shashasha

Jason Polan (1982–2020) began his project to draw every single person in New York in 2010. Following Volume 1 (released in 2015), this book picks up in June 2014 of Polan’s drawings, collected from the artist’s records sketchbooks and blogposts. Each sketch of a person Polan drew is accompanied by a small note – a name, a date, a location, an observation or a piece of trivia; some of the drawings are elaborate, some only a single line, but each captures something distinct and personal. The project (for which Polan drew about 100,000 people) is a love letter to the city of New York and the people who live there.

“This human-seeing machine saw and drew it all. Each of us has no art but our own. Jason found his, spread it far and wide, shared it with the world, and gave us all his small joys and tender mercies of a life lived in art and looking.” — Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine