Joe Iurato

Joe Iurato is not just a street artist famous for his small wooden cutouts – he’s also a skater, climber, and philosopher, someone who’s familiar with many aspects of urban life. All of his artworks have a certain autobiographical quality and even though his work from the technical point of view resembles Banksy, Iurato is not a political activist. Through his miniature site-specific action figures, Iurato is telling stories about the path from childhood to adulthood and all those small events, feelings, and uncertainties we face along the way.

Joe Iurato lives in New Jersey with his two sons and finds the inspiration for his work right before his eyes – he’s watching his children grow up in a major urban area. The way they explore the world, ask questions and look around in wonder while digesting the reality of a big city, are the most common motifs in Iurato’s work. The artist is also a photographer and knows well many hidden corners of his native New Jersey and New York areas, which helped him conjure up ideas on site-specific placements of his small wooden pieces. Actually, Iurato’s artworks used to look different before, and only recently he change his technique. Instead of painting large-scale figures, in the last couple of years, he decided to make them significantly smaller and because of that easier to place in various public areas. At the same time, he’s still using the same procedures to create his pieces and that is uniting the old-fashioned printing process with the modern street art technique such as stenciling.