art We Love :: JR – Women Are Heroes

Here’s a taste of JR’s latest project entitled, Women Are Heroes. It’s been pretty amazing to see the scale of JR’s work growing. I’ve been told you could even see this recent example of his work from space.

My favorite part is the clapping and cheering from the people in the village as the train goes by. I’d love to create something that would evoke the same reaction. Crazy inspiring!

JR is a 25-year-old parisian (from tunisian and eastern european parents), living in a middle-class background. He describes himself as a graffiti artist, but started taking photographs when he found a camera on the paris metro as a 17-year-old. he is now, in his own words, a hybrid ‘photograffeur’, who pastes enormous black-and-white photographic canvases of eyes and noses and mouths in various urban environments.

JR has just returned from kenya, where he and his 10 unpaid assistants transformed kibera, one of africa’s biggest slums, into a vast exhibition space. They plastered the people’s portraits on train carriages and on the roofs of their houses.

JR is described as the most exciting new ‘outsider’ artist since Banksy. ‘All the money is going back into the work’ he says, ‘I planning a cultural center for Kibeira, it will be a place where the people can post photographs on the walls.’

By using waterproof vinyl material, JR ensured the art intervention might have a practical purpose too. ‘They don’t understand art just for the love of art. It has to make sense. by helping their roofs to become rainproof, we did made sense and they loved it.’ JR

Artwork by JR, viewed from above. JR competes with the billboard ads of coca-cola and levi for attention.

JR’s work in kenya is only the latest in a number of ambitious community projects he has undertaken to include ‘ordinary people’. JR says he is not political, rather than being an artist with a cause, he is an artist who causes people to think.

The times online magazine stated in a recent article ‘the trade in JR’s pictures, created in third world slums and bought by affluent westerners, is reinvested in the slums, this makes him a robin hood figure’.

via: designboom.com

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 6:22 PM and is filed under FWL BLOG and tagged with AFFICHES, art, artist, com, face, FAVELA, France, heroes, JR, KENYA, KOURTRAJME, Millimetres, photo, PHOTOGRAPHE, RUE, street, street art, trailer, train, women, WOMEN ARE HEROES, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.