Do you remember the game License Plates, when vacation travel meant keeping your eyes peeled for car tags from as many states as possible? Well, this summer you can play Art Everywhere, looking for masterpieces of American art scattered across the American landscape.
In some fifty thousand outdoor locations across the country starting on August 4–in cities and towns large and small, on billboards and buses, train platforms and bus shelters–the Art Everywhere project will display reproductions of more than fifty great American artworks from the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Art Everywhere US rendering of a billboard with Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks of 1942 (Art Institute of Chicago).
Art Everywhere US rendering of a bus stop shelter with Roy Lichtenstein’s Cold Shoulder of 1963 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
Art Everywhere US rendering of a bus with Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood of 1968 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).
The project, inspired by the Art Everywhere movement originally conceived in the U.K., was spearheaded here by Maxwell L. Anderson, the Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, in collaboration with the other participating museums and the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. But this massive show wasn’t curated by museum professionals but by the American public, who, during the month of April, was asked to vote online for their favorites among some hundred works nominated by the curators and directors of the participating museums.
After the more than 170,000 responses were tabulated, the top vote-getter was Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, depicting the denizens of a late night diner on a deserted New York City street. The other winners cover the gamut of American art from John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark of 1778 to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Self-Portrait of 2008 and include both the familiar (Grant Wood’s American Gothic) and the somewhat surprising (Erwin E. Smith’s luminous photograph Frank Smith Watering His Horse, Cross-B Ranch, Crosby County, Texas).
Those with smartphones or other mobile devices will be able to use the Blippar app to access information about each work they spot. And there’s a Facebook page and a Twitter feed where you can take part in the conversation about the project and, more importantly, about our artistic heritage.
Try to make the launch event in Times Square on August 4, when American art will light up the area’s enormous digital screens. For additional information visit arteverywhereus.org
