Jason Polan (1982–2020)

When Jason died on January 27, 2020, the project Every Person in New York was over ten years old. This book picks up in June 2014, where Volume 1, published in 2015, left off, and draws upon the artist’s meticulous records in sketchbooks and blog posts. Every day he was in New York he drew for the project until the end of 2019. He estimated having drawn over 50,000 people and as he stated “I still have a bit to go.”

“There’s something about the idea of Every Person in New York that show more my mind could get around, more so than the idea of Every Person in America, or Every Person in the World. Living in New York is something I think about a lot and I was looking for more ways to learn about it.” Jason Polan, from his introduction to volume I.
Jason Polan’s powers of observation — so simple, quick, supple, fun, and visually intelligent — made him one of the consummate draftsmen of the 21st century. Thinking back, I realize I never saw him not drawing. He was always on a street somewhere in New York, notebook in hand, following people, sitting off to the side, watching, a slight smile on his lips, 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.

Jason Polan (1982-2020) was an artist living in New York City whose work has been exhibited all over the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. His projects include “The Every Piece of Art in The Museum of Modern Art Book,” “An Entire Bag of Popcorn,” "Things I Saw" and a daily drawing in The New York Times for a year, “Every Person in the Phone Book…” Jason founded the Taco Bell Drawing Club in 2005. The club met every week at the Taco Bell on Union Square in New York City and at Taco Bells around the world whenever he traveled. show less

Jason Polan is on a mission to draw every person in New York, from cab drivers to celebrities. He draws people eating at Taco Bell, admiring paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, and sleeping on the subway. With a foreword by Kristen Wiig, Every Person in New York, Volume 1 collects thousands of Polan's energetic drawings in one chunky book. As full as a phone book and as invigorating as a walk down a bustling New York street, this is a new kind of love letter to a beloved city and the show more people who live there.

From the late artist's unfinished project, a compendium of drawings capturing the characters, and character, of New York City.
Jason Polan was on a mission to draw every person in New York, from cab drivers to celebrities. He drew people eating at Taco Bell, admiring paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, and sleeping on the subway. With a foreword by Kristen Wiig, Every Person in New York, Volume 1 collects thousands of Polan's energetic drawings in one chunky book. As full as a phone book and as invigorating as a walk down a bustling New York street, this is a love letter of sorts to a beloved city and the people who live there.
"In 2008, illustrator Jason Polan set out to capture the enormous human poetics compressed in Gotham's geographic smallness by drawing every person in the city. The first seven years of this ongoing project, totaling drawings of 30,000 people, are now collected in Every Person in New York—a marvelous tome of Polan's black-and-white line drawings, colored in with the intense aliveness of a city where, as E.B. White wrote more than half a century earlier, "wonderful events are taking place every minute." What emerges is a kind of poetry—fragmentary glimpses of ideas and images, commanded by an internal rhythm to paint a complete whole of this human hive." —Brain Pickings
"This digest of sketches brings to life the everyday moments of New Yorkers and finds a spark of excitement in the sometimes-banal shuffle of city living." — Monocle magazine
"Polan's drawings exude, in unbroken but flexible lines, the momentum of a Manhattan streetscape with only brief moments of stillness. Those pauses can last minutes or over an hour, enough time for fully textured, impressionistic portraits. But more often Mr. Polan's drawings are of scenes that pass in seconds: a father ordering hot dogs for his stubborn children, or Diane Keaton trying to hail a cab." — The New York Times show less