Billboards
Click the images below to explore each of the billboards 14X48 has posted!
^ Campaign 21: Kindred
Posting InfoArtists: Marisa Williamson
Posting Date: November 11, 2019 Location: 11th Avenue and 46th Street, New York, NY Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor, LMCC, individual donors Press Release |
Project DescriptionKindred, written by speculative fiction-writer, Octavia Butler, and published in 1979, opens with the main character, Dana, reflecting on the loss of her arm. The black female protagonist has returned from a series of unexplained journeys into the past. Her purpose there, she realizes, is to save the life of Rufus, a boy she sees grow into a man, a slave owner--and to facilitate his union with her great great great grandmother, a slave on his plantation. I gathered imagery from the archive of my work to illustrate the following quote by the author: "To survive, know the past. Let it touch you. Then, let the past go." Butler conjures dystopic and utopic worlds in her work, all based in some version of reality. She introduces contexts and characters for which interdependence, desire, race, gender, and history are woven into rich metaphoric narratives, but also in which very real conflicts of heart, mind, and body are dramatized. In this piece, I wanted to pay tribute to Butler's impact on my life as an artist. Her work works on me, as I hope mine does on others; providing insight not only into how history is understood, but how it is felt.
-Marisa Williamson, October 2019 |
^ Campaign 20: Stand Up!
Posting InfoArtists: Miguel Colón
Posting Date: May 10, 2019 Location: Avenue S and Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY Sponsors: Red Rock Outdoor, LMCC, individual donors Press Release |
In making this billboard, I thought of community and what that means to me. Originally I thought of some of the community murals I have seen around the city where there are heartwarming scenes of people coming together and participating in various agreed-upon activities. But I thought making this type of image would be playing it safe. Just me trying to ensure I would have something up somewhere, even if I didn’t feel much passion at stake in it. Then I thought of the kind of mural I would like to paint, one in which the voice of the people is heard. I mean anyone who has ever faced oppression of any kind. Racism, sexism, stigma towards the mentally ill. It struck me that those charged with upholding the law often use excessive force, and that when they do, they are very rarely punished for it. And if they are, not in a way that reflects their trespass. In my painting, the riot cops represent oppression. The people standing up to them are standing up to oppression itself.
The painting has three sections. In the first section an African American man, covered in chains waves his hands defiantly and shouts out, “I will not be oppressed!” In the second scene a woman confronts a riot cop. She is in his face, calling him to task. In the last scene, a woman is taking away a riot cop’s baton. The woman who posed for the scene, is my friend, Betty Eastland, who sent me the link for the submission for this project. She doesn’t struggle or exhibit any violent behavior. She uses compassion and understanding to diffuse situations, to disarm. Like Betty, I’d like to transform these volatile forces into peaceful solutions. --Miguel Colón |
^ Billboard 19: Stranger Fruit/Untitled #19
Posting InfoArtists: Jon Henry
https://www.jonhenryphotography.com/#1 Posting Date: March 20, 2019 Location: 38th Street and 8th Avenue, New York, NY Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor, LMCC, individual donors Press Release |
Stranger Fruit was created in response to the senseless murders of black men across the nation due to police brutality. Even with smart phones and dash cams recording the actions, more lives get cut short due to unnecessary and excessive violence.
Who is next? Me? My brother? My friends? How do we protect these men? Lost in the furor of media coverage, lawsuits and protests is the plight of the mother. Who, regardless of the legal outcome, must carry on without her child. I set out to photograph mothers with their sons in their environment, reenacting what it must feel like to endure this pain. The mothers in the photographs have not lost their sons, but understand the reality, that this could happen to their family. The mother is also photographed in isolation, reflecting on the absence. When the trials are over, the protesters have gone home and the news cameras gone, it is the mother left. Left to mourn, to survive. The title of the project is a reference to the song “Strange Fruit.” Instead of black bodies hanging from the Poplar Tree, these fruits of our families, our communities, are being killed in the street. --Jon Henry |
^ Billboard #18: The City on Stage
Posting InfoArtists: Lisa Kereszi
www.lisakereszi.com Posting Dates: October 08, 2018 Location: 48th Street and 7th Avenue, New York, NY Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor, LMCC, individual donors, and FotoCare 
Press Release
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This billboard project introduces a set of problems for the lifelong student of photography to solve. The dancer onstage here high above our heads becomes her own shadow puppet in a space that is now a mere ghost – a theatre that has been demolished; its former occupied space inhabited anew by another performance hall. Taken at the dawn of the 21st century, this photograph belies no sense of its time or its age, and might have been taken fifty, maybe eighty years before it actually was made. The performer herself was enacting her own version of a lost vaudeville act, her revival of burlesque performed with a wink and a nod to decades of performance art and cultural critique. Here, in 2018, a full century after that missing landmark was first erected, the star and her shadow are poised once again atop a perch off Times Square, a symbol of the cyclical change that happens every day, every year, every decade in this urban organism known as New York City. The photograph preserves an era that is slipping away, that tradition of live entertainment, a part of our cultural heritage.
