Why you should listen
It's been more than a decade since JR received the TED Prize, which prompted the launch of "Inside Out," a global project giving people worldwide the chance to make statements of public art in the form of black-and-white portraits that are blown up and pasted on spaces such as a footbridge in Hong Kong, the sidewalks of Times Square in New York and the dome of the Pantheon in Paris. More than 450,000 people from 141 countries have taken part in the project since 2011, while JR himself has continued to press forward relentlessly.
More recent projects include the 2018 Oscar-nominated feature documentary Visages Villages, co-directed with legendary New Wave director Agnès Varda, a large-scale pasting in a maximum security prison in California, a TIME cover, a video mural featuring 1,200 people presented at SFMOMA, an exhibition on the abandoned hospital on Ellis Island and a huge installation at the US-Mexico border fence. Working anonymously, JR turns those who might not consider themselves typical museum visitors into art lovers.
