JR (artist)

Life and career

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.

JR later travelled throughout Europe to meet other people whose mode of artistic expression involved the use of outdoor walls. Then, he began wondering about the vertical limits, the walls and the façades that structure cities. After observing the people he met and listening to their message, JR pasted their portraits up in the streets and basements and on the roof tops of Paris.

Between 2004 and 2006, JR created Portraits of a Generation, portraits of young people from the housing projects around Paris that he exhibited in huge format. This illegal project became official when the City of Paris put JR’s photos up on buildings. At the beginning of his projects, JR wanted to bring art into the street: "In the street, we reach people who never go to museums."

In 2007, with Marco, 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. For the artist, this artistic act is first and foremost a human project: "The heroes of the project are all those who, on both sides of the wall, allowed me to paste the portraits on their houses."

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 2013, he continued working in New York City, with the Inside Out Project in Times Square, which challenged advertising with a massive work of art consisting of thousands of portraits of locals and tourists.

In January 2014, JR collaborated with the New York City Ballet for their second annual Art Series program, by exhibiting work in the theatre in Lincoln Center, including an interactive piece on the floor of the promenade. This collaboration led JR to explore the artistic medium of choreography in another project with the ballet months later.

JR calls himself an "urban artivist", he creates pervasive art that he puts up on the buildings in the Paris area projects, on the walls of the Middle East, on the broken bridges of Africa or in the favelas of Brazil. During the pasting phase, community members take part in the artistic process. In Brazil, for example, children became artists for a week. In these artistic acts, no scene separates the actors from the spectators.

After having exhibited in the cities from which JR’s subjects came, the photos traveled from New York to Berlin, Amsterdam to Paris As JR remains anonymous and does not frame his huge portraits, he leaves a space for an encounter between a subject/protagonist and a passerby/interpreter, and this is the essence of his work.

Critical reception

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 almost a million Instagram followers, he's one of the most popular artists on social media.

28 Millimetres

JR considers himself as "neither a street artist nor a photographer". To carry out his projects, he uses photography but also video, prints on paper or tarpaulins, urban spaces, books and especially social links. JR noted "I would like to bring art to improbable places, create projects so huge with the community that they are forced to ask themselves questions. I want to try to create images of hot spots such as the Middle East or Brazil that offer different points of view from the ones we see in the worldwide media which are often caricatures."

Portraits of a Generation

The Portraits of a Generation project constitutes the first stage of the 28 mm project. After the first unauthorized exhibit on the walls of the Cité des Bosquets housing project, JR returned and set himself up of this housing project and the neighbouring one, the Cité de la Forestière, both in the epicenter of the 2005 riots in the French suburbs. The first portraits were rapidly exhibited on the walls of the last popular neighbourhoods of the capital, in the east of Paris. These photos provoked the passerby in as much as they questioned the social and media representation of a whole generation that for some is only to be seen relegated to the outskirts of the capital.

Face2Face

The Face2Face project tried to show that beyond what separates them, Israelis and Palestinians are enough alike to be able to understand one another. Israeli and Palestinian men and women who have the same jobs accepted to laugh or cry, to scream or pull faces in front of JR’s lens. The portraits created were pasted up face to face, in monumental format on either side of the Separation Wall and in several surrounding towns. JR photographed and Marco wrote, together succeeding in creating the largest unauthorized 20 urban art exhibit in the world (la plus grande exposition d'art urbain au monde). The project’s goal was to show through images that art and laughter combined can break down prejudice.

The film Faces, directed by Gerard Maximin, about this artistic undertaking carried out in the Middle East by JR and Marco has won numerous prizes.

Women are Heroes

For this project, JR slipped into fantasmatic places, the ones seen on TV when there is violence, the ones an observer might go close to but never enter and that will not be found on any tourist guidebook tour. Women are Heroes introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future. In seeking what is common in their gaze, JR tried to get closer to what is universal: the human being. This project allowed him to keep the promise he made to these women: faire voyager leur histoire (to make their story travel). Women are Heroes has traveled to locations including Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya, Brazil, India, and Cambodia. In 2014, JR made one final project for Women Are Heroes with the dockers of Le Havre, France. Imaging a woman’s eyes from the previous trip in Kenya, JR and his team completed the largest pasting to date on shipping containers that were then stacked on a barge traveling the world to Malaysia. In doing so, he finally took the women’s stories around the globe.

