A WorldPride mural in New York
To mark the 50th anniversary of WorldPride and the Stonewall riots, 50 murals were painted on the walls of New York’s Lower East Side in June 2019. Local and international artists were selected to create works across New York City’s five boroughs that reflected and celebrated the beauty, struggles, and activism of the LGBT community.
Among these public artworks was a unique Lego creation by Brooklyn-based artist Jaye Moon. The mural reimagined a scene from Call Me by Your Name in Braille, created in celebration of the WorldPride Festival.
Translating the film into Braille
“As this festival was a celebration of the LGBT community, I decided to use the film Call Me by Your Name to create a wall art piece.
I translated the film’s script into English Braille and built the translation visually using Lego pieces. I edited the film’s script to fit the site-specific space while maintaining the flow of the story. I wanted to draw attention to a language that is often overlooked by people who are not visually impaired.
Using Braille for the script connects several communities in a public space, making the work more intersectional. Viewers may be attracted to the colours of the work and the novelty of the games, but what they actually find in the code are lives that have been historically hidden. The building blocks connect these experiences visually and literally.”
Jaye Moon and her practice
Jaye Moon is a Korean artist based in New York. She moved to the United States in 1990 and graduated in 1994 from the Pratt Institute, where she studied sculpture. She primarily creates urban art with political themes, combining Lego blocks with existing architectural structures.
Her series of typographic works placed around the city feature captions such as “Paradise Here” and “Somewhere Better than this Place,” reflecting her interest in a new, portable, and immediate way of living in the urban environment. By using Lego as a primary medium, audiences are able to interact with her work by deconstructing or reconfiguring the mosaics as bricks—turning them into communal objects within the cityscape that can be easily picked up, dismantled, or rebuilt.