejected it as not clear enough. It asked whether women had to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum, and it pointed out that fewer than five percent of the artists in the modern sections were women while about eighty-five percent of the nudes were female. The group paid to run it on the sides of city buses themselves. It lasted a month before complaints took it down, and it became the most famous poster in the history of art activism. It was also the first time the group’s gorilla mask appeared in the work.

In December 1989 a sculptor named Arturo Di Modica hired a truck, drove a three-and-a-half-tonne bronze bull to the front of the New York Stock Exchange in the middle of the night, and left it there under the Christmas tree as a gift to the city after the 1987 crash. The police impounded it. Public affection brought it back, to Bowling Green, a few blocks south, where it has stood ever since. Charging Bull is the most visited piece of guerilla art in the world, and almost nobody who photographs it knows that it was dumped on the pavement without a permit.

The 2000s spread the form into softer materials. In 2005 a knitter in Houston named Magda Sayeg covered the door handle of her shop in a knitted sleeve, then a stop sign, then a bus, and yarn bombing became a global practice within a few years, one of the few urban arts dominated by women. Banksy walked into the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the British Museum in 2005 and hung his own works among the collections, complete with fake labels, some of which went unnoticed for days. Keri Smith’s The Guerilla Art Kit, published in 2007, turned the form into an instruction manual for anyone with a Saturday afternoon and a roll of tape, which is roughly where it lives today: half activism, half play, and available to everyone.

The Fearless Girl problem

On the night of 7 March 2017, the eve of International Women’s Day, a four-foot bronze girl with her hands on her hips appeared on Bowling Green, staring down Di Modica’s bull. Fearless Girl, by the sculptor Kristen Visbal, had every outward sign of guerilla art: overnight installation, a public space, a political charge, a confrontation with an existing monument. It was also a commission from State Street Global Advisors, an asset management firm, placed with a city permit, as the launch of a campaign about women on corporate boards. Di Modica, who had actually broken the law to place his bull, objected that the girl turned his symbol of resilience into a villain and called the whole thing an advertising trick. In November 2018 the city moved her to face the Stock Exchange instead.

The episode is worth dwelling on because it draws the line that this whole category depends on. Guerilla art borrows the tactics of surprise and placement. Advertising has learned to borrow them back. The difference is not in how the work looks or where it stands, but in who paid for it, whether permission was sought, and what the object is for. When you see something unexpected in a public square, the first guerilla question is not “is it good?” but “who put it here, and did they ask?”

The forms, so you can spot them

Guerilla gardening is the oldest and the most widespread: seed bombs, planted tree pits, flowers in potholes, whole beds in vacant lots. Guerilla sculpture ranges from Di Modica’s bull to small cast figures glued to ledges and bridges. Yarn bombing wraps street furniture in knitting and crochet. Projection bombing throws images and text onto buildings at night, leaving nothing behind at dawn. Subvertising alters billboards and bus shelter advertisements, sometimes by replacing them entirely with an artist’s poster in the same frame. Institutional interventions, in Banksy’s manner, place fake works or fake labels inside museums and shops. Flash performances gather and disperse in minutes. Guerilla signage installs official-looking plaques that tell unofficial truths. And the poster, the Guerrilla Girls’ medium, remains the cheapest and most durable form of all: a sheet of paper, a fact, a wall.

What unites them is a set of three questions you can ask of any of them. Was it placed without permission? Does it depend on its location? Would it be a different work, or no work at all, if it were moved into a gallery? If the answer to all three is yes, you are looking at guerilla art, whatever it is made of.

Guerilla art in New Jersey

New Jersey’s guerilla art is mostly the quiet kind, and it is everywhere once you look. The state’s cities have some of the highest concentrations of vacant lots in the Northeast, and the community garden movement that the Green Guerillas started across the river has been at work in Newark, Paterson, Camden, and Trenton for decades, often beginning exactly as the Bowery garden did: a fence, a lot, a group of neighbours, and no permission. Painted utility boxes, crocheted tree sleeves, and small figures on bridge railings turn up in Jersey City, Montclair, Asbury Park, and Collingswood with no plaque and no program behind them. When you find one, notice whether it has been left alone. A city’s tolerance for guerilla art is a fair measure of how it feels about its own residents.

Guerilla art in Haiti: the carnival as a weapon

The oldest guerilla art tradition in the Americas is not a garden or a statue. It is carnival, and its sharpest form is in Jacmel, on Haiti’s southern coast, where for the pre-Lenten Kanaval each February the town’s papier-mâché artisans build masks and full-body costumes that turn the streets into a moving satire. Dragons, lions, rhinos, and devils share the parade with figures that comment directly on the news: missionaries, politicians, foreign aid. The master mask-maker Georges William Marshall, with more than thirty years in the craft, built a lion mask papered entirely in foreign banknotes and called it Le Rage du Guerre, a comment on what aid money has done to inequality in the country. One of the oldest recurring characters, Chaloska, is a bug-eyed, fanged caricature of a military officer, a figure of mockery that has outlived the regime it was invented to ridicule by more than a century.

This is guerilla art in the strictest sense. It takes over public space for a day, it says what cannot be said in print, it is made by hand from the cheapest materials available, and it leaves nothing behind but memory and next year’s masks. The same instinct animates the sculptors of Atis Rezistans on the Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince, whose scrap-metal figures stand in the road rather than in a gallery, and it is the instinct that a magazine rooted in Haitian and Caribbean culture recognises first. Long before New York gave the form a name, the Caribbean carnival was already doing the work.

Why it matters

Guerilla art is the reminder that public space is not settled. Every plinth, lot, lamppost, and bus panel is a decision that somebody made, and the guerilla artist’s act is to point out that it could have been made differently. Most of the form’s successes are now invisible because they won: the community garden became a park, the bull got a permit, the knitted lamppost was left alone until the wool rotted. The Guerrilla Girls’ numbers are quoted in the museums they attacked. That is the strange fate of the form. It works best when it stops being noticed as art and starts being treated as how things are.

Where to go next

Visit the Liz Christy Garden at Bowery and Houston in Manhattan, and read the small sign that tells you how it began. Stand in front of Charging Bull at Bowling Green and remember that it arrived on a truck at night. Look up the Guerrilla Girls’ 1989 Met poster and check the museum’s current numbers against it; the group still publishes updates. In New Jersey, walk any older neighbourhood in Newark or Jersey City and count the things nobody was asked about. And if you can, go to Jacmel in February, or to the Brooklyn exhibitions that bring the Kanaval masks north, and watch what a town does when it decides, for one day, that the street answers to no one. Then pick up Keri Smith’s The Guerilla Art Kit and decide what you would put where.