“When you look at those artworks, you actually don’t know if it’s a painting, if it’s a photograph, if it’s on the moon. “You go back to the essence of life,” he said. The image was reproduced on the cover of Time magazine and went viral. “Those planes from Russia could see that there are children under them,” said JR. His first image in “Déplacé-e-s,” called “Valeriia,” presented the playful 5-year-old as a surreal giant, carried aloft by hundreds of tiny people on the ground, shot in front of the Lviv opera house at the start of the war in Ukraine. Unfurling these banners in public plazas across Europe with armies of volunteers, JR used drones to capture images of these actions from a bird’s-eye view - the vantage point of warplanes. “Children are thrust in between a conflict that has nothing to do with them.”įor the series “Déplacé-e-s,” the project from which “Les Enfants d’Ouranos” evolved, JR printed photographs of individual child refugees, beaming and animated, onto fabric panels stretching 120 feet long. “Some of those places are totally forgotten,” he said. The Parrish mural is a composite of photographs of children playing soccer taken at refugee camps in Mauritania, Ukraine, Rwanda, Greece and Colombia.

“All those gods, before whoever they became, they were just children,” JR said, interested in metaphorically representing the possibilities of youth as divine.

In Greek mythology, Ouranos was the primordial god of the sky and father of the Titans. Titled “Les Enfants d’Ouranos,” the piece is the work of the Paris-based artist JR, known for his site-specific photo-based installations in public spaces globally that show the humanity of individuals and communities that are often overlooked. It is an instantly recognizable image of play, printed as a black-and-white negative with inverted tones onto reinforced fabric affixed to the concrete exterior of the museum. To be installed by Memorial Day, a giant photographic composition depicting larger-than-life silhouettes of nearly 40 children, running as if to converge on a soccer ball, will radiate a kind of white light against a black expanse stretching more than 200 feet. This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.Īs warmer weather draws more people to the East End of Long Island, a joyful vision will beckon across the long horizontal facade of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., that will be visible from the Montauk Highway.

The museum of innocence museum