THE JR CHRONICLES
JR's Brave Truth at The Brooklyn Museum
JR, the Parisian-born artist, has emerged as one of the most powerful voices, storytellers, photographers, culture documentarians and street artists of our time. The Brooklyn Museum presents the largest solo show of the artist featuring some of his most iconic work and introduces a monumental new mural, The Chronicles of New York, which has more than 1,000 portraits of people who were interviewed and photographed in NYC over the summer of 2018.
Three years ago, the PROVOKR Awards chose JR as the Artist of the Year. We have been moved by his work constantly and featured his street murals here many times. JR shakes it up.
He starts with a heartfelt commitment to a specific community and its people and his desire to question loudly the more powerful. He is a revolutionary. His images are wonderfully off beat and human on their own. His love of street or guerrilla art takes the photographs to to the walls, the borders, the stairs, the windows, and to the streets themselves. Anything can be his canvas. He has reinvented photography and given the photograph a new powerful purpose.
Our hats, or our lens caps, are off to the fabulously imaginative curation by Sharon Matt Atkins, Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian, and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian. The show features work from 2001 to the present in photographs, films, dioramas, and documentation of the artist’s installations.
JR found a camera on the Paris Metro in 2001. He had begun his career as a graffiti artist and combined the two immediately taking photographs of friends in his community and pasting those on buildings in urban centers. Thanks to the person who lost their camera that day because without it an art form and a cultural revolution might not have been born.
