The New York Times presented a time-lapse of French artist JR creating a large-scale mural in Manhattan, New York. Situated in the triangle below the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, the one-of-a-kind mural by JR stands at an impressive 150 feet and features a black-and-white image of a regular man walking through the city. The time-lapse video shows the progression of the mural’s public installation as thousands of New York City pedestrians walk across and interact with the giant mural. So what you actually see on the cover of that week’s New York Times Magazine is real. The image is by JR, who is known for pasting giant photographs on urban surfaces all over the world. The project photographed recent immigrants and pasted their images on the city’s streets, where they and other immigrants are often invisible. The pasting was made in the heart of Manhattan, on Flatiron plaza, the triangle of pavement between Fifth Avenue, Broadway and East 23rd Street.
JR’s work has long been preoccupied with the theme of immigration. His installation at Ellis Island features large archival photographs of immigrants displayed throughout the island’s abandoned hospital. That installation is permanent and still visitable today through hard-hat tours organized by Save Ellis Island.
From Flatiron to the Pyramids
The Walker mural came during JR’s early New York chapter. In the decade since, he has become one of the most recognized contemporary artists in the world. Born Jean-Rene on February 22, 1983, in the Paris suburb of Montfermeil, JR won the TED Prize in 2011 and used it to launch the Inside Out Project, a global participatory art initiative that has now involved over 500,000 people across 152 countries.
In 2016, the Louvre invited JR to create an anamorphic installation that made I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid appear to vanish when viewed from the right angle. That same year, he built gigantic scaffolding-supported athlete sculptures across Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics. In 2017, he installed “Kikito” on the US-Mexico border: a 40-foot image of a one-year-old Mexican boy peering over the border wall in Tecate, culminating in a binational picnic on both sides.
In 2021, JR created “Greetings from Giza” for the first contemporary art exhibition ever held at Egypt’s 4,500-year-old Pyramids: a steel-and-mesh sculpture that made the top of the Great Pyramid appear to levitate. In 2023, 153 dancers performed on scaffolding 30 meters high on the facade of the Palais Garnier in Paris, set to music by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk.
Film, Gallery, and Scale
JR co-directed Faces Places (2017) with Agnes Varda, traveling through rural France creating portraits of people they met. The film won the L’Oeil d’or at Cannes and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards. His later documentary Tehachapi (2024) chronicles his collaboration with incarcerated men at a California maximum-security prison.
He was named to TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People list in 2018. He is represented by Perrotin, Pace Gallery, and Galleria Continua, with concurrent exhibitions in 2025-2026 spanning London, Shanghai, Kyoto, Naples, Beijing, Los Angeles, and Paris. Prints are available through Atelier JR.
For more large-scale street art, see Street Art by Ernest Zacharevic and Anamorphic Illusions by Truly Design.
