As someone who circulated freely through the urban environment of New York City, Jason Polan’s work as an artist was intimately connected to experiencing all that the metropolis had to offer—and fondly, sometimes obsessively, cataloging its ceaseless variety. Polan moved to New York in 2005 and passed away at the start of 2020. Because his time there spanned the post-9/11 to pre-COVID era, he absorbed the city during the slow reconstruction of lower Manhattan, amid the shock of the Great Recession of 2008, and prior to the dramatic shutdown brought on by the global pandemic.
Both ambition and optimism are inherent in Polan’s embrace of New York's sprawling physical terrain and masses of people, who are without fail rendered as distinct individuals by Polan’s hand. Above all, his artistic project suggests freedom of movement and proximity to others, along with the importance of noticing and carefully documenting, while evoking in retrospect our shared loss of spatial innocence.
“[Jason] died before the pandemic,” Sadie Stein noted in her opinion piece for The New York Times in early 2021, “when most of us still had yet to learn that those occasional breaks from urban anonymity, those small moments of connection—wordless, spoken, odd, quotidian—are a tremendous luxury.”
Apart from regularly sharing a table with friend and artist Stefan Marx at Printed Matter’s annual New York Art Book Fair in recent years, Polan did not exhibit widely or have his work shown by major galleries. Among the exceptions were his first-ever solo show, Living and Working, at Chelsea's Nicholas Robinson Gallery in 2011 and an exhibition featuring some of his works at the Parisian retail boutique Colette in 2013. Nevertheless, Polan’s prolific nature and egalitarian approach made him both a well-known and beloved artist, someone who imbued rare warmth and humanity into his art and everyday interactions, which were ultimately inextricable from each other.
Jason Polan 1982–2020
Born in 1982 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jason Polan earned a dual degree in anthropology and art and design at the University of Michigan in 2004 before moving to New York City. Polan's expansive ethos began to take shape while in college with his I Want to Know All of You project, through which he rendered portraits of all 800 people at the art school. Polan moved to New York after graduating and founded the Taco Bell Drawing Club in 2005 at the restaurant chain's Union Square location, establishing a space for individuals of all skill levels to engage in observational drawing sessions in a decidedly mainstream venue.
Particularly fond of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Polan drew every piece of art on view in 2005 and published it as a book in the hopes of getting a job there. Although he did not find employment at MoMA, he gained a following, drew every piece of art on view a second time four years later, and was included in the 2015 exhibition, Messing With MoMA.
Following an absurdly meditative project, An Entire Bag of Popcorn—whose formal aim was likewise encoded in its title—Polan shifted his focus to his magnus opus, Every Person in New York, in early 2008. Among several memorably ambitious endeavors, this remains the work for which Polan is still most celebrated and associated with today. As the project's title suggests, Polan attempted to draw every resident of the city, resulting in over 30,000 sketches, with highlights compiled in a 2015 illustrated book of the same name. Although the sketches in the first bound volume of Every Person in New York stop in 2014, he continued drawing New Yorkers up until his death in 2020, when a posthumously edited second volume was published, including his final illustration for the project dated December 16, 2019.
On regular travels all over New York City, Polan drew in his notebook regular citizens, and some celebrities, at random and by appointment, capturing fleeting moments that he shared faithfully via scanned uploads to his personal blog. Polan's drawings, usually spontaneous and often unfinished, captured the essence of his subjects with wit and sensitivity. Starting in 2008, Polan also began contributing daily online sketches—in many cases from the Every Person in New York project—to The New York Times. He later had his own Opinionator blog for the newspaper's website, called simply "Things I Saw," which presented scanned notebook sheets with groupings of meticulously labeled drawings.
Polan's first solo show, entitled Living and Working, was held at Nicholas Robinson Gallery in Chelsea in 2011. Reviewing the exhibition for The New York Times, Roberta Smith noted the inclusion of "One Month," a series of thirty-one life drawings based on objects Polan came across, along with a usable Ping-Pong table decorated with Keith Haring-esque animals, a huge King Kong head composition, and a wall covered in black circles of varying sizes. "Also in the show, until the end of June," Smith concluded, "is Mr. Polan himself, working at a big table stacked with books and magazines that provide source material—existing images being another subject. He is adding drawings—and also small clay sculptures—to the show as they are made and is available for Ping-Pong or conversation. Relational aesthetics, if you want to call it that, has rarely seemed more charming, direct, and user friendly."
Like Haring, Polan was not only a quintessential downtown New York artist with an altruistic mission who drew inspiration from urban life, but someone who engaged his fellow citizens without pretension, which made him accessible and commercially appealing. Starting in 2016, Polan began collaborating with UNIQLO, Nike, Vans, and other brands, producing designs for merchandise and apparel, as well as Marvel Comics, for which he created a variant cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #20. Throughout the 2010s, Polan also led open drawing studios for families at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Despite passing from cancer in 2020 at just thirty-seven years of age, Jason Polan made a profound impact on the contemporary art world and the culture of post-millennial New York City in particular. Although Polan did not have his work shown by major galleries, his prolific nature and egalitarian approach made him both a well-known and beloved artist. On May 3, 2024, Wright auctioned I Want to Know All of You: The Art & Collection of Jason Polan, a tribute to Polan's life, career, and sensibility, in what represented the first-ever such offering to a broader audience.
Auction Results Jason Polan
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