Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco
    JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco
    JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco
    Ebook215 pages58 minutes

    JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco

    By JR and Neal Benezra

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    World renowned artist, TED Prize winner, Oscar nominee, and one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2018, JR is a contemporary art superstar. In 2018, he brought his legendary photo truck to San Francisco. More than 1,000 citizens posed for his camera and told their stories, and JR compiled their portraits into an astounding photographic mural, a portrait of the city. To be installed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it is the latest of his ground-breaking and deeply compelling art projects. This rich volume features all the individual portraits and selected stories alongside behind-the-scenes photos, a foreword by Neal Benezra, and an introduction by JR. A removable poster showcases the entire mural. For JR's legions of fans and anyone who loves or lives in San Francisco, this book reveals art and urban community from a new angle.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChronicle Books Digital
    Release dateMay 21, 2019
    ISBN9781452176758
    JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco
    Author

    JR

    JR is a celebrated artist whose oversize black-and-white portraits adorn walls, streets, and rooftops around the world. He lives in Paris and New York.

    Related to JR

    Related ebooks

    Art For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Flow of Pictures

      Sep 5, 2023

      The Flow of Pictures
      7 min read

    • Article

      Viewpoint Jon Bentley

      Aug 16, 2022

      Photographing the banal is nothing new. It was arguably luminaries like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, back in the 1970s, who pioneered the genre. Through laser-like powers of selection, combined with vividly saturated colour, they found photog

      2 min read

    • Article

      Outsmarting The Smartphone

      May 24, 2021

      I saw an observation recently that stated that the difference between a smartphone and a camera was involvement… to which I would add the words “and commitment”. Then there’s the online promotional campaign currently being run by Ted’s Cameras under

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Art Of Architecture

      Apr 15, 2023

      The Art Of Architecture
      7 min read

    • Article

      Five Hundred Glass Negatives

      Sep 7, 2017

      Five Hundred Glass Negatives
      6 min read

    • Article

      Imogen Cunningham

      Sep 8, 2020

      Imogen Cunningham
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Sun Picture Tax

      May 1, 2021

      The Sun Picture Tax
      4 min read

    • Article

      Bill Brandt

      Oct 30, 2018

      In 1927, a young man by the name of Bill Brandt arrived in Vienna to see a lung specialist. He was 23 and had spent the previous six years in a Swiss hospital recovering from tuberculosis. The city was much to his liking, and Brandt decided to stay,

      2 min read

    • Article

      Alex Webb

      Nov 3, 2016

      Alex Webb
      6 min read

    • Article

      Minor White

      Dec 10, 2019

      Minor White
      4 min read

    • Article

      William Henry Fox Talbot

      Jul 28, 2020

      William Henry Fox Talbot
      2 min read

    • Article

      Agenda

      Dec 8, 2020

      Agenda
      2 min read

    • Article

      Philippe Halsman

      Jul 2, 2019

      Philippe Halsman
      2 min read

    • Article

      Create Your Own Look

      Feb 21, 2023

      Create Your Own Look
      9 min read

    • Article

      Richard Estes

      Oct 1, 2021

      Richard Estes
      5 min read

    • Article

      City of Images

      Sep 4, 2018

      City of Images
      11 min read

    • Article

      EXTERIOR Explorations

      Apr 21, 2020

      EXTERIOR Explorations
      3 min read

    • Article

      Artists at Work

      May 19, 2021

      Artists at Work
      5 min read

    • Article

      Art

      Jun 14, 2022

      Art
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Master Reawakened

      Jul 1, 2022

      A Master Reawakened
      5 min read

    • Article

      Sam Francis: Resurrection

      Oct 1, 2021

      Sam Francis: Resurrection
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for JR

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      JR - JR

      art

      JR AT SFMOMA

      In January 2018, I received an email from Marc Benioff. Founder and CEO of Salesforce, Benioff is acknowledged to be one of the most innovative business leaders in our community and, equally important, an inspiring philanthropist deeply engaged in enhancing the welfare of the Bay Area community.

      The message related to the French artist JR and a project he was undertaking in San Francisco. Eventually to be titled The Chronicles of San Francisco, JR’s project involved transforming a trailer truck into a photographic studio, parking it in twenty-four predetermined locations across the length and breadth of San Francisco, and welcoming twelve hundred self-selected individuals in off the street to be filmed, photographed, and interviewed. The finished work would take the form of an enormous photo-based media arts mural. Benioff wondered whether I could imagine presenting the work at SFMOMA.

