JR WINS TED PRIZE !

Fantastic news.. JR wins $100 000 TED prize. Just to illustrate how big a deal this is for Street Art, two previous recipients of this prize were Bill Clinton and Bono !!!

We were absolutely honoured to host the Scandinavian premiere of JR's "Women are Heroes" during this years Nuart, a truly stunning and moving documentary that in our opinion should be on every country's national curriculum. Well done JR !!!

From Tedprize.com

JR, a moving and innovative artist who exhibits freely in the world’s streets, has been named the recipient of the 2011 TED Prize — an award granting $100,000 and something much bigger: a wish to change the world with the support of the TED community.

JR represents a new chapter in the TED Prize. While a seemingly unconventional recipient, his work matches the creativity and innovative spirit of TED’s community, and his art inspires people to view the world differently –- and want to change it for the better.

JR creates what might be called pervasive art.” Working with a team of volunteers in various urban environments, he mounts enormous black-and-white photo canvases that spread on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa, and across the favelas of Brazil. These images become part of the local landscape and capture people’s attention and imagination around the world.

In Rio, he turned hillsides into dramatic visual landscape by applying images to the facades of favela homes. In Kenya, for his project “Women Are Heroes,” he turned Kibera into a stunning gallery of local faces. (See the trailer for “Women Are Heroes” above.) And in Israel and Palestine, he mounted photos of a rabbi, imam and priest on walls across the region –- including the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.

JR remains anonymous -– never showing his full face, revealing his name, or explaining his huge portraits –- to allow for an encounter between the subject and passers-by.

“JR’s mind-blowing creations have inspired people to see art where they wouldn’t expect it and create it when they didn’t know they could,” said TED Prize Director Amy Novogratz.

Over the course of the next months, JR will be working with the TED Prize team to develop an auducious wish that will involve the world in a brand new piece of art. The wish will be announced at TED2011 in Long Beach, California, at the end of February. Watch TEDPrize.org for news.

FROM NYT

Award to Artist Who Gives Slums a Human Face
by Randy Kennedy

It’s not common for important philanthropic prizes to go to people whose work involves criminal trespass and who make statements like the following: “You never know who’s part of the police and who’s not.”

But the TED conference, the California lecture series named for its roots in technology, entertainment and design, said on Tuesday that it planned to give its annual $100,000 prize for 2011 — awarded in the past to figures like Bill Clinton, Bono and the biologist E. O. Wilson — to the Parisian street artist known as J R, a shadowy figure who has made a name for himself by plastering colossal photographs in downtrodden neighborhoods around the world. The images usually extol local residents, to whom he has become a Robin Hood-like hero.

For most recipients, the value of the six-year-old award has less to do with the money than with the opportunity it grants the winner to make a “wish”: to devote the funds to a humanitarian project that will almost inevitably draw donations and other help from the organization’s corporate partners and influential supporters. The chef Jamie Oliver, the 2010 prize winner, recently proposed setting up an international effort to further his campaign against obesity; Mr. Clinton’s wish has channeled significant resources toward the creation of a rural health system in Rwanda.

From the NYTIMES.. Read the full article and check out the slideshows here

JR Website