The Williamsburg project. (Courtesy JR)

On a weekday evening earlier this month, as the sun set over the Williamsburg bridge, passengers on the JMZ may have noticed an addition to one of the Brooklyn buildings that wasn’t there on their morning commute. Throughout the day, the French graffiti artist JR and his crew had pasted a giant black and white snapshot of an eyeball on the side of a seven-story building near the East River.

That morning, at 10 a.m., the artist and a handful of 20-somethings had met in a lot under the bridge, toting with them huge stacks of paper, piles of brushes and buckets filled with a sticky white wheat paste, the glue advertisers and street artists use to affix images to walls.

Near a tall crane there stood a wiry young man with a trim black beard and sunglasses, dressed completely in black. He was fidgety and seemed anxious. "This is gonna be big," he said.

This was the 29-year-old Parisian artist who goes by the two-letter moniker JR. His mega-scale images of eyes and faces have popped up across the city’s walls in recent months, along the High Line, on buildings in Soho and on the Bowery and at an old factory in Hunts Point.

By now you almost certainly know his work. He’s scaled buildings and evaded cops in dozens of countries, pasting works in heavily policed industrial Shanghai, Brazilian favelas, Tehran and South Sudan, to say nothing of his work in his native France. His fame has grown quickly and blue-chip dealers have come knocking. He is now preparing for a September show at French dealer Emmanuel Perrotin’s new Hong Kong gallery, where, of course, he plans to do some extra-curricular wheat pasting as well. "The police in China are pretty bad,” he said in an interview at his studio. “But we do it anyways.”

In Tel Aviv last September, JR set up a photo booth on the city’s main boulevard, and took photos of all comers, then printed the photos, letting people use his wheat paste and brushes to paste their portraits around the city. Though police confronted him, they did not intervene. The next day, JR headed to the West Bank with his camera, and soon his oversized black and white portraits appeared in Ramallah on storefronts, rooftops and street corners. JR left town after only a few days, but much of his work is still there.

In 2007, he headed to Israel for the first time, and took photos of Israelis and Palestinians, printed them on 15,000 feet of paper and pasted the posters of Jews on the Palestinian side of the separation wall, and vice versa, even hanging some next to Israeli checkpoints. "I wanted to bring the enemies face to face,” he said.

"People always tell me, 'JR, you're crazy! You're gonna get arrested,' but, I make it work," he added. "An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist."

The idea goes back his youth. He grew up poor in the suburbs of Paris, but moved into the city when he was 16, after he was expelled from school. He started marking up walls in Paris with a spray-can. One day he found a camera on the Metro, and soon traded in paint for film. He took photos of graffiti artists around Paris and pasted their portraits on the same walls they had marked up, calling the display "Expo2Rue" or "street exhibition."

His big break came in 2005, when widespread riots rocked Paris after two African immigrants were electrocuted as they fled the police in a nearby suburb. Feeling that the French media was biased in its coverage of the riots, JR took matters into his own hands. He photographed young immigrant residents of the banlieues, the city's outskirts, as they made funny faces at his camera, and pasted the portraits on walls across Paris's ritziest neighborhoods. The loud, unsettling response to class tensions received a great deal of press.

It’s also gained him supporters in unexpected places. The organizers of the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference recently awarded him $100,000, an annual prize it gives to fund ideas. He accepted it only on the condition that the money did not come from TED’s corporate backers—Goldman Sachs, Rolex and Coca-Cola. The group used money from private individuals to the pay the award.

His overhead is not minimal. His studio in New York is filled with state-of-the-art computers and printers. Most of the money comes from art dealers, like street artist Banksy's former representative in London, Steve Lazarides, who has sold JR’s metal panels pieces, along with large images of faces carved on wood. His work has sold at auction for $80,000, not that he sees any of that money.

"I produce only as much work as I need to support my large-scale projects," he said in the studio. "I could be out there—there are galleries in New York and a lot of other places that have proposed me shows, but that's not where I'm putting my time." Last year he was picked up by Perrotin, opening doors to well-heeled contemporary art collectors.

"I go by the philosophy that I have no long-term vision,” he added. “Ten years seem like they've passed in one. So next year looks really far away. Look, I'm 29. When I started taking photos I was 17 and I had no idea you could have the job of being an artist.”