The photograph is not just a study in keeping memories, or time travel or revivalist tendencies, though. The reality of the construction of this image is a lesson in itself: it is a fantasy, a facade. The medium allows for such a lie; when the shutter was pressed, there was no audience, no band, no cast or crew. Just two young women alone in a cavernous, dark, limnal space, each about to emerge as mature artists, collaborating on a fake performance on an empty stage, in an empty theatre that was becoming an abandoned space. Because photography is indexical – it’s just light reflecting off surfaces that gets recorded on film or pixels – it allows us to readily believe what we see, and not question it as reality. But the truth is, that all photographs are fictions. They are the result of the hand, heart, eye, one’s own history and circumstance, plus chance, all converging to create a version of reality that looks really real. These beautiful lies exist in the service of some greater truth the artist attempts to reveal to us. As is the case with the brick front of the demolished performance hall where this photograph was taken, this façade (that of the photograph’s appearance as fantasy) exists here today, if only for a few weeks’ time, proclaiming “ta-da!” from a billboard high above Manhattan’s Theatre District. Can you follow the clues to reveal the where of the photograph? And to create your own who, what when? Can you do your homework and fulfill the photo challenges in the scavenger hunt, to get closer to the experience of each New York photographer who preserved the treasures of our streets, our people, our architecture and our stories, if only in silver and salt? Can you learn to see the world like they did, seeing the value in everything as fodder for self-expression and transformation into art? Try your hand; prizes await the most-complete, quickest studies. Lisa Kereszi |
Scavenger Hunt
Winners!
First Prize: Michael Lyons
Second Prize: Alec Logan Smith
Honorable Mention: Michael Lorenzini
and Best in Show Book Add-on Signed Book Prize: Alec Logan Smith
Second Prize: Alec Logan Smith
Honorable Mention: Michael Lorenzini
and Best in Show Book Add-on Signed Book Prize: Alec Logan Smith
Scavenger Hunt Prizes
1st Place for the Quickest Study: a FUJIFILM XF10 (value $500) provided by Fotocare, plus one or more photobooks
2nd Place: a FUJIFILM Instax SQ10 (value $189) provided by Fotocare, plus one or more photobooks
3rd Place: one or more photobooks
2nd Place: a FUJIFILM Instax SQ10 (value $189) provided by Fotocare, plus one or more photobooks
3rd Place: one or more photobooks
Scavenger Hunt Rules
All answers must be submitted as original photographs posted to Instagram with the hashtag #thecityonstage no later than November 15, 2018. The first entrants to successfully complete all 12 assignments, post them as above and also (very important) email thecityonstage at gmail.com to alert us that you are ready to have your work checked for sufficient completion, will qualify to receive one of the prizes generously supplied by Fotocare, as well as a selection of photobooks donated by Peter Hujar Archive, Yale Art Gallery, J&L Books, Aperture, HK Photographs/Rizzoli, NY Public Library, TBW, Minor Matters, Roman Numerals or Matte. Item 13 (Extra Credit) may be swapped in for any one of the other assignments to complete the required dozen. If selected, you must pick your prize up in person with picture ID by a specified deadline to be determined or forfeit your award. This content is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Instagram, and by entering it you release Instagram of any and all responsibilities. By entering this contest, each entrant agrees to release and hold harmless all contest entities from any injury, loss, death, damage, action, claim, demand or other liability that may occur from entrant's participation in this contest or from the acceptance, use or misuse of any prize awarded, or attendance at any event.
