The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project
Chapter #2: Mario Ybarra Jr.
January 24–March 19, 2014
Mobile, Alabama
Reception: January 24, 7–9pm
at the Centre for the Living Arts
301 Conti Street
Mobile, AL 36602
www.nomadicdivision.org
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LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) is proud to present the second chapter of billboards as part of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project featuring the work of Mario Ybarra Jr. in Mobile, Alabama from January 24 to March 19, 2014. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project is a series of artist-produced billboards and activations that will unfold along Interstate 10 Freeway from Florida to California through spring 2015. The project was conceived by artist Zoe Crosher and is co-curated by the artist and LAND’s Director and Curator, Shamim M. Momin. Using the concept of Manifest Destiny—America’s territorial expansion across North America—the artists will explore this problematic and layered history.
Using approximately 100 billboards total, ten artists will create “chapter” groupings along I-10, each a unique interpretive link to the exhibition’s thematic. The billboards will move through and punctuate the landscape by tracing territorial expansion from east to west, along one of the country’s busiest freeways, concluding in Los Angeles. The billboards will be activated through various events, programs, and social media outlets for dialogue and interaction with local communities.
Crosher writes, “The intention is to give a physicalized reminder of this extraordinarily influential (and often times destructive) 19th-century belief which unabashedly dictated the expansion west, that still dictates our movement west, and to gently place/implicate/remind the people unknowingly participating in that landscape along the way.” Momin adds, “By physically moving through and mapping the very landscape that has been so fantasized, dreamed about, and capitalized upon in a breadth of positive and negative ways, the artists have the opportunity to address their work to the idea in a variety of ways—opaque or direct, tangential or political, macro and micro.” The project launched on October 20, 2013 in Jacksonville, Florida with billboards by Los Angeles-based artist Shana Lutker, titled Onward and Upward. Participating artists include John Baldessari, Sanford Biggers, Matthew Brannon, Zoe Crosher, Eve Fowler, Shana Lutker, Jeremy Shaw, Daniel R. Small, Bobbi Woods, and Mario Ybarra Jr.
Mario Ybarra Jr. (b. 1973, Los Angeles; lives and works in Wilmington, California) is a visual and performance artist, educator, founding member of Slanguage collective, and activist who combines street culture with fine art to produce site-specific urban interventions that often bring to light little-known aspects of a particular location’s cultural history. Ybarra Jr.’s chapter of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project will use source material from the artist’s ongoing collection of images of what he calls “barrio aesthetics” in Los Angeles, transplanting these images to billboards spread throughout Mobile. Ybarra Jr. is interested in inserting the daily culture and experience of one city and neighborhood into another, both contrasting and familiar.
The billboards will launch on January 24 with an opening reception at the Centre for the Living Arts (301 Conti Street Mobile, AL 36602) from 7 to 9pm. An exhibition of the billboard vinyls will take place at the Centre for the Living Arts from April 3 to July 27, 2014.
This project is supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Special thanks to the Centre for the Living Arts for their support of Chapter #2: Mario Ybarra Jr. Additional support provided by Fairhope Brewing Company, Lamar Advertising Company, and Wintzell’s Oyster House.
About LAND
LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) is a non-profit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects in Los Angeles and beyond. LAND believes that everyone deserves the opportunity to experience innovative contemporary art in their day-to-day lives. In turn, artists deserve the opportunity to realize projects, otherwise unsupported, at unique sites in the public realm.
