JR, a name that I stumbled upon last year on the BBC, is a French "public" artist who just won the TED prize 2011.
He definitely becomes one of my favorite artists. When he was a teenager, he did lots of graffiti in everywhere. Meanwhile, he and his friend/partner would document the process of making graffiti, then started to exhibit their "works" on the streets. From graffiti to his nowadays propaganda-like massive black and white photographs, the transformation is absolutely amazing. The idea of bring people to join the art making process is "communist-ing" or "publicising" the photo-graffiti, so that the final work does not belong to JR, but to the participants and the community. He launches a large scale project call Inside Out which pushes his original idea out of the boundaries, extends it to the globe and planet. That is why his won the TED prize 2011.