Scavenger Hunt
- Start here: at 7th Avenue and 48th Street, within view of the current 14x48 billboard. Like the billboard photographer herself once was assigned to do, complete one of Stephen Shore’s iconic student assignments: photograph an intersection.
- Find the statue of Father Duffy in Times Square, and do as Lee Friedlander has done, immortalize him in two-dimensions OR find your own figure to immortalize in the midst of the chaos of the city.
- Visit and shoot near the site of the old flea circus on 42nd Street in which Diane Arbus made portraits of the freak show cast.
- Head east, and visit the Anna Atkins photogram show at the NYPL on 42nd Street. Then, inspired by what you see, make a picture that preserves nature in some way.
- Do as Garry Winogrand has done, and make pictures of animals behaving like humans in the Central Park Zoo, as in the book The Animals.
- En route uptown, make a picture surreptitiously on the subway, like Walker Evans did in his book, Many Are Called.
- In Harlem, or nearby uptown, make a picture based on the phrase used as in Roy DeCarava’s book title, The Sound I Saw.
- Also uptown, find an instance of children at play, even behaving like little adults, like Helen Levitt was always on the lookout for, on the neighborhood’s stoops an sidewalks. (Please always ask permission when photographing minors.)
- Zip all the way downtown, and walk the cobblestone streets of Soho, where Cindy Sherman has made herself into any and everywoman in her studio. Use your face and form as your canvas and represent a character other than yourself and point the camera back at you.
- While you are down there, walk the streets after dark and make a nocturnal photograph inspired by those made by Peter Hujar.
- Almost the finale! The star of the show, this dancer onstage herself--can you find her or stage your own version of her? The real muse is performance artist Julie Atlas Muz who will be back on stage down at the Slipper Room on October 28 and November 9th. And she is on Grand St. this December with her hubby, a star of American Horror Story: Freak Show, Mat Fraser, to co-direct an all-inclusive cast in One of Us: Jack and the Beanstalk
- The last frame: for the final exam, end up back within blocks of where you began, and photograph the façade of the actual theatre in which the billboard image was made. Hint: it’s on 43rd Street, and today bears the name of a different playwright than it did for almost a century. His initials are the same as the educator listed in problem number 1.
- Lucky Thirteen! Extra credit: Who is missing? There are clearly many more viewpoints and stories to be shared in the Big Apple. Choose your own photographer from an underrepresented community and tell the world about them by posting or emulating one of their photos. Please caption with their credit info.
^ Billboard #17: If you lived here...
Artists: Anthea Behm and Avi Alpert
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor, LMCC, and individual donors Posting Dates: July 27, 2018 Location: 286 Spring Street (east of Hudson St), New York, NY Press Release
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" This billboard mimics the real estate advertising slogan, 'If you lived here, you’d be home by now.' In our version, we ask viewers to pause and reflect on what it means to be “home” in a city of massive and ongoing gentrification and displacement. We want to pierce through the cruel irrationality of the market to provoke new, more moral bases for housing. How can we, collectively, act to make sure that our own well-being is not caused by another’s suffering? What justice is due to those who have been forced from their homes or who can’t afford a home? What would it mean to imagine home not as a commodity to be purchased and exchanged by the highest bidder, but as a fundamental human right based on need and dignity?