“Fuck!" he added

Midway through the pasting in Williamsburg, a man approached the site with a spray can. It looked like he was about to vandalize JR’s work. Instead, he approached the artist and asked for an autograph. JR signed his can, but seemed hesitant to do so. "I don't do graffiti," he’d said his studio. “I'm not a street artist. Shepard Fairey, Banksy, me, we all started around the same time. There wasn't this 'street artist' thing. That wasn't even a word. More than anything, I'm a wallpaper man. I'm an artist."

For the Williamsburg project, he’d had permission from the building’s owner, who had planned to remodel the building anyway. JR has operated without problems in New York in the past, and it seemed like the Williamsburg project would go smoothly.

But by mid-afternoon there was reason to worry. A burly man in work boots and a tank top approached the site.

"Who is the boss here?" he asked the team. They looked up from their paste-filled buckets. He repeated the question, adding, "I need to speak to the person in charge!"

The boss had gone around the corner for a quick break from the heat. His right-hand man, Marc Azoulay, was 70 feet above the ground, pasting from the basket of JR's crane. The construction worker took out a badge: New York City Department of Buildings. He was going to call the police. JR had removed scaffolding from the front of the property to make room for the crane but hadn't returned it yet, which is illegal. One of JR's assistants rushed over and convinced him into letting them stay for another few hours. "Please, we'll put it right back when we're done," she said. It seemed like this had happened before.

The image they were pasting was a portrait of a member of the Lakota tribe in North Dakota. Recovered from the heat in the setting sun, JR stepped back to take in the scene. "The native story is pretty interesting,” the Frenchman said, noting that Manhattan was purchased on the cheap from the Indians. “I want to spread that message, to bring the story back to Manhattan."

She's pretty excited about that phone! Guess you do have to stay pretty organized if there's literally nothing on Earth you won't cover with crochet. Up next, Banksy?

A Banksy. (Courtesy the artist)

On the occasion of the Facebook IPO, The New York Times has a story today that claims consumption in Silicon Valley tends to be quieter than it is in other industries. At the office, anyway.

With friends you can brag about buying Banksy. From the piece:

Off the corporate campuses and out of public view, it seems, there is little anxiety about spending. Friends of Facebook employees say that they have talked about buying houses, of course, but also planes — a seaplane even — and works by popular artists like Banksy, whose pieces can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just do not expect them to post about any of that on their Facebook pages.

When I wrote about how tech dudes in this town collect, I did notice that they seem to like street art. I think it has something to do being disruptive, which is the mantra of the tech world.

A still from the movie. (Courtesy Kickstarter)

A 21-year-old director who really likes Shepard Fairey is asking Kickstarter for $30,000 to make a 25-minute narrative film about early life of the street artist.

"The film approaches the origin of OBEY in a similar fashion to how The Social Network approached the origin of Facebook," writes director Julian Marshall. He has the life rights for this period in Mr. Fairey's life, he assures us.

The trailer seems a little like a Saturday Night Live parody. Watch young Shepard boldly graffiti a political billboard. You can imagine how mad that politician gets when he sees it. Oh gosh, just so mad. Anyway, take a look.

Thanks to Animal New York for the tip!

(Photo by Rozalia Jovanovic)

This week, the graffiti wall at Houston and Bowery was painted by Los Angeles artist Retna with a work entitled A Conversation With a Great Friend. With the help of two assistants, the new public artwork was completed on Monday. But the painting of the wall has coincided with the departure of a longtime resident of a spot on the same block, Billy's Antiques & Props, which offers antique wares like school desks, wood-framed mirrors and signage from defunct gas stations that the store's owner, Billy Leroy, would set up along the sidewalk on the north side of Houston Street along the tent that the shop occupies.

"Oh, I’m closing because I can’t take another cold winter, and the neighborhood has changed so much," Mr. Leroy said. "Rag 'n' Bone. It’s not the old Bowery anymore. It’s just a drag." Despite the Whole Foods and all the fancy retailers in the neighborhood, Mr. Leroy asserts that he is not leaving because his rent was being raised. "My landlord, Tony Goldman, has always been very fair with me. It’s just that I'm fifty-two years old. I don't want to be sixty-two and sitting in a retail location with no heat or electric. But I’m always going to make deals. I’m Billy making deals."

When the store opened in 1986, Mr. Leroy did business with the original owner of the space, Rob Fennick, when it was called Lot 76. He started working for Mr. Fennick in 1998 and took over in 2003.

