SoHo Streets Become the Latest Canvas for French Street Artist JR’s Photography
JR creates work that champions underrepresented groups of people. Working with a team of volunteers in various urban environments, he mounts enormous black-and-white photographs on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa, and across the favelas of Brazil. These images become part of the local landscape and capture people’s attention and imagination around the world.
JR covers the Favela Morro Da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2008
In Rio, he turned hillsides into dramatic visual landscape by applying images to the facades of favela homes. In Kenya, for his project “Women Are Heroes,” he turned Kibera into a stunning gallery of local faces. And in Israel and Palestine, he mounted photos of a rabbi, imam and priest on walls across the region including the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.
JR in Kibera, Kenya as part of the Women Are Heroes series, 2008
JR received world-wide recognition as the recipient of the 2011 TED Prize. On his recent trip to New York he pasted up images from a new series,”Lakota, North Dakota” which features the Standing Rock and Pineridge Native Reservations whose impoverished and forgotten communities have suffered unspeakable hardships.
JR's Lakota, North Dakota series on Bowery and Houston Street
JR's Lakota, North Dakota series on Wooster and Grand Street
JR's Lakota, North Dakota series on Wooster and Grand Street
You can find more on JR on his website and you can participate in his latest project, The Inside Out Project, “a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work.”
The Culture Report 