JR

French street artist JR uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out.

Street artist JR made a wish in 2011: Join me in a worldwide photo project to show the world its true face. One year after making his TED Prize wish, he shows how giant posters of human faces, pasted in public, are connecting communities, making change, and turning the world inside out.

JR launched the participatory art project INSIDE OUT to highlight our shared humanity. Travel with a group of people who packed up their lives and got on the INSIDE OUT bus, crossing the United States to capture portraits of undocumented people and those that support them.

Art can move us in deep, meaningful ways. A beautiful song, a good book or a great film can change our perspectives and attitudes toward ideas, and sometimes people. Where does that magic come from -- and how can we channel it when we're creating? JR is an artist famed for his enormous black-and-white portraits that tell stories and adorn surfaces from the Louvre to the favelas of Brazil. His ambitious projects, like a recent massive mural inside a maximum security prison in California or the boy who peers curiously over the wall at the Mexico-United States border, put a deeply human face to things we might have only read in the news while also highlighting and celebrating the connections between us humans. In this episode, JR talks about the importance of joy in his art-making process, speaks to the value of community and curiosity and shares how his unique working style developed over the years. This is an episode from the TED Audio Collective podcast How to Be a Better Human. For more episodes on how to be a little less terrible, follow How to Be a Better Human wherever you're listening to this.

Famed for enormous black-and-white portraits that are pasted on surfaces ranging from the Louvre to the US-Mexico border wall, multimedia artist JR continues to tackle ambitious projects. In this powerfully moving talk, he shares how he made a giant mural on the courtyard floor of a maximum-security prison -- with the help of guards and prisoners alike -- and ended up with much more than a compelling image.