Wrinkles of the City

The Los Surcos de la Ciudad project (The Wrinkles of the City) is based on the encounter between JR, the city of Cartagena, Spain, and its oldest inhabitants who are taken as the memory incarnate of the city, marked by the scars of its history, economic expansion and socio-cultural mutations. While meeting and photographing the elderly, JR imaged their wrinkles, the furrows of their brows, as the marks of Time, the traces of their lives that are linked with the history of the city.

For JR, these older people are the living memory of a city changing faster than they themselves age. For him, every one of their wrinkles and each day that goes by are inscribed in the buildings and in the streets of old Cartagena that provided JR with a heterogeneous architecture.

As of 2015, The Wrinkles of the City project has reached Shanghai, China, Los Angeles, California, Havana, Cuba, Berlin, Germany and Istanbul, Turkey.

Inside Out Project

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. The images are uploaded digitally and made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. Over 150,000 people from more than 108 countries have participated.

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. The effort to engage New Yorkers across the five boroughs after Hurricane Sandy, was completed using one of the Inside Out Project Photobooth trucks. This method created by JR produced a more direct connection of his work to the streets through an immediate interaction with the community and the people. The Photobooth trucks have since traveled around the world for a variety of different causes, including a nationwide tour that brought attention to immigration reform in America, and a 10-stop trip to major monuments in France ending with a large installation in the Pantheon in Paris.

Unframed

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.

In 2014, JR continued his Unframed project on Ellis Island, using photos from when the island operated as the entryway for millions of immigrants to America. These archival images were installed into the facades and walls of the abandoned hospital on the grounds that once housed the sick and dying.

NYCBallet

In 2014, JR collaborated with the New York City Ballet for their second annual Art Series program. JR exhibited artworks in the Lincoln Center David H. Koch theatre in January and February, including a large installation of an interactive piece on the floor of the promenade. This work followed his model of engaging with his fans and the public across social divides, connecting ballet patrons to first Time attendees with the image of the life-size ballerinas on the ground.

The Art Series led to further collaborations between the artist and the New York City Ballet, as months later he explored a new artistic medium of choreography. JR worked with the company's ballet master in chief Peter Martins to create a piece titled Les Bosquets based on his beginnings during the 2005 riots in the Parisian suburbs. For this project, the dancers became his paper and his works were transformed to the stage.

Feature films

JR transferred his Women Are Heroes project to the cinema in directing a feature film made up of images of the pasting phase of the installations and interviews of the women. Through this documentary film, the artist shows us how he installed the portraits of the women in urban spaces and the reactions of the inhabitants. He explains "this film gathers the images and the words of the women he met, the day to day flow of their lives and experiences to create, through art, a reality different from the one shown in the media".

This first film was part of the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. It was programmed in during La Semaine de la Critique (International Critics’ Week), and competed for the Caméra d'Or. In May 2010, JR was invited to present his film on Le Grand Journal on Canal+ in Cannes during the festival.

JR's second film, Inside Out: The People's Art Project, is a documentary that tracks the evolution of the biggest participatory art project in the world, Inside Out. JR inspired communities to define their most important causes with displays of giant black and white portraits pasted in the street. The project encourages citizens to take ownership of walls that were previously restricted and in doing so testing the limits of what they thought was possible. It is a Social Animals production in association with Notting Hill Films, directed by Alastair Siddons.

This film was featured as an official Documentary Feature Spotlight selection at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, premiered at the SVA Theatre on West 23rd Street, on Saturday, April 20 and debuted on HBO in May 2013.

In 2015, JR made the movie Les Bosquets inspired by the riots in the French suburbs in 2005 and featuring the performance of the ballet Les Bosquets of New York City Ballet (2014).
The same year, he directed the short film titled Ellis, starring Robert De Niro.

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

Awards

On 20 October 2010, JR won the TED Prize for 2011.

Prizes attributed to the film Faces by Gerard Maximin on the Face2Face project by JR and Marco:

iPad app

Books

Books with contributions by JR