Jim Powers – The Mosaic Man of New York City

For the past 26 years, Jim Powers, known by most as The Mosaic Man, has been decorating the light posts of New York’s East Village with intricate tile and mirror mosaics. And the homeless 64-year-old is still at it.

“When I got into this, I was immortal all a sudden,” Powers says about how he felt when he first started creating his art, in the late 1980s. The former Vietnam veteran set out to make East Village a known arts destination by creating a trail of 80 mosaic-decorated light posts, each with its own theme and design inspired by local history and culture. At the height of his career as a street artist, The Mosaic Man was up to 70 light posts, but in the later part of the 80s and into the 90s, mayor Rudy Giulianni started a clean-up-the-city anti-graffiti campaign and took down 50 of his beautifully-adorned artworks. It was pretty hard to bear, but Jim never gave up on his dream of completing the trail, and managed to rebuild every one of them.



Photo by Gregory Tran

Tormented by a fading eyesight and a problematic hip, The Mosaic Man struggles with the most mundane tasks, but he keeps making his street art, for the people of the Village. After all, he says they’re the ones who stopped authorities form taking down all of his poles during Giulianni’s campaign. But although Jim Powers is a local icon for long-time East Village inhabitants, he has little recognition for his work. City Lore, an organization that supports New York’s cultural heritage, honored Power in its 2004 People’s Hall of Fame, and a short documentary on his activity was recently posted online, but other than that… He has never made any real money from his art, has been homeless for decades, and struggled finding funds to restore his works.


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