      For several years I had been contemplating how the work of a contemporary street artist might be brought into our galleries. From 1930, when our founding director, Grace McCann Morley, persuaded Diego Rivera to come to San Francisco to complete a series of mural commissions, our city has been home to a rich, and expressly democratic, tradition of paintings made for the public. And yet this tradition—so deeply embedded in the culture of our city—seemed incompatible with the refined and elite world of museums. Perhaps JR’s project might provide just the right opportunity to bring art from the street into our museum.

      I had only a passing awareness of JR. I quickly did some research and found that, although still in his mid-thirties, the artist had a remarkable and unique body of work to his credit. Having grown up in Paris, as a young teenager JR had begun to tag buildings in the city. Soon he shifted from graffiti to photo-based work, creating images of faces, printing them on large sheets of inexpensive paper, and pasting them on buildings.

      Initially JR’s practice reminded me of the Affichistes, French artists such as Jacques Villeglé, and Raymond Hains, who in the late 1940s began to work with well-worn posters and advertisements, tearing them down and composing the fragments into collages. However, while the Affichistes transformed billboard scraps into works for galleries, collectors, and museums, JR was making photographs, printing them on cheap paper, and posting them on walls in the cities in which he worked. JR’s is a fundamentally populist practice which has little to do with the art world of collectors, galleries, and museums.

      In a few short years, JR’s practice attracted international attention and he was soon completing projects throughout France and in many countries around the world. Perhaps the most powerful is a large mural focused on the people of Les Bosquets, a housing development in the Paris suburb of Clichy-Montfermeil. In 2005 violent riots had broken out among the largely émigré population in this neighborhood; and, eleven years later, in 2016, JR photographed 750 residents. The resulting work, The Chronicles of JR pasting the roof of the trailer truck with the image of a homeless individual Clichy-Montfermeil, was inaugurated at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and it was subsequently installed outdoors in the neighborhood where the images were made. A massive photographic collage of the 750 figures, the work captures the spirit of frustration and anger of the community from which the riots emanated. It is a very political work.

      Along with my museum colleague Ruth Berson, I met with JR in January 2018. We expressed enthusiasm for his project, and he was thrilled to learn that our museum was planning a major Rivera exhibition for the fall of 2020. It was Rivera, arguably the greatest muralist of the twentieth century, and an artist of profound populist sentiment, whom JR idolized. One of Rivera’s San Francisco murals, Pan American Unity, which will be the centerpiece of the SFMOMA exhibition, proved to be of particular interest to JR. Painted for the Golden Gate International Exhibition held on Treasure Island in 1939–40, Pan American Unity is an expansive meditation on the relationship between Mexico and the United States, replete with iconic figures and images representing both countries. While working on his project, JR studied the Rivera mural at City College of San Francisco, and he would reinterpret elements of its iconography— including an image of painter Frida Kahlo, Rivera’s wife—in his own composition.

      The Chronicles of San Francisco is a populist spectacle, a panoramic theater of our extraordinary and idiosyncratic city. In order to capture the singular spirit of San Francisco, JR parked his portable studio in neighborhoods ranging from Pacific Heights to the Western Addition, from the Mission to the Civic Center. Upon close inspection, certain public figures—such as former San Francisco mayor and then–lieutenant governor of California Gavin Newsom and Golden State Warriors basketball star Draymond Green—can be identified; however, the overwhelming majority are anonymous. Swimmers mix with members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, homeless men and women mix with an obstetrician reenacting the birth of a baby. Laptops and selfies abound. The street theater that is such a part of daily life in San Francisco is captured in all its crazy glory. A fundamental component of the piece involves an interview undertaken with each participant so they might share their own story. In addition, JR’s team collected contact information for each of the twelve hundred participants so that each might be contacted and invited to view the work at SFMOMA.

      In addition to our shared passion for the work of Rivera, our partnership with JR benefited from the gallery location where we will display his work. In 2016, SFMOMA opened a new wing designed by the architectural firm Snøhetta. One of the essential goals of our expansion was and continues to be an effort to mean more to more people. Toward that end we created public, unticketed space totaling 40,000 square feet on the first and second floors of the new SFMOMA. The centerpiece is the Roberts Family Gallery, a large and open gallery with floor-to-ceiling window walls on two sides. The Roberts Gallery also offers a large series of Roman steps, effectively creating

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1