Artist Anthea Behm has used a unique process in the making of this billboard to mimic the “uneven development” of New York housing. She has taken the text and, using a stencil, made the words appear on photographic paper through an uneven exposure to light (access to light being another sign of the inequality of housing stock). The paper is then itself unevenly developed through different amounts of developing fluid for different lengths of time. The resulting photogram is then scanned, here mimicking the process of the nearby Wall Street traders who convert actual human labor into digital capital that they keep for themselves and use to displace others. The history of the area now called SoHo is itself a history of uneven development. We can trace residence back to the Lenape people who, along with the Susquehannocks and others, inhabited much of the East Coast prior to European arrival in the Americas. Through bad translators, the Dutch “purchased” the land from the Lenape, although the Lenape leader Mattahorn almost immediately denied the claim, to no avail. Under Dutch control, the SoHo area itself took on a somewhat progressive mission, as it became land owned by manumitted slaves of the Dutch West India Company. This, too, was somewhat short-lived, before the English took over the area and curtailed the rights of free blacks, especially after the 1712 Slave Revolt. For the next few hundred years, the area would transition from farmland to homes to industrial spaces. Deindustrialization up to the 1950s left abandoned factories that artists would eventually make into the city’s first lofts. These artists would eventually fight to legalize their loft arrangements. While some became wealthy, others became victims of their own success, as a new generation of Wall Street traders bought into the loft lifestyle from the 1980s on and displaced many who had not been lucky enough to buy the spaces. Today, the area, especially farther west, continues to undergo uneven development as part of New York City’s mad dash to be luxury space for the few. New converted factory spaces open almost weekly, it seems. They’re available to the highest bidder, but if you lived here, you’d be in someone else’s home by now. This project is accompanied by a digital pamphlet with more info on the project and how to get involved in fighting gentrification. We have also produced a series of fake Craigslist ads which covertly guide readers to websites with information on housing justice. " - Avi Alpert and Anthea Behm |
^ Billboard #16: Quién Manda
Posting Info
Artist: Giovanni Valderas
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor, Vicki and Bruce Heyman/Uncharted and individual donors 
Posting Dates: June 18, 2018
Location: 149th Street and Grand Concourse Ave, Bronx, NY Press Release
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Quién Manda
"Quién Manda", a Spanish idiom which imprecisely translates to “Who rules?” poses an emboldened question of agency. Who chooses, who votes, who rules? Valderas created the billboard in the style of a piñata, a form associated with celebrations, in order to highlight the complex history between the United States and Latin America. The text, disguised in this celebratory form, provokes discussion and self reflection.
Valderas' previous installations engage the Latinx community through guerrilla public art installations. He often incorporates "Spanglish" idioms used in Chicano/Latinx communities that are difficult to translate into English. The text becomes a metaphor for cultural misunderstanding. In an ongoing project of the same name, Valderas makes yard signs by hand and disperses them into Latinx neighborhoods, mimicking political yard signs found during elections season. This project aims to increase voter turnout in historically low-turnout Latinx communities. To accompany the billboard, Valderas urges viewers to act in support of DACA and the Keep Families Together Act which affects thousands of people in the Latinx community, and is currently under threat in Congress. Valderas has created a website where viewers can submit their name and a brief message for their representative in Congress. For each submission, Valderas will make and mail a QUIÉN MANDA postcard to Congress. |
^ Billboard #15: Infertile American Dream
Posting Info |
Infertile American Dream |
Artist: Kei Ito
Curator: Liz Faust Sponsor: Red Rock Outdoor and individual donors Posting Dates: February 26, 2018 Location: Corner of Woodpoint Rd and Maspeth Ave near the Graham Ave L Station, in Williamsburg, NY Press Release |
Infertile American Dream is a C-print, which was created by exposing light-sensitive paper to sunlight on November 8, 2016.
The increase of nuclear armaments worldwide, and the ramping up of nuclear tensions between the US and North Korea harken back to the terror of my grandfather’s experience during the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. By his account, it seemed as though the sky was lit by hundreds of suns. On that day, the very fabric of life that he knew, his friends, family, and even the landscapes of the city were completely annihilated. Any trace of home seemed to never have existed, as if his home was never even built. As a 3rd generation A-bomb victim who is now a resident of America, I find the chaos in the current political establishment unbearable. Political divides have deepened, and nuclear war seems closer on the horizon than it has ever been in my lifetime. Blind fear directed towards to a group of people through prejudice and misunderstanding caused by media; the realization that the home, in both physical and spiritual sense, can be taken away as quickly as thirty minutes by a single bomb and the chain reaction that follows. After we reach the point of no return, the American Dream will be unsustainable--an empty and barren wasteland filled with nothing but ash left for future generations. Like the unassembled home in Infertile American Dream, our children will not be able to have a chance to conceive their ideal vision of hope for the future. - Kei Ito Atomic Traces
Kei's billboard, Infertile American Dream, is accompanied by an online exhibition curated by Liz Faust, entitled Atomic Traces.
