Jr - JR: The Chronicles of San Francisco

Text by Neal Benezra copyright 2019 Chronicle Books LLC.

Map on copyright 2019 Chronicle Books LLC.

All other text and images copyright 2019 by JR.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 9781452176758 (epub, mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: JR, 1983 author. | Benezra, Neal David, 1953 writer of supplementary textual content. | Litak, Anne-Marie, writer of added commentary. | Levy, Eyal, writer of added commentary. | JR, 1983 Photographs. Selections. | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, host institution.
Title: JR : the chronicles of San Francisco / Neal Benezra ; with essays by Neal Benezra, JR, Anne-Marie Litak, and Eyal Levy.
Other titles: JR (Chronicle Books (Firm)) | Chronicles of San Francisco
Description: San Francisco, California : Chronicle Books, LLC, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018039990 | ISBN 9781452176697 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Portrait photographyCaliforniaSan FranciscoExhibitions. | Video artCaliforniaSan FranciscoExhibitions. | Mural painting and decorationCaliforniaSan FranciscoExhibitions. | Projection artCaliforniaSan FranciscoExhibitions. | JR, 1983Exhibitions. | PhotographersFranceExhibitions. | San Francisco (Calif.)Social life and customsExhibitions.
Classification: LCC TR680.J73 2019 | DDC 779.09794/61dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039990

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by neal benezra helen and charles schwab director san francisco museum of modern art

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, JRs 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 traditionso deeply embedded in the culture of our cityseemed incompatible with the refined and elite world of museums. Perhaps JRs 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 JRs practice reminded me of the Affichistes, French artists such as Jacques Villegl, 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. JRs is a fundamentally populist practice which has little to do with the art world of collectors, galleries, and museums.

In a few short years, JRs 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 migr 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 Riveras 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 193940, 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, Riveras wifein 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 figuressuch as former San Francisco mayor and thenlieutenant governor of California Gavin Newsom and Golden State Warriors basketball star Draymond Greencan be identified; however, the overwhelming majority are anonymous. Swimmers mix with members of the San Francisco Gay Mens 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, JRs 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.