Project

Jinny Street Gallery

A gallery in 42 streetlamps in Tokyo, with artist walks, creative workshops, and projects made with the neighborhood.

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Contents

Jinny flag on top of street lamp #1

Jinny Street Gallery is a contemporary art space uniquely created from streetlamps in the walkable and charming neighborhood of Jingumae 2-chome, Shibuya, Tokyo. Just north of Harajuku.

I founded this project with my friend Lorenzo Menghi in January 2023. The gallery’s mission is to showcase emerging artists across a wide range of styles and mediums while promoting walking.

As my dear friend Rafael Balboa once described it, Jinny Street Gallery is an inverted conventional gallery where the indoor space has transformed into the outdoors, right on the street.

Jinny Street Gallery consists of 42 streetlamps with integrated display cases, scattered throughout the Jingumae 2-chome neighborhood (see map). To experience the gallery, you’ll need to walk it.

The exhibitions are free to visit, day or night. Alongside them, we organize artist walks, workshops, and collaborations with people and businesses in the neighborhood. The gallery has become a place to meet people and make things together.

Before Jinny opened, I tried the display cases with Walk With Me in spring 2022: 59 of my street photographs across all 42 lamps. Our first exhibition as Jinny was Tokyo Flâneur, which opened on January 15, 2023. The exhibition archive follows the shows since then, from photography and painting to sculpture and installations made for the cases.

Hanging the Flags

We hung the first yellow flags on the night of November 28, 2022, a lamp at a time, from a ladder.

Two hands unfolding a yellow Jinny flag beside a parked bicycle

Someone on a ladder against a lamp post, a folded yellow flag under one arm, another person steadying the ladder

Someone at the top of a ladder fixing a yellow flag to a streetlamp while another holds the ladder

A yellow Jinny flag on streetlamp 15, under a pedestrian sign and a 30 speed limit

A dark side street with a few people at a lamp post in the distance

A crossing in Jingumae at night with yellow flags on the lamps down the street

Artist Walks

On our artist walks, we go through the exhibition together, stopping at the lamps to hear the artists talk about their work. A show becomes a route through the neighborhood, with conversations along the way. Many of the walks are part of an opening night, gathering at nearby NININI·NI before heading out into the street.

People gathered around a streetlamp listening to an artist

I have a tradition of taking a selfie with the group. These are some of those photographs, going back to the walks before Jinny officially opened.

Group selfie beside a streetlamp and crossing on May 8, 2022

Group selfie beneath a yellow Jinny flag outside a green storefront on November 17, 2023

Group gathered beside an illuminated Jinny display case on December 2, 2023

Group selfie outside the green storefront on January 27, 2024

A large group gathered along the pavement for a selfie on April 12, 2024

Group selfie beneath the Jinny flag, with some people sitting on the curb, on October 4, 2024

Group selfie beside a Jinny lamp and a lit restaurant on November 16, 2024

Group gathered around the base of a Jinny streetlamp on March 1, 2025

A smaller group posing beside an illuminated streetlamp on July 26, 2025

Group selfies, 2022–2025. Open a photograph to see its date and move through the walks.

Workshops and the Creators’ Club

The Creators’ Club began in October 2024 with Altria of Owlpaca Studio. Its workshops take ideas from Jinny’s exhibitions and turn them into something people can try themselves, using everyday materials. No art training is needed.

We have made collages, painted over photographs, drawn one another, and built sculptures from discarded bottles. Other sessions have taken us outside to collect rubbings of the city’s surfaces, or brought everyone together to paint tiles and make small books. A workshop with Kittyzilla invited people to draw their dream neighborhood in a folded zine; another produced sandwich-shaped “Sando Zines.”

The work came back into the streetlamps in the Creators’ Club exhibition, from December 2025 to January 2026. People who had joined us to try something for an afternoon became exhibitors themselves.

Workshop participants cutting and assembling colored paper around a table covered with art materials

A handmade circular paper zine held up in front of the workshop table, with colored shapes projecting from its edges

The workshop group holding up their finished paper creations beneath a Jinny flag

Making Sando Zines with the Creators’ Club, .

Made with the Neighborhood

We work with the Jingumae 2-chome Shopping Association, its director Sawabe Kin, and the people who live and run businesses here. Openings at NININI·NI and collaborations with nearby places are part of the gallery’s life.

Open calls bring new people into the program. Lemon Roads brought together 42 artists around the launch of Jinny Lemon Sour. For Yu-Asobi, we worked with Kosugiyu Harajuku on an exhibition about public bathing, including artists chosen through an open call to the bathhouse’s visitors.

Jinny Playground extended this into play: interactive works in and around the lamps, with a treasure hunt through the neighborhood. The street itself became part of the exhibition.

Jinny Lemon Sour

Jinny Lemon Sour is no longer made. We stopped producing it in January 2026.

Jinny Lemon Sour was a collaboration between Jinny Street Gallery and Open Book, a renowned bar and beverage-maker in Shinjuku’s legendary Golden Gai district. Open Book made the craft lemon sours, while Jinny Street Gallery curated artworks from our featured artists for the drink’s labels.

It was sold only in the gallery’s neighborhood; the map of the shops that carried it stays here for the record.

Two cans and two glasses of Jinny Lemon Sour on white steps, each with a different artist’s label

A can of Jinny Lemon Sour on a wooden counter at Bocchiriya, beside bowls of food

A can of Jinny Lemon Sour being poured into a glass of ice at Bocchiriya

Photographs by Lorenzo Menghi.

The Website

In 2026, I designed and built a new website for the gallery, with a 3D neighborhood map, an exhibition archive, and interactive tools for artists. The archive brings together the artworks, photographs, and events around each show, including the artist walks. Read about the website project.

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