At first glance, a vast black-and-white mural that has just appeared on the facade of the Superblue building in Miami does nothing to dispel the idea that you’re in the world’s party capital. There are women in bikinis, nightclub dancers, dining couples, dudes in bucket hats, ladies with facelifts.
This jostling mass of humanity is the work of the 40-year-old French artist JR who, from November 2022, photographed 1,048 residents of the city to create the collage. Parking his 50ft truck, which is fitted out as a full photographic studio, in neighbourhoods all over the city, he shot portraits and recorded the voices of all those curious enough to come and see what he was up to. “I told them to present themselves as they want to be seen,” he says, as we look up at the mural together in the beating Florida sun. For one man, that meant stripping naked.
But this is Miami, and beneath the glossy facade there is darkness too, discernible in the audio recordings that visitors to the mural can access with their smartphones. “When you listen to their stories, there’s a lot of violence and poverty,” says JR. “It’s right there in the middle of the glamour and the glitter. Of course, that’s like any city, but there’s a particular disparity in Miami. We’d go to a neighbourhood where someone had been shot that morning. People come here with a lot of dreams, often from far away. And those dreams come true for some, but not for others.”
Superblue is a private company that specialises in experiential art. In its huge 5,000 sq m building in the Allapattah district, there are interactive digital displays and rooms full of foam; a mirrored maze by the British artist Es Devlin; and a space suffused with light by James Turrell, godfather of the phenomenological artwork, that feels like going to heaven. It’s crowd-pleasing stuff.
As such, it is a fitting venue for JR, for whom popular engagement is the ultimate goal. Inside Superblue, he has set up a photo booth and a massive printer; the public are invited to come and make their own portrait and take it away. “It will be printed here and drop down here and fly through the room and you have to go and grab it, then it’s yours,” he says, pointing at rollers set into the ceiling. “It’s called JR’s Printing Press. People can use them as they please. To frame them for their sitting room, or to band together and paste them up in a public place to demonstrate that they are a community.”
Working with public portraiture is the Frenchman’s stock-in-trade. It all started in 2004, in the housing project called Les Bosquets in the Paris suburb of Montfermeil, where he stuck his enlarged portraits of residents to the walls and where, in 2005, the grind of poverty and lack of opportunity provoked a fierce uprising. “Through graffiti, which I had been doing since I was 15, I’d developed an understanding of visual power. I wasn’t academic. I didn’t know about art, who Basquiat was. But I had begun to understand the direct impact of a visual image,” he says.
Using a camera he’d found in the metro, he made large-scale portraits of the area’s residents and pasted them on the outside of the buildings, not so far from the suburbs in which he grew up. “I wanted to show that real people live here, and they deserve to be seen and, by implication, to be heard.”
He has since travelled the world, making similar work, including in Brazil, India, Israel and the Palestinian territories. “I’ve been arrested in Turkey, Germany, Paris. Not because I’m interested in doing things illegally, but because that’s the only way to get things done, to present work right in the public realm,” he says. “But it’s worth it because art has power, and we’ve done projects that have brought about physical change.” He describes one in the favelas of Rio, where he says it led the mayor to intervene and provide electricity and garbage collection and better conditions. This was in 2008, and the artist pasted supersized portraits of women on to the makeshift houses running down a steep hill. “They are the worst victims of the conditions there,” he says. “It meant that the media started paying attention.”
More recently, in 2019, he gained access to the maximum-security prison of Tehachapi in California and photographed prisoners from above, then assembled the images into a large picture which his studio, prison guards and the prisoners themselves pasted on to the exercise-yard floor — re-exposing men who had been hidden from view.
“There were 50 or 60 inmates who had life sentences without parole,” says JR. “But the project brought the guards and inmates together and it created a chain reaction. The guards began to give the prisoners positive reviews. Some were even released after a couple of years as a result.” The film that emerged from that project premiered at the Telluride Film Festival earlier this year.
JR cuts a charismatic figure. He dresses in black with a pork pie hat and dark glasses. “When I was a graffiti artist, it was a way to not be recognised, to not pay fines,” he says. “Now when I take off the hat, no one recognises me.” He is quietly, calmly spoken, an idealist who seems to carry people with him effortlessly as his projects expand in ambition. His studios — one in north-east Paris near the Père Lachaise cemetery, another in Nolita in New York — are financed by sales of his artwork through the French gallery Perrotin and fees such as Superblue’s. “All income goes back into the machine,” he says. “My model was [the late Bulgarian artist] Christo, who carried out all those massive public art projects on his own terms. He proved that it was possible. We became good friends.”
JR was friends, too, with the film director Agnès Varda. In 2017, they made an enchanting, rambling road-trip movie, redolent of Varda’s nouvelle vague credentials, through the French countryside. Called Visages Villages (translated as Faces Places), it won Varda her first Oscar nomination.
Now he is working on a film with Robert De Niro, whom he met when he set up the New York studio in 2014. “It’s about his parents being artists, but disappearing into his shadow,” says JR. “A completely independent project — no studios or platforms are involved. It’s the first time I’m using very large images to talk about something very, very personal.”
In November, he also delivered an extraordinary free performance called Chiroptera, for which 153 dancers were positioned on the scaffolding in front of the Palais Garnier in Paris, with music by Thomas Bangalter (one half of Daft Punk) and choreography by Damien Jalet. (It is viewable online and well worth a look.) It was a high-risk strategy, where even the curtain wouldn’t rise properly just two days before the performance, and on the night it was soaked in rain. Twenty-five thousand people turned up for the two performances. It is the second project he has staged here, and now the Opera would like a third. “I said, ‘Oh my God, can I breathe for one minute?’” he laughs. “Can I just go to Miami?”
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