PORTRAITS for the PEOPLE
Playboy Australia|February 2020
An eminent critic and a boundary-breaking artist convene for a rare tête-à-tête—and demonstrate that sometimes the most powerful insiders enter from the outside
SHIRA TARRANT
PORTRAITS for the PEOPLE

“Ready…one, two, three!” It’s 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday, and JR and Jerry Saltz are jumping. The French artist and the Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic bend their knees and bounce, striking a running-man pose mid-flight. Behind them is The Chronicles of New York City, a 32-foot-wide, 21-foot-tall black-and-white mural featuring 1,128 New Yorkers of every age and ilk, from movie stars to cops. JR spent a year photographing and interviewing each of them before digitally collaging their portraits into a single, sweeping New York cityscape. Click-click-click-click. A camera flashes, and their landing thuds echo through the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall.

“Exactly,” JR nods approvingly.

“Wait—I have moobs!” exclaims Saltz, clutching his chest in mock distress. Laughter erupts from the smattering of people on Playboy’s makeshift set.

Today marks the first time the two men have met, but they have much in common. In addition to being New Yorkers, both are self-taught outsiders — Saltz was a truck driver until the age of 41, and JR usually prefers open spaces to white walls — who have become powerful insiders by insisting that art is for everyone, not just the people who flock to museums and auctions.

We’re here for a private preview of JR: Chronicles, the artist’s first major museum show in North America and his largest exhibit to date. Now 36 years old, he is best known for wheat-pasting colossal black-and-white portraits onto buildings, bridges and the surfaces of geopolitical hot spots around the world. From favela matriarchs in Brazil to a toddler peering over a U.S.-Mexico border fence, his subjects are usually people whose portraits you wouldn’t expect to see exhibited publicly, let alone at skyscraper scale.

This story is from the February 2020 edition of Playboy Australia.

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This story is from the February 2020 edition of Playboy Australia.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.