Atomic Traces Atomic Traces is an online exhibition about the stages of nuclear power and weapons and their inevitable destruction they will cause. The exhibition looks at these stages in the form of a house. Nuclear waste resides in the basement; stored away hidden yet felt. Nuclear explosions live on the ground floor, the most visible of the three. Finally, radiation masquerades as the roof of the building, invisible and poisoning the occupants. The image and symbol of a house is applied to nuclear here because both houses and nuclear energy/ weapons are actively planned and constructed by people, neither exists in nature. Houses are a part of the history of the landscape. They are like people, they have their own histories, personalities, charms, and faults; they can be fixed or broken. They are individual, yet the same. They are their own class of things, an inanimate species. In today’s current climate, landscapes and cultures all are at risk of being annihilated. - Atomic Traces is curated by Liz Faust |
^ Billboard #14: (Bill)board
Posting Info
Artist: Peter Hoffmeister
Sponsor: Lamar Outdoor Advertising and individual donors Posting Dates: October 23, 2017 Location: 174th Street and Broadway, New York, NY Press Release
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(Bill)boardWith (Bill)board, I transform the back of a twenty-dollar bill, creating an image
flexible enough to accommodate simultaneous associations. This project began with the idea that paper currency is a type of public space, in that it is an entity that hypothetically facilitates cooperation and exchange between individuals. However, the value paper money represents is a double-edged sword; it is a force that can be harnessed for the benefit of a majority, or the greed of a minority. It is not ironic that the back of the twenty-dollar bill features an idealized image of the White House—given the incredible amount of money in politics today—an image of prestige whose only purpose it would seem is to bolster patriotism like a cheap history lesson. In a climate where many feel disoriented by an onslaught of caustic politics and oppressive economics, it is not hard to find contradictions. But voting in elections is not the only way to have a societal impact. In the struggle to uproot an immoral and unethical system, voting with our dollars is another possibility that holds real power. To expand upon this idea, I developed a companion piece called Withdraw Your Support. It consists of an unlimited edition of fake twenty-dollar bill “sizzle cards,” but instead of using its reverse as a space for advertising, I printed “Withdraw Your Support.” The assumed monetary value of the fake bill is replaced by a message meant to call upon the public consciousness. These will be continually dropped on sidewalks in the vicinity of (Bill)board and in New York City generally, where unsuspecting passersby will encounter them. I plan to continue spreading these for years to come, as an ongoing project. If you would like to spread some in your neighborhood, please send your address to the email below, and I will provide you with a free kit. WithdrawYourSupport@protonmail.com --Peter Hoffmeister Supplementary InformationHoffmeister's billboard encourages viewers to examine the ways we use currency and participate in our financial system, and asks us to reconsider whether our behaviors are aligned with our values. Below is some additional information which may aid in that inquiry.
What is a Credit Union? What Is Bitcoin? Cyptocurrencies other than Bitcoin The Top 50 Cryptocurrencies Community Currencies: Kenya Community Currencies: Ithaca Documentaries about the Financial System |
^ Billboard #13: Bliss
Posting Info
Artist: Conor Doherty
Sponsor: Lamar Outdoor Advertising and individual donors Posting Dates: March 3, 2017 Location: E Fordham Rd & Decatur Ave, Bronx, NY 10458 Press Release |
BlissBliss is from a series of images inspired by sea level rise due to global warming, and our general apathy towards (and willful ignorance about) the issue.
We are all aware that this is going on, yet we all continue to live our lives very much in the same way and continue to do next to nothing to slow down or reverse the damage being done to the planet. The balloons emerge from the water as if the ocean has suddenly covered something or someone who was there, and who was not meant to be covered up by the water. The cluster of balloons—a symbol of innocence, whimsy and happiness—combined with the literal presence of the rising sea serves two purposes. It is a visual reminder of the global climate change crisis that is rapidly unfolding before our eyes, and of our un-willingness to treat it with urgency. At the same time the image for some viewers is meant to be perceived as nothing more than a “cool image.” The meaning will be lost on those who are confronted with the evidence but are unwilling to give it time and thought: the exact mind-set that this image is an embodiment of. |
^ Billboard #12: "5"
Posting InfoArtist: Bang Luu
Sponsor: Lamar Outdoor Advertising, The New York Community Trust and individual donors Posting Dates: December 12, 2016 Location: Broadway and 174th Street, New York, NY 10033 Press Release |
"5"Breast cancer is well-known and well-documented with a social movement advocating research and treatment. Nonetheless, public comprehension of cancer is limited, and the actions that can be taken to prevent, detect, and treat cancer are still not well understood by the public. The pink ribbon and other products are used as uncontroversial symbols that both raise awareness about important medical conditions but also can shelter people from the complexities of the disease. The symbols are stand-ins for aspects of cancer’s intricacies and terrors.
