Maya Barkai has spent over a decade turning the small pedestrian icon on a crosswalk sign into large scale public art. Her project, Walking Men Worldwide™, assembles photographs of “walking man” signals from cities around the globe into collage installations, displayed at human scale rather than as distant street furniture.
The project launched in January 2010 with Walking Men 99™, a fixture at 99 Church Street in New York City that ran through 2013. Since then, installations have traveled to Russia, Israel, Australia, Argentina and Taiwan, gathered through an international network of contributing photographers who send in images of their local crossing signs.
Barkai treats the crosswalk icon as a universal symbol with local variation, and the collage format turns that variation into the point of the work. Related series, including Men At Work, Bicycles and Anonymous, extend the same idea to other pieces of everyday urban signage. The project also produced album artwork for musician Lee Ranaldo in 2012 and continues through an online store selling limited edition prints.
It is a reminder that public art does not need a blank wall or a plaza. Sometimes it is standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change.
