CREATECitywide billboard art show connecting emerging artists with mass audiences on the streets of LA
TBC’s 2050 Show will be a citywide, billboard art show & app bringing broad attention to local emerging artists and art to our community.
Please describe your project proposal.
TBC will mount an art exhibition on billboards across many neighborhoods of the city & featuring works from emerging Los Angeles artists. Of the estimated 30-50 works (pending rental fee rates), 5 will be selected by public voting with the remainder selected by a curator. In addition, we will highlight emerging artists each week for 3 months on our website, social media channels, & on an app. We want to bring art to Angelenos and help artists develop sustainable careers in the arts.
Which of the CREATE metrics will your proposal impact?
Arts establishments
Employment in the creative industries
Measures of cultural and global economic influence (“soft power”)
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
Central LA
East LA
San Gabriel Valley
San Fernando Valley
South LA
Westside
County of Los Angeles
City of Los Angeles
Describe in greater detail how your proposal will make LA the best place to CREATE?
The LA art community is growing rapidly in both in size and reputation. This creates great opportunity but also great competition, especially for those who are young and unestablished. It is difficult for a majority of artists to have their work seen and even more difficult to build a full-time career making art. We think artists, and the conversations they and their work stimulate, are central to a vibrant, thoughtful community. As such, our goal is to help shine light on emerging artists and to bring more art to Angelenos – connecting these two important constituencies. Existing institutional channels of the art world are fundamental but leave many behind. Our work is to help artists without access to traditional channels find outlets for their work and a leg up in their careers, and to help the residents of LA encounter art in their everyday lives.
The Billboard Creative (TBC) will help make LA the best place to create by:
- helping to lift young and emerging LA artists above systemic obstacles to gaining exposure with art enthusiasts & mass audiences, as well as with members of the arts community who can help them in developing their careers.
- exposing tens of thousands of Angelenos to public art without requiring them to make a special effort because billboard art is part of our daily commutes. According to the companies from which we rented billboards for our 2015 show, its 33 boards made 12 million impressions.
- inspiring budding artists, including those in the segments of our population for whom traditional art exhibitions prove inaccessible for a variety of reasons, through widespread access to innovative art.
- stimulating cultural conversations by bringing thought-provoking art on a massive scale to the streets of LA.
- and, showcasing the work of LA artists in a quintessentially LA medium. Billboards are intertwined with with the city's history & culture & let the city itself serve as gallery walls.
This grant would allow us to stage a second show in 2017 focused exclusively on LA-based emerging artists. (TBC currently mounts 1 show per year that is open to artists from around the world.)
For the 2050 Billboard Art Show, we will open a call for submissions from LA artists. We can accept art from all disciplines except for video art. Works to be displayed in the show will be selected in two ways: a curator will select approximately 25-45 works and residents of LA will vote to identify 5 “public choice” entries. The exhibit will last one month.
New to TBC for this show will be a content feature on our website, social media streams, and app highlighting several emerging artists each week of 3 months. This will allow us to help artists beyond those who are selected for the formal exhibition.
We plan to bring art to as many communities of Los Angeles as possible by purchasing boards across the geography of LA and LA County. This will expose artists from diverse backgrounds to equally as diverse audiences.
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your project.
TBC will track the following metrics in evaluating the program's success:
- Impact of show on the careers of the emerging artists whose work is included in the show (will survey the artists at 6 and 12 months out to gage additional opportunities that have arisen from the exposure of being included in the show such as additional shows, new contacts or support from other arts institutions, and sales of work); will monitor trends in media and social media coverage of artists during and after the show.
- Number of artist submissions
- Number of works of arts included in billboard show
- Number of neighborhoods included in billboard show
- Estimates audience for show (the billboard companies have metrics for number of impressions of individual boards)
- Number of votes cast for the “public choice” works in the exhibition
- Increase in website traffic
-Impact of exposure through this show and the 2050 process and program on The Billboard Creative and its ability to assist more artists and bring more art to the streets of LA (eg. new networking and partner contacts established, new advisors and volunteers recruited, new funding opportunities uncovered, expanded artist database for future calls for entries etc.).
How can the LA2050 community and other stakeholders help your proposal succeed?
Money
Volunteers
Advisors/board members
Staff
Publicity/awareness