Bastrop portraits signal hope after fires

BASTROP — The cluster of oversized black-and-white portraits keeps a hopeful lookout on Chestnut Street here.

They are simultaneously subtle and yet completely unexpected — pleasant faces, arranged in grids, plastered on the corrugated metal walls of a now-empty old building, most recently an auto shop and before that the Powell Cotton Seed Mill.

The 40 portraits went up in early November, about a month and a half after the devastating wildfires that ravaged the Bastrop area were finally contained. Everyone pictured is a Bastrop area resident or volunteer who came to this small town to help. And their portraits now adorn a building that will be transformed into a new arts center for the Bastrop Fine Arts Guild.

Called "Inside Out Bastrop," the installation of the larger-than-life faces is part of "Inside Out," a worldwide participatory art project, conceived by a French street artist who goes by the moniker JR and who won the 2011 TED Prize.

Sam Martin, publishing director of the Austin office of the international design firm Frog, instigated "Inside Out Bastrop."

In just three weeks, Martin hired Austin photographer Leon Alesi, found several dozen people to photograph, located a suitable wall to install the portraits, got permission from Bastrop municipal officials and produced a six-minute documentary of the project that was shown at a TED event in London last month.

"My idea from the beginning was to show life," says Martin. "I wanted to show that people in Bastrop were still thriving."

The synergy that "Inside Out Bastrop" — bearing its message of hopefulness and community — actually found its home on what will be a new center for creativity gives the project a deep resonance for those involved.

"Art is a way for people to work through grief and tragedy," said Karol Rice, a board member of the Bastrop Fine Arts Guild. "You look for those silver linings, and this is something that provides one."

Martin learned of JR's "Inside Out" through Frog's business relationship with TED, a global program of conferences and prizes centered on innovation. After winning the $100,000 TED prize, the artist JR — who gained international notoriety for his large-scale guerrilla photo installations that bring attention to often troubled communities — used his prize money to begin the "Inside Out" project earlier this year.

"It is about making invisible people visible," JR told a news outlet when the project was announced at a March TED conference .

"Inside Out" — essentially run via a website, www.

insideoutproject.net — invites any group anywhere in the world to take black-and-white portraits of anyone who has a story to tell. After digitally uploading images to the project's website, participants receive uniformly large-scale posters with instructions to stage an "action" and post the portraits in the most visible location possible. In the few months since "Inside Out" launched, actions have happened around the world — in Egypt, Malaysia, Russia and South Africa among dozens of other places — with all the images simultaneously displayed on the "Inside Out" website along with each person's statement.

Martin had been curious about participating in "Inside Out." And then the wildfires erupted.

"I badly wanted to do something, but at first I didn't know what to do," he said. "So I wanted to see if art could help."

Martin chose "hope" as the project's theme and the project tag on "Inside Out" website. (As a philanthropic gesture, Frog Design footed the bill for the Bastrop project.)

"Inside Out" is decidedly uncommercial. Its guidelines stipulate that portraits contain no corporate logos or brands nor plugs for any cause. Submit just a simple portrait against a plain background. "Look straight into the camera, and think about what you care about," the guidelines read. "Make a strong face."

Creating such streamlined portraits made an interesting challenge to Alesi, whose own portraiture features artistic images of people in their private environments, domestic surroundings such as bedrooms or home offices and studios.