Street art can be an affective means for civic engagement in displaying the performative nature of identity and culture through temporary sites of memory. The temporality of the chosen sites (on street corners and in and on dilapidated buildings) are political in nature in the way they physically transform space and urban landscapes. Simultaneously, these sites reunite the stories of our collective American past with the realities of our American present through the visual. JR uses scale as vision in order to provide a voice for those whose concerns remain invisible to certain parts of society. Sites of memory, in this way unite communities on a local level due to the universal human experiences that they exhibit. I invite you to examine and comment on the French street artist JR’s Unframed Projects. In a departure from his previous work, JR began creating large-scale public photographic installations, refocusing his work by using recycled and archived images for his street exhibitions instead of his own. In Unframed, JR enlarges, reframes and stretches ‘rediscovered’ photographs onto outdoor façades. In this way, he challenges contemporary notions of the popular and the social by re-visualizing collective memory and redistributes those memories and images in both physical and virtual spaces (ie: on Ellis Island or on Instagram). A series of questions that I’ve had will shape this blog post, including the following: How can the notion of temporality push at the descriptive boundaries assigned to sites of memory while simultaneously question the functionality of how one classifies it? What happens to the iconographic repertoire of the Unframed photographs when the circulation of the self disappears? Do the newly constructed collective and social memories created by JR morph into something other than their intended forms when one inserts the iconic image, which might re-imagine the established narrative? The Unframed Project uses representations of iconic images culled from archives, and I argue that street art as social practice positions itself ideally between ‘low art’ as some would call it, and scholarship. Street art, in this middle space, can help us to further examine how memory, space and performances of identity affect the narrative and reading of these particular temporary sites of memory in urban spaces.