Theater of Ideas: Artist JR TED Talks, “Can Art Change the World?”

The LAVA Center shares two provocative and inspiring TED Talks from the artist JR at the next Theater of Ideas, Friday, April 17. Doors open at 5 p.m. for gallery viewing. At 6:30 p.m., the screenings begin, followed by audience discussion and who knows? Maybe more world-changing ideas will hatch in those moments.

JR began his career on the streets of Paris as a graffiti artist, leaving his mark on rooftops and subway cars. When he found a camera he began documenting his adventures, and taking pictures of his friends in Les Bosquets, a housing project in the Paris suburbs. He pasted photocopies on outside wall spaces and pasted frames around the images, creating an open-air gallery.

His work celebrates the marginalized and invisible through portrait photography enlarged to cover entire buildings, neighborhoods and even whole towns.

“In the street,” he is quoted as saying, “we reach people who never go to museums.”

In 2011 he won the $100,000 TED Prize, and used the money to launch “Inside Out Project,” facilitating thousands of people around the world exploring his method, documenting their communities through oversized portraits pasted on public walls.

During the course of his career so far, he has done projects challenging the status quo in Israel and Palestine, in Africa, in South America, in China, India, Europe and North America. His projects have been featured in the documentary films Paper and Glue and Tehachapi. Though walls are often his canvases, his work is about breaking down walls and removing barriers between people.

Art, he tells us, cannot save the world. But he proves over and over that it can change the world.

The 2026 season of Theater of Ideas is supported in part by Dog Hollow Press. The LAVA Center is sustained in part by grants from Community Foundation of Western Mass, Mass Cultural Council, the Markham-Nathan Fund for Social Justice and our individual donors.

Anyone interested in proposing/sharing a future presentation, discussion, experience, or participatory event of any kind in any format is invited to email your idea to [email protected] with “Theater of Ideas proposal” in the subject line.