Artist of the day: Artist of the day, December 27: JR, a French photographer and street artist (#875)

Friday, December 27, 2019

Artist of the day, December 27: JR, a French photographer and street artist (#875)

JR (1983) is the pseudonym of a French photographer and street artist whose identity is unconfirmed. Describing himself as a photograffeur, he flyposts large black-and-white photographic images in public locations, in a manner similar to the appropriation of the built environment by the graffiti artist. He states that the street is "the largest art gallery in the world." He started out on the streets of Paris. JR's work "often challenges widely held preconceptions and the reductive images propagated by advertising and the media."

JR's work combines art and action and deals with commitment, freedom, identity, and limits. He has been introduced by Fabrice Bousteau as: "the one we already call the Cartier-Bresson of the 21st century". On 20 October 2010, JR won the TED Prize for 2011. He used the $100,000 award money to start the Inside Out Project.

JR began his career as a teenage graffiti artist who was by his own admission not interested in changing the world, but in making his mark on public space and society. His graffiti efforts often targeted precarious places like rooftops and subway trains, and he enjoyed the adventure of going to and painting in these spaces. After finding a camera in the Paris Metro, JR and his friends began to document the act of his graffiti painting. At the age of 17, he began applying photocopies of these photographs to outdoor walls, creating illegal 'sidewalk gallery exhibitions'.

Between 2004 and 2006, JR created Portraits of a Generation, portraits of young people from the housing projects around Paris that he exhibited in a huge format. This illegal project became official when the City of Paris put JR's photos up on buildings.

In 2007 JR put up enormous photos of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities on either side of the Separation Barrier. Upon his return to Paris, he pasted these portraits up in the capital.

In 2008, JR undertook an international tour for Women Are Heroes, a project in which he highlights the dignity of women who are often targets during conflicts.

On 20 October 2010, JR won the TED Prize for 2011. He used the $100,000 award money to start the Inside Out Project, a global art initiative that has allowed thousands of people around the world to speak to their communities through portraits pasted in public space. This prize brought him and his work to New York City where he opened another studio and inspired pastings in the area such as those done in 2011 of members of the Lakota Native American Tribe from North Dakota.

In 2015, he directed the short movie ELLIS, starring Robert De Niro. The movie, set in the abandoned Ellis Island Hospital complex and using JR's UNFRAMED art installations, tells the forgotten story of the immigrants who built America.

In 2016, JR was invited by the Louvre and made I.M. Pei's famous glass pyramid disappear through a surprising anamorphosis. That year, he also worked on his Giants series in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympics, creating new gigantic sculptural installations at the scale of the city, depicting competing athletes in action, supported by scaffolding. His work putting an emphasis on the beauty of the athletic movement.

In 2018, JR partnered with Time magazine, to produce their cover story, featuring over two hundred Americans who have been impacted by guns, including "hunters and activists, teachers and police officers, parents and children", to produce "Guns in America"—a talking mural—on one of the most polarizing issues in the United States today. JR filmed the 245 contributors in three selected cities, Dallas, St. Louis, Missouri, and Washington, D.C. The November 5, 2018 Time cover is a collage of those individuals, whose profiles become a gateway to 245 unique stories.

In 2010, during a radio program in San Diego, California, artist Shepard Fairey stated: "JR is the most ambitious street artist working." Le Monde has described his work as "revealing humanity." With over a million Instagram followers, he's one of the most popular artists on social media.

The Inside Out Project is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work in the form of black and white photographic portraits. In 2013, the project created a massive exhibit in Times Square in Manhattan that challenged advertising with art created from thousands of portraits of locals and tourists.

Unframed is an ongoing project that began in 2010, realized using images by famous or anonymous photographers, and archival images that JR interpreted and took out of their context depending on the place, neighborhood, or city he worked in. In works such as those made in May 2013 in Marseille, France, JR dug into the identity of the neighborhood of la Belle de Mai and invited its inhabitants to think about the memory of their streets by looking into their personal photo albums. The photographs, old or new, cropped or enlarged, create monumental artworks on the facades of neighborhoods and transform personal and multiple footprints of what is part of the city's history and collective memory. JR has exhibited Unframed works in Cincinnati, Marseille, Atlanta, Washington DC, Baden Baden, Grottaglie, Vevey, and São Paulo.

U.S.–Mexico border art
In September 2017, JR erected a scaffolding with a large photograph of a little boy, on the Mexican side of the U.S.–Mexico border, giving the impression of the toddler curiously peering over the fence, when seen from the U.S. side. The boy, named Kikito, lives with his family close to the border in Tecate, where the piece of art was erected. On the last day of the installation, a border crossing picnic was arranged, with hundreds of participants.

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