My own mother’s battle with cancer inspired 5. Her death left a vacancy in my heart, a void I could not and would not wish to fill. I have been confused by the sharpness of these feelings, the sense that her departure was a thing unto itself, a memory outlined by crime tape, which it would be an outrage to remove. I have since been generating a lot of artwork that reflects my situation positively, which I hope engages and educates viewers with illustrated biological imagery and emphasizes the importance of regular checkups and preventive measures. I focus on exploring grief and, ultimately, healing wounds developed from tragedy. My work is aimed at helping those with similar experiences to be aware of supports and feel less alone. --Bang Luu |
Information about Breast Cancer & Screening
American Cancer Society
Prevent Cancer Foundation
National Breast Cancer Foundation
Komen Foundation
Detailed Factsheets about Breast Cancer
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/cid/documents/webcontent/003090-pdf.pdf
http://preventcancer.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Breast-Cancer-Fact-Sheet-2013.pdf
Prevent Cancer Foundation
National Breast Cancer Foundation
Komen Foundation
Detailed Factsheets about Breast Cancer
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/cid/documents/webcontent/003090-pdf.pdf
http://preventcancer.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Breast-Cancer-Fact-Sheet-2013.pdf
^ Billboard #11: HOODS
Posting Info |
HOODS |
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Artist: John Edmonds
Sponsor: Lamar Outdoor Advertising, The New York Community Trust and individual donors Posting Dates: Sept 12 - Nov 21, 2016 Location: 252 W. 29th Street (bw 7th and 8th Ave), New York, NY 10001 Press Release
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"The HOODS series started out originally as a way to talk about my own feelings of
reclusiveness and exhaustion—a self-portrait that was essentially about covering, shielding and isolating oneself. As the series progressed, I began to realize that the topics I started to address were much larger than myself. I became more and more interested in how the photographs were essentially pictures of an unidentifiable subject—and how I could use the psychology of color as a way to allude to the mutability of emotion, identity and complexity of bodies. It is this paradox of hypervisibility and invisibility that I am interested in with the HOODS series—the microaggression of misidentification and how one relates to another. Photographing hoods—an article of clothing that many understand as presumably “urban” and masculine—allows me the idiosyncratic agenda of looking mainly at a surface, while trying to closer to what is underneath." --John Edmonds |
^ Billboard #10: New Perfumes
Posting InfoArtist: Rachel Stern
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor and individual donors. Post Date: February 26 - April 4, 2016 Location: 181st Street and Broadway, New York, NY Press Release |
New Perfumes"Is it possible to describe scent with an image? To translate the intoxication and immersive experience of smell to the distancing experience of sight? In the marketing of commercial perfumes we have seen a wide array of attempts to communicate just this. From luxurious materials, foods, and locations to beautiful bodies and celebrity faces scent is sold through the promise of the experience that will accompany it. In this billboard project titled “New Perfumes” the image of scent is broken down into a stark symbology. A giant nose is bombarded by an army of hands holding perfume bottles and atomizers. The implied smell is conflated and overwhelming. The bodies (nose, and hands) included are isolated and cloaked, their gender is neither present nor relevant. Here smell is implied not through the imagined experience delivered by the character of the perfume but by the actual moment and action of smelling. "
-- Rachel Stern |
^ Billboard #9: Look Up!
Posting InfoArtist: Rico Washington, Elizabeth Hamby, Shino Yanagawa
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor and individual donors. Post Date: October 5 - November 16, 2015 Location: Flatbush and 7th Avenues, Brooklyn, NY Press Release
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Look Up!Everybody has a story. New York City has an estimated eight million of them. In a bustling metropolis synonymous with change and chance, it’s not uncommon for dynamic stories of triumph and tribulation to share space on the same constricted sidewalk. New York City public housing has long embodied each of these intangibles and much more.
