A massive new art installation has been going up in Domino Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn over the past few weeks, piece by piece…and a giant crane has been involved.
That’s because the new mural is being made out of shipping containers! Put on by the Brooklyn Museum as part of the current “JR: Chronicles” exhibition, the display involves what looks like 12-16 shipping containers stacked at alternating levels to create a sculpture. On the front side, rebar appears to fill in the space between the containers to create a flat surface that the mural could be pasted on.
“JR: Chronicles” has been on display on the first floor of the Brooklyn Museum since October 2019. JR is a French-born artist who takes individual portraits of everyday people, and then blows them up and wheat-pastes them (sometimes illegally) in public places.
The multimedia exhibit follows his career through different displays of his work, from “his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics,” according to the Brooklyn Museum website.
The focal point of the exhibit is the giant mural The Chronicles of New York City, which is currently on display in the museum, but has been reproduced to cover the enormous sculpture in Domino Park. To create it, he and his team brought a mobile studio to fifteen different locations around the five boroughs. They photographed 1,128 New Yorkers with all different stories and background, right where they lived, and then put all the faces together within a cityscape.
The structure is completed and can be viewed by the public starting today, February 3!
featured image source: Instagram / @steinber