JR / Les Bosquets

Street Artist 'JR' Plasters Massive Ballerina Mural on TriBeCa Building

Famed French street artist JR has taken to the streets of New York yet again, installing one of his signature large-scale pasted photographs on a large 100-by-75-foot wall in Tribeca. Featuring a giant ballerina dancing in front of a rundown-looking building, the piece is on the side of a new residential and retail property at 100 Franklin Street.

JR’s interest in ballet inspired his art film Les Bosquet, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring. His new street art work bears a striking similarity to the image promoting the film on the Tribeca website.

The documentary was a collaboration with the New York City Ballet, for whom the artist had previously created a temporary art installation featuring a 6,500-square-foot photo of company dancers for the floor of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. The January 2014 project also adorned the building’s facade with a larger-than-life image of dancers’ legs.

JR’s work has appeared everywhere from New York’s Ellis Island to the Panthéon in Paris.

Earlier this year, he teamed up with the New York Times for the magazines “Walking New York” cover project in April, scattering 15 giant photos of recent immigrants throughout the five boroughs.

JR has also been active in Philadelphia of late, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer, installing a 15-story-tall mural of a local Pakistani food truck worker titled Migrants, Ibrahim, Mingora-Philadelphia. That piece is one of 14 site-specific art installations around the city highlighting social issues created for the Mural Arts Program’s “Open Source” series.

This work was commissioned by developer DDG, who has worked with artists such as Yayoi Kusama and institutions including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Andy Warhol Foundation. The installation is slated to remain on view indefinitely, or until the paper inevitably succumbs to the elements.

The process, which took just a couple of days, was documented on JR's instagram account.

Lovette even joined in to help plaster the image.