Yet throughout the course of our day, we often pass by these marginalized communities constructed on super blocks. Informed by pejorative news media narratives, we walk with haste and avert our eyes from the towering edifices that have become its hallmark and the people that inhabit them. As many of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods are experiencing a seismic shift in demographics, visual artist Elizabeth Hamby and collaborative journalist-photographer duo Rico Washington and Shino Yanagawa present Look Up!, an amalgamation of media and counter narratives that serves as a lens for recontextualizing New York City's public housing communities. At the intersection of their respective art projects, Alphabet City and We The People: The Citizens of NYCHA in Pictures + Words, Look Up! offers denizens of the city an alternate appraisal of these vibrant communities and its residents - often devalued and viewed as undesirable. Each of the four shapes featured on the Look Up! billboard is indicative of a specific architecture utilized in a particular housing project in Brooklyn. Superimposed with images from members of the public housing community, each shape corresponds with the story of a former/ current resident from the respective housing project. Melding oral histories with the concept of architecture as language, this collaboration presents itself as a unique opportunity for Brooklyn and the city at large to reexamine itself and redefine its neighborhoods beyond the unjust stereotypes that have long stigmatized them. View the four stories below. Viewers can also download the Aurasma app on your smartphone or tablet, follow our aura at LookUpNYC, focus the camera lens on the Look Up! Billboard located at Flatbush and 7th Avenues in Brooklyn, and unlock a special video from the project. An complementary exhibition related to this collaboration is currently on view as part of the Affordable New York exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York through February 2016. |
Jessie Hilliard: Marcus Garvey Houses / Brownsville, Brooklyn / Est. 1975
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Nelson George: Samuel J. Tilden Houses / Brownsville, Brooklyn / Est. 1961
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Susie Jones: Vandalia Houses / East New York, Brooklyn / Est. 1983
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Jamel Shabazz: Red Hook Houses / Red Hook, Brooklyn / Est. 1933
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^ Billboard #8: Reach
Posting Info16Artist: Julia Weist
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor and individual donors. Special thanks to Stefan Keidel, Kyle Triplett and Meredith Mann Post Date: June 12, 2015 -July 16, 2015 Location: 107-37 Queens Blvd, Forest Hills, NY Press Release
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ReachIn 2015, Weist set out to find a space on the Internet that was empty and a single word that would lead people there. The Reach project shares this word with the 123,484 weekly viewers of a billboard on Queens Boulevard, and those who see imagery of the artwork.
A search for the word used in the Reach project results in only one webpage, a site created by the artist. Viewers are invited to visit the site, but are asked to never use the word as text anywhere else online, lest they undo the page's unique singularity. The site includes a PHP process that writes a status to the web server each time a visit occurs. The server is queried by an Internet-enabled circuit board which in turn runs a command to an Internet-enabled outlet. To put it simply, when the Reach webpage is visited a lamp turns on in the artist’s home.
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^ Billboard #7: Keep Calm
Posting InfoArtist: Margeaux Walter
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor; Citizens Committee of NYC; and individual donors. Post Date: Jan 13, 2015 Location: Greenpoint Ave and 46th Street, Queens, NY Press Release
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Keep CalmThe artist has chosen to work with the slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” to create a dialogue that addresses the overlap between individuality and commerce as well as the various guises of advertising and propaganda. The slogan originated in the British Stationary Office during WWII and was created as war propaganda but never distributed. Today the slogan has been re-appropriated as a marketing tool to such an extent that the lines between individual expression and propaganda can be blurred. Walter’s image reveals a collage of these posters. Upon closer examination, the viewer will also notice a camouflaged papier-mâché figure in the posters.
