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I-70 Sign Show

Drivers crossing America on Interstate 70 find that the scenery shifts in Missouri. Billboards dominate the landscape. Most signs advertise travel amenities — food, motels and fuel. Many are blank. Others seem to conduct a heated, if inadvertent, culture-war debate: “red” versus “blue,” Christian values versus pleasure and vice. Warnings that hell is real, abortions stop beating hearts, and gambling destroys the family battle ads for porn venues and casinos. My goal in launching the “I-70 Sign Show” was to infiltrate this polarized terrain with artworks that function as playful commentary. I invite artists whose projects engage language, signage or pop culture in ways that could reflect themes prevalent along the 250 miles between St. Louis and Kansas City — religion, sex, gender, guns, labor, athletics, leisure and commerce. The project started in April 2014 with Kay Rosen and continued with Mel Bochner, Mickalene Thomas, Kim Beck, Ken Lum, Karl Haendel, Ryan McGinness, Marilyn Minter, Jeff Gibson, Eric Oglander and Ed Ruscha. The “Sign Show” does not explicitly label its billboards as artworks. By inserting something perplexing into a numbing message barrage, the project invites a vehiclebased audience to reconsider a banal scene with curiosity. One unusual aspect of the “Sign Show” emerged from the site-specific condition of Missouri’s billboard surplus. When I rented one sign, the media vendor offered a second one free. Each artwork, printed on heavyweight vinyl, debuts on the mid-Missouri billboard for which I pay, situated at the edge of a family farming business. After two months, artworks move down the interstate for reinstallation on a new sign, different each time, assigned by the vendor based on availability. This agreement gives the project an advantageous element of chance, since the art’s potential meaning is almost always heightened — more poetic or political — in its second context. In a dramatic example, Thomas’