Every Person in New York

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