In conjunction with the billboard, the artist invites people to tweet their own Keep Calm messages with the hashtag #keepcalm14x48. These tweets will be made into postcards and distributed along Greenpoint Ave, and at Ave Coffee House. By giving community members the ability to personalize this slogan, the artist turns a commercial transaction into a personal one, uniting the voices within the community. Participate in this dialogue, and grab a postcard with a message from another community member while you’re at it! |
^ Billboard #6: Window Plane
Posting InfoArtist: Desiree Leary
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor; Citizens Committee of NYC; and individual donors. Post Date: Sep 8 - Dec 1, 2014 Location: W 174th Street and Broadway, New York, NY Press Release
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Window PlaneWINDOW PLANE BILLBOARD presents a fragmented narrative of an implicit crash involving a toy airplane, the reflection of a truck, and a cracked window. Incorporating elements not uncommon to the space surrounding a billboard, the real, represented, and implied skies skew the viewer’s environment when looking up. This billboard is part of the artist's SINGLESPACE project, a series of diptych images which she shows and distributes in various formats including postcards, prints, a poster, and a pocket-sized field index.
In effort to create an awareness of safe behavior as one moves through space, the artist will be trading stickers of the WINDOW PLANE image in exchange for promises of safe behavior. The artist encourages you to apply these reflective stickers to bikes, helmets, skateboards, bumpers, and beyond! |
^ Billboard #5: Toco Man/I Need A Miracle
Posting InfoArtist: Santiago Mostyn
Partners: #Wallplay Gallery Post Dates: Mar 5 - , 2014 Location: 118 Orchard St at Delancey, New York, NY Press Release |
Toco ManToco Man is an image made on the north coast of Trinidad, during a trip I made there to re-photograph all the houses I grew up in. The man in the image, Anthony Mulligan, lives in the shack behind him, and told me a long story of his on-going war with his family members, who've apparently been trying to kill him for years. The slogans on the wall are his semi-literate attempt to highlight corruption in the local government. Mr. Mulligan told me he believed I had been sent by God to take his picture and share his plight with the rest of the world, so it seemed fitting to put him up on a billboard in New York City.
I Need A MiracleThe language of images – what images can say culturally, what biases or desires they engender – is important in my work, and more recently written language as an extension of that, so I've always been interested in what billboards can do. They're emblematic of urban culture, but most of us only ever get to relate to them as passive consumers of their content.
So putting this phrase – I Need a Miracle – into public space, especially in New York (home of the catch phrase) seems transformative for a number of reasons. Almost all billboard texts point to the viewer and try to berate or seduce: You should do this! Who do you think you are! Get with the program! But the 'I' in this Miracle phrase is read by the viewer as both their own voice and the unknown narrator. There's a relationship set up on equal terms, which is unusual in public space, as it isn't a voice designed to produce desire. The phrase also means different things to different people. My relationship to it was seeing a gutter punk use it on a cardboard sign, asking for change. I've been in his position as a travelling punk myself and felt that the possibility for empathy – how we strangers can stay linked as communities through language – will help us all stand on less biased ground. |
^ Billboard #4: Static
Posting InfoArtist: Ken Millington
Sponsors: Lamar Outdoor; Citizens Committee of NYC; and individual donors. Post Dates: 10/30/13 - 07/31/14 Location: Grand Concourse & 149th Street, Bronx, NY Sound Fossils
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Static FossilAs the analogue switch-off reaches completion, our televisions will solely derive signals from digital services. Accompanying this transition will be the disappearance of the familiar image of television static. This technological relic was the result of a lost broadcast signal. A weaker signal was immediately subject to interference. A disturbance that found its source in local weather, lightning, solar flares, signal leakage and even the residue of the Big Bang, namely the Cosmic Microwave Background Emission (CMB). In that in-between space, the polluted signal, we see the echo of the origin of the universe painted in the phosphors of red, green and blue (RGB).
Giant advertising billboards, with their affinity to television, are an appropriate larger- than- life venue for this concept. With the abundance of vacant billboards around the city, these displays could be seen as television screens that are turned off. Placing an image of static upon one site would amount to turning on one TV but not broadcasting anything recognizable. It provides a banner for the passing of an archaic technology. The image is an information landscape. Originally painted in acrylic on parachute cloth at the scale of 4ft 8in x 16 ft, the work was photographically reproduced for the billboard, a translation that mirrors the analogue to digital conversion. Rethinking contemporary landscape painting, the work documents the individual attempt to engage the sublime quality of nature unseen, the universal forces at work outside of the borders of the visual spectrum. |
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