Dear Editor,
I do not know who Margaret Clemons is, but she needs to give credit to the French artist JR for her “brainchild” Witness Project, as reported in today’s SN (‘Witness Project’s eyes and faces go up around city’). To quote from the New Yorker article ‘In The Picture,‘ by Raffi Khatchadourian, November 28, 2011, “The images of eyes, unblinking and the size of buildings, stared down from the slum on a hill – Rio de Janeiro’s oldest favela, Morro da Providencia – and into the heart of the city. They emerged mysteriously, in the summer of 2008, not long after three young men from the community were murdered.
“The person responsible for the images was not from the favela, or even from Brazil. He is a French artist who is known exclusively by his initials JR.”
Yours faithfully,
Jennifer Bulkan
Editor’s note
We reported in earlier stories that the local Witness Project came about as a consequence of Ms Margaret Clemens’ initiative, and that she was the one who sought to integrate it with the Inside Out project, which is the global one. Its full name is therefore the Inside Out Witness Project. The report in our newspaper yesterday did acknowledge the role of the artist JR, viz “Inside Out, a collaboration between the artist JR and the TED Prize, is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work.”
