JR: Bringing People Together through Public Art
The artist JR is used to making art in the midst of social upheaval. In the early days of his career, wheatpasting portraits of his community onto the walls of Paris streets, his images became the backdrop to riots that began in the city’s low-income housing estates. As protesters took to the streets in 2005, setting thousands of vehicles on fire in response to aggressive policing and youth unemployment, the irreverent, confrontational faces that appeared in JR’s Portrait of a Generation series looked on.
Since then, JR has gravitated toward areas of conflict — the US-Mexico border, Rio’s favelas, the Gaza strip — pasting, in community, images of marginalized people into the fabric of the urban landscape. The artist, who keeps his identity anonymous, has a vision as ambitious as his vast imagery: to change the world by bringing people together through public art. His Inside Out: The People’s Art Project invites groups from all over the world to wheatpaste their images into public space.
JR. Inside Out, Times Square, 2013. Installation view, Times Square, New York, USA.
This year, when the coronavirus pandemic turned the world upside down, his team repurposed Inside Out’s Snapchat filter to create a global graduation yearbook for students everywhere who have been robbed of their commencement rituals. Part of American basketball player LeBron James’s initiative Graduate Together, the filter has been used by tens of thousands of students. We spoke to JR about his recent projects, and making art in times of crisis.
why did you want to help create an environment to honor this moment in their lives?
Living in the US for nine years, I realized how powerful it is to celebrate that whole school period and learning period, and the families getting together. Every year I would see photos and photos and photos of graduation. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought of it when the COVID crisis happened. And then when someone told me, there will be no graduation this year, I was like: Oh my god, I hadn’t thought about that! It really came to me by my team saying we should do something about it, and we should use Inside Out. And I said: Yes, that’s perfect, let’s use Inside Out and help them celebrate it in any way we can.
You have put together a website that operates as a live yearbook with a continuous scroll of thousands of students from around the world. How did it come together?
We had to think: how do we make a graduation book? How do we make a graduation book for a website? How can we create a yearbook that would look more like an art piece? So we built the website and started the call for action. In the case of Inside Out, most of the time it’s people not really understanding — does it have to be a full-length photo? Can I do it with my dog? With my teacher? And we had to say: No no no, the only ones we validate are portraits. Once people got that, and we could show a few examples, then things went smooth. We started receiving thousands of them.
With Inside Out you encourage participants to create “Group Actions,” using their images collectively with others to highlight issues that are important to them. Have there been any group actions that have emerged from Graduate Together? I know that’s more challenging during a lockdown.
I don’t think it would have been impossible, but often those group actions have to happen from the people themselves, not pushed by us. We put down roots for the project with the [Youtube] TV show and putting them in Times Square, and in the yearbook — as many events as possible around the photos. But I wish the students understood they could take their photos and paste the high school. I think, depending on the places, people don’t really know what we can do, can’t do. It’s a weird time where people don’t exactly know what is possible.
The faces of US High School graduates live on a billboard in Times Square, New York, during “Graduate Together: America Honors the High School Class of 2020” on May 16, 2020. © JR. Photo: Justin Bettman.
"An artwork should always raise questions, not give answers."
You have been capturing images of people for a long time. What do you think it means to people to have their photograph taken?
The whole question for me is what we do with our portrait, not who takes the portrait. In a case like the yearbook, it’s everyone’s photo being sent using the filter on Snapchat. It’s what their photo will become that is more important than how the portrait is taken. The portrait itself is not the artwork. The artwork is your portrait hanging in the middle of Times Square or somewhere else. The artwork for me really starts when I start pasting. The pasting is always the most important part of the process.
You recently pasted an image of George Floyd’s eye (and Adama Traoré’s, who was killed by French police in 2016) onto a school in Paris. Why did you decide to represent only his eye?
An artwork should always raise questions, not give answers. I liked the idea of putting just an eye on a school, in a really busy area where people would walk by and think: who’s that kid, whose eye is that? I kind of liked the idea that when people look at George Floyd’s eye they had to figure out by themselves who it is. We actually took a photograph of the floor exactly where he was killed in Minneapolis and the artist Zenith repainted those fractures on the floor, those cracks on the floor, over his eye. So if you look, the crack you are seeing over the eye is the exact place where George Floyd was killed on the concrete. I’ve been talking to a lot of kids in the school and they’ve been wondering whose eye is that and what does it mean, and of course they knew about George Floyd but they still had questions. I like creating these conversations.
Has this historic moment that we’re in changed your practice in any way?
My work has always been talking about these issues, since I was 17 or 18 years old. I pasted my first artworks in a neighborhood that had seen the killings of kids, and the riots that exploded in France in front of my photos, when I was just 19. So I have always been talking about those issues in different ways, in different contexts sometimes. I’ve always been trying to bring positivity among people, and showing people’s faces in hope of reminding people of the similarities between all of us.
JR. Migrants, Mayra, Picnic across the Border, Tecate, Mexico – USA, 2017, 2017. Installation view, Tecate, Mexico, and California, US.
