JR - Chronicles

232 pages
Text(s) by Sharon Matt Atkins and Drew Sawyer
22 x 16.8 x 2.4 cm 
Language: English, French
Hardcover 
Publisher:  Maison CF
2019

A comprehensive overview on the French artist who has transformed cities worldwide with his epic portraits of their inhabitants

Over the past two decades, French artist JR has massively expanded the impact of public art through his ambitious projects that give visibility and agency to people around the world. Showcasing the full scope of the artist's career, JR: Chronicles accompanies the first major exhibition in North America of works by the French-born artist. Working at the intersections of photography, social engagement and street art, JR collaborates with communities by taking individual portraits, reproducing them at a monumental scale and wheat pasting them―sometimes illegally―in nearby public spaces.

This superbly produced volume traces JR's career from his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide, to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics. The centerpiece of the accompanying exhibition is The Chronicles of New York City, a new epic mural of more than 1,000 New Yorkers. Also included are previously unseen murals set in Brooklyn; Face 2 Face, diptychs of Israelis and Palestinians in Palestinian and Israeli cities; Women Are Heroes, featuring images of the eyes of women gazing back at their communities in numerous countries; The Gun Chronicles: A Story of America, JR's complex work on guns in America; and other equally famous works.