by Mayté Rodríguez Cedillo and Fernando Favela

The desert wind rattles the steel slats of the border fence outside Tecate, but on a September afternoon in 2017, something impossible seemed to be happening: a one-year-old boy, sixty-five feet tall, peered playfully over the wall, his small fingers appearing to grip the top rail as if he might tip the whole structure over with a giggle.

Below, families from both sides of the line gathered to take photographs, wave to strangers, and — for one afternoon — forget exactly where the border actually was.

AT A GLANCE — French photographer JR wheatpastes monumental portrait murals onto buildings, favelas, and border walls worldwide. In 2017, he installed a 65-foot photograph of Tecate toddler Kikito on the U.S.-Mexico border wall for a one-month run that drew global attention. In September 2026, JR joins muralists Diego Rivera and Judith F. Baca in the inaugural exhibitions of Los Angeles’s new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

From a Found Camera to a Global Canvas
JR built his career by turning strangers into monuments — wheatpasting oversized black-and-white portraits onto buildings, rooftops, and walls in more than 130 countries, a technique he began developing as a teenager in Paris after finding a camera left behind on the Métro. Raised on the working-class outskirts of the city — his mother from Eastern Europe, his father from Tunisia — JR started as a graffiti tagger before turning his camera on his own neighborhood. He has famously never confirmed his real name, calling the street “the largest art gallery in the world.” Through his ongoing Inside Out project, he has distributed more than 400,000 posters to people in over 130 countries, inviting them to paste their own portraits in public. The work earned him the TED Prize in 2011 — recognition for an artist who had, only a few years earlier, been chased by police for the smell of his spray paint.

A Toddler Named Kikito, and a Different Kind of Wall
In September 2017, JR erected a 65-foot photograph of Kikito — a one-year-old from a house overlooking the U.S.-Mexico border fence near Tecate — as part of his ongoing Giants series, a project he has said began with a recurring dream rather than a planned statement. After months of scouting the border for the right location, JR knocked on doors near the fence and met Kikito’s family; with their permission, he photographed the boy and built the installation on scaffolding positioned so the image reads correctly from the U.S. side. Visitors soon arrived from both directions, waving to one another across the fence line and taking photographs. When the piece came down after a month, JR marked the close with a “Giant Picnic,” setting a long table across both sides of the border for a shared meal. “There are no walls and borders,” JR said in a statement of how the child saw the structure. The installation itself no longer exists at the site today, but all of us that were present will never forget how that photograph made us feel during the time those young immigrants “the Dreamers” were facing deportation. JR was reported saying that he did not intend for the project in Tecate to coincide with the news about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.

He has worked for years to highlight the “Ellis Islands of today,” which has taken him from the shores of Italy where migrants have been arriving by boat from Africa to the California desert. “Now as an artist I think that it’s amazing that the piece arrived at a moment when it creates more dialogue,” he said. “Because the idea itself is to raise more questions.”

The image remains one of the most widely circulated works of public art of the past decade.

Two Decades of Turning Faces Into Monuments
Kikito was one entry in a body of work that has spanned six continents — from Face 2 Face, which paired portraits of Israelis and Palestinians along the separation wall, to Women Are Heroes, an intimate look at women’s lives across the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to an early photograph of his childhood friend that appeared, unexpectedly, on the news during the 2005 Paris riots.

“I realised very early on that I was obsessed by the power of community,” JR told the Guardian in a 2021 interview. That instinct has carried him from the Saatchi Gallery in London to the Brooklyn Museum, and into film: JR co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places with the late Agnès Varda, and in 2018 was named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People.

More recently, his reach has extended into design: in March 2025, JR unveiled L’Observatoire, a private sleeper carriage he conceived for Belmond’s Venice Simplon-Orient-Express — the first carriage on the legendary train ever designed by an artist.  (You can find that article in our Europe & Beyond section.)

A New Chapter at the Lucas Museum
When the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park on September 22, 2026, JR will be one of three muralists — alongside Mexican modernist Diego Rivera and Los Angeles artist Judith F. Baca — featured in the museum’s inaugural Murals exhibition, inside a 300,000-square-foot building designed by architect Ma Yansong. Founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, the museum draws on a collection of more than 40,000 works. “This art belongs to everyone,” Hobson has said of the collection’s spirit.

Placing JR’s monumental portraiture beside Rivera’s muralism situates the Tecate photograph within a much longer lineage — one that runs through México’s own tradition of public art and into this new chapter of American institution-building. It caps a year that already includes JR: Horizons at Perrotin Los Angeles and The Cave of the Pont Neuf in Paris.

✦ BajaTraveler® Takeaway
JR’s Kikito was never really about a border — it was about scale, and about making a single child impossible to ignore. Eight years after that toddler towered over the Tecate fence, the artist takes his place beside Diego Rivera on the walls of one of the most ambitious new museums in the world. For readers who track where art is headed next, September 2026 in Los Angeles is worth watching.

Plan Your Visit
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens September 22, 2026, in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, with JR featured in the inaugural Murals exhibition alongside Diego Rivera and Judith F. Baca.

→ Visit lucasmuseum.org | For more on JR’s global projects, visit jr-art.net

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Who is the artist JR?
JR is a French photographer and street artist, born in Paris in 1983, known for wheatpasting monumental black-and-white portraits onto buildings and walls worldwide. He has never publicly confirmed his real name, won the TED Prize in 2011, and was named to Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2018.

What happened to the Kikito artwork in Tecate?
JR’s 65-foot photograph of Tecate toddler Kikito was installed on the Mexican side of the border fence in September 2017 and remained on view for one month before being taken down. The physical installation no longer exists at the site today.

Is any of JR’s work still visible in Baja California?
The original Kikito installation was removed in 2017, and no permanent JR artwork remains in Tecate today. His current and upcoming projects, including his Lucas Museum feature, are located primarily in Los Angeles, Paris, and other international cities.

When does the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art open?
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, opens September 22, 2026, in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. Its inaugural exhibitions include a Murals gallery featuring JR alongside Diego Rivera and Judith F. Baca.

What other major works has JR created?
JR’s best-known projects include Face 2 Face (2007), pairing Israeli and Palestinian portraits along the separation wall; Women Are Heroes (2008–2010) in Rio’s favelas; and the Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places (2017), co-directed with French filmmaker Agnès Varda.