Artist JR 'Runs' to the Hamptons

If you’ve happened to drive by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill in recent weeks, you may have noticed the group of children frolicking in the meadow along the front of the building. Though it looks like a happy scene, in truth, the giant 200-foot-long mural pasted on the side of the building depicting silhouettes of the seemingly happy youngsters holds a deeper meaning.

That’s because the photographs of the children playing soccer used in the mural were all taken at refugee camps in Rwanda, Ukraine, Mauritania, Greece and Colombia. The mural, “Les Enfants D’Ouranos,” which will remain on view at the Parrish for the next year, is the latest project by elusive French street artist JR.

While the 40 children depicted in the mural were running through refugee camps when the pictures were originally taken, their silhouettes have been transported in JR’s art piece to the ideal playing field on the East End.

The message that JR wishes to get across in “Les Enfants D’Ouranos,” is that the children remain playful, regardless of their difficult living conditions, he explained in a June 9 talk at the Parrish about the mural, as well as his journey as an artist.

JR’s past artistic projects have garnered a lot of publicity, and they include printing a giant toddler and installing it looking over the wall at the Mexico-United States border, and pasting billboards depicting Israelis and Palestinians of the same profession side by side in his project “Face2Face.”

What makes “Les Enfants D’Ouranos,” different from his past photographic projects, however, is that JR (whose name is Jean-René) decided to print the images as negatives. The reversal allows for the message surrounding children in refugee camps to change, and have the subjects illuminated and their shadowy silhouettes filled with light, he said. The meadow that rests outside the south facade of the Parrish creates an image of the children running through rural and beautiful fields.

The idea for “Les Enfants D’Ouranos,” he said, stemmed from his project “Deplacé.e.s,” which also focused on refugee children as the subject of his work. “Deplacé.e.s” began when the war in Ukraine started in early 2022, and it occurred to JR that he could drive from his house in Paris to the front lines.

He said that he met someone at the border of Ukraine and, via Whatsapp, asked him to send him pictures of what he saw. JR became inspired by one photo in particular: a young girl smiling and playing.

JR printed the photo of the young girl, Valeria, onto a 180-foot-long tarp. He explained the arduous journey the heavy print took, being rolled up and driven to the border of Poland, and then placed on a trolley to cross the border. Once in Ukraine, JR met up with some young adults there who he had been in contact with, and they drove him from the border to the center of a nearby city.

“I had told him previously, ‘You know, to do this image, because we can’t paste, I need you to gather like hundreds of people.’” JR recalled. “Then he was telling me, ‘I got those hundreds of people but I got to fact check every one so that there is no spy.’”

After a rapid check, in the middle of the war, hundreds of people came onto the streets to help display and carry the massive print. His vision was for all of those people to carry the print and then open it at the same time, so that the image would unfold in a uniform and visually pleasing way from an aerial view. JR noted how amazing this was, that in a time of conflict, all of these people could come together and help open this portrait.

“The idea was very simple,” said JR. “The idea was that the planes who are bombarding would see that they are also kids, and so the image would be large enough so that the planes would see them as they are bombarding.”

After creating the giant print and opening it in Ukraine, JR was faced with the dilemma of what to do with it afterward. He said that the people in Ukraine encouraged him to continue to use it and display it elsewhere, which led to the transportation of the enlarged Valeria print to several major cities all across Europe. From Paris to Rome, hundreds of people would gather to help open up the massive image in unison.

JR said that it is moments like these, when communities across the world find inspiration and hope in art, that inspire him to create more artistic projects. He told the audience that he started his project “Deplacé.e.s,” because of the displacement and constant movement that Valeria had to go through as a result of the war in Ukraine.

“At that time, the little girl you saw called Valeria, she was being moved from Ukraine,” said JR. “She had certainly been to Poland, to France, throughout Europe, and there is this same kind of situation happening in and around the world in different places. So, we started looking at all those places, where the same situation had happened in the past, from 10 years ago until recently.”

The project expanded beyond the Valeria print, and several prints were made of young children. Communities came together to display children from different countries that might have suffered through conflict or struggle. JR’s goal in photography has always been to create community, not to become a renowned artist, he said.

“It’s photography, but I am not a photographer,” said JR. “I use photography to bring people together … In all of this process the people do meet and that is always the key and at the heart of what I do.”

During the talk at the Parrish, JR covered a multitude of his works that go beyond the focus of children, including the work that led to him becoming an artist in the first place.

When JR first started creating and photographing art, he said that he did not even realize what he did was considered art until others defined his work that way. As a young teenager growing up in Paris, JR and his friends would graffiti their names on the walls around the city.

“I was just writing my name on walls, you know, and I guess when you do that it’s a way of saying, ‘I am here. I exist,’” said JR.

He found his first camera in the metro, and as it was abandoned by its previous owner, JR claimed it as his own and began taking photographs. Although the camera was cheap and not amazing in quality, it had a strong flash and allowed JR to bring his artistic vision to life. JR said that he had never been to museums or galleries before, nor did he study art, so he entered this artistic world in a very uniquely naive way.

His first widely noticed work was when he photographed his friend holding a video camera like a gun. JR told the audience at the Parrish that they proceeded to paste this image with strips of paper on the side of a building in an impoverished neighborhood in Paris. JR said that the next day, the mayor of this neighborhood attempted to sue JR for pasting this photo on this building without a permit. However, his attempts were in vain because he could not identify who JR was or which JR he was trying to sue. The photo stayed because the mayor wanted to avoid a riot stemming from the destruction and cleaning of the picture.

A year after the pasting of the photo, the 2005 French riots broke out in the northern suburbs of Paris between youth and police in the wake of the deaths of two teenagers of color. They were considered some of the worst and largest riots in French history, and JR’s photo of his friend was in the background of the news coverage.

“I was on the cover of The New York Times,” he said. “Not for my work, but for being the background of the largest riot. That’s how my career started, basically, because that’s when people noticed my work.”

JR’s “Les Enfants d’Ouranos” (Children of Ouranos) remains on view outside the Parrish through May 26, 2024. The mural is augmented by “Les Enfants d’Ouranos, Bois #6” — a large-scale work by JR from his 2022 series — on view in the museum’s interior lobby gallery through October 22. In that series, JR transferred negatives of the photograph onto reclaimed wood painted in black ink to create a more dramatic contrast. The exhibition is organized by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, executive director, and Corinne Erni, chief curator, with support from assistant curators Kaitlin Halloran and Brianna L. Hernández.

Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway, Water Mill. To learn more about the exhibition, visit parrishart.org. To learn more about JR, or view more of his unique projects, go to jr-art.net.