But it's not the same as it once was. "You know, if the Bowery was still the old Bowery with quirky shops in New York, and bums everywhere, my store would not be big. In fact, I’m the last one." Mr. Leroy is tired of holding down the fort for the Old Bowery, and he has plans for a new reality show for the Travel Channel called Baggage Battles.

But Mr. Leroy has a connection with the wall, as well. In fact, he asserts, he was part of the wall's rehabilitation into the graffiti wall it is today.

“In 2005, I approached Tony," he said, referring to his landlord, who owns the graffiti wall. "I said, 'Let’s do a recreation of the Keith Haring." But that didn't work out. "I didn’t come up with the money. It was too hard a deal, it was too complicated. Then he got together with Jeffrey Deitch and did the Keith Haring wall and that’s how that wall got started. But we were the catalyst for the idea of recreating the wall. Now it's become this big thing. I let Mr. Brainwash jump the fence, letting guys jump the fence and graffiti the wall for years before. In fact the guy who did the last illegal mural is coming to the party tonight. Omni."

As of Monday, the wall now has several statements painted onto it written in a language that Retna has created from hieroglyphs that blend graffiti with ancient Incan, Egyptian, Hebrew and Asian calligraphy:

"All the great ones are conscious of universal truths"

"Watch the heartbeat in your wrist—A precise pulsing beat of life's drum"

"The power of the world always works in circles"

Mr. Fairey (Photo courtesy of Getty Images)

From the good people at ANIMAL NY, we have this fun tidbit.A Shepard Fairey mural in Miami featuring the artist's signature "OBEY" logo of Andre the Giant was apparently defaced recently with a giant "1%."

The move is either in support of the one percent — the opposite of the Occupy Wall Street concept of the 99 percent — or might be implying that Mr. Fairey is himself a member of the one percent.

The guy did help elect a (centrist) Democratic president! Though he also owns a clothing label. Tough call!

Here's the bad news. There are hours of outtakes that risk disappearing forever: the original footage is damaged and fading and in desperate need of being restored.

According to a Kickstarter titled STYLE WARS...the Outtakes, started by Henry Chalfant, who co-produced the film with director Tony Silver, $28,000 needs to be raised by December 7 to save the unseen footage. The donation total so far is $6,639. Start donating!

Posted on the Kickstarter page are several available outtakes that have been floating around Youtube. Here's one featuring Rock Steady Crew, talking to the filmmakers in the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo.

The graffito in question.

Over the weekend a tipster wrote in to say he'd spotted a piece by the graffiti artist André on Perry street, just across from the restaurant Sant Ambroeus, and sent in the photo to the left, which seems to feature the artist's signature character "Mr. A" on a construction wall protecting what will apparently one day be an A.P.C clothing store.

When construction workers showed up to work on Monday, however, that section of the wall was missing—stolen by an eagle-eyed fan with excellent taste in graffiti.

Andre Saraiva a.k.a. André was featured in the Banksy movie Exit Through the Gift Shop as well as the popular recent graffiti show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles "Art in the Streets." He'll be headed to New York in a slightly more formal capacity this February for a show at Half Gallery during Fashion Week.

The artist's rendering of his plan.

In case you missed it over the weekend, street artist Leon Reid IV told the New York Post that if he had $800,000 and city approval, he'd absolutely put a giant vinyl spider on the Brooklyn Bridge, no question.

Mr. Reid has yet to raise the money for the project, but while many people might not know what they'd do with nearly a million dollars and the approval to negatively modify a city landmark, Reid was extremely certain about what such circumstances would mean for him: a 30-foot by 15-foot, helium-filled spider. Definitely. Why not?

“It just hit me: What would happen if a spider were crawling through the bridge, if I made it seem as if the spider wove the web of suspension cables? I thought, that’s a cool idea,” Reid said.

When we checked up with Mr. Reid he said he wanted to dress our city's statues.

Photo courtesy of Twitter.

Street artist Agata Olek has struck again, this time covering the cube at Astor Place with a surprisingly snug sweater.

If you’re not familiar with Ms. Olek’s work, she’s the type that can cover the Wall Street bull in yarn and still manage to get a write-up from the Journal. Cooper Union students are sure to get a kick out of this one.

“Knitting is for pussies,” Ms. Olek recently told PBS. “I crochet.”

[via Bowery Boogie]