2011 TED Prize Goes to Street Artist

How does a street artist who pastes up giant posters of funny faces win the prestigious 2011 Technology, Entertainment and Design ("TED") Prize? He does it by changing the world though street art. JR, as he is known, lives in Paris, has traveled around the world in the last six years pasting up giant posters that he says are "transforming messages of personal identity into pieces of art". One of his first projects was Face2Face in the Middle East in which he used two images side-by-side of people in the same profession. One image was a Palestinian and the other was an Israeli. Hardly anyone could identify which image was which person. Another of his projects was set in Africa, Brazil, India and Cambodia where he honored the role of women which are often discriminated against in those countries. The TED Prize (past recipitents have included Bono and Bill Clinton) grants it's winners a wish and for JR that wish was to have as many people as possible hang posters of street art in as many places in the world as possible. This project of his is called "Inside Out" and is funded by TED. Today people are digitally uploading pictures of themselves (or of families or groups of people) free to the insidesideout.net website by the thousands. JR's team is printing them into colossal posters and then mailing them back to the participates to hang anywhere they like, legally or illegally, on the streets of the world. To read a recent article in the New York Times about JR and see JR's TED acceptance speech click here.