French Street Artist JR Joins Tel Aviv Protests
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Crossposted from Haaretz
Some 450,000 people across Israel took part in the March of the Million last weekend, but there were more than 450,000 faces protesting on the streets that night.
As a sea of people marched from the Habima Square in Tel Aviv, a sea of disembodied faces — poster-sized, in black and white and pasted onto pickets — floated over the crowds and onwards to the protest site.
The spectacle was the brainchild of the French street artist, JR, an up-and-coming albeit decidedly mysterious figure in today’s art world. Often touted as a modern-day Banksy or the Henri Cartier-Bresson of this century, the 28-year-old Parisian, known simply by his two-letter moniker, has been making headlines and raising eyebrows across the globe not only for his visionary displays of public art, but also for the humanitarian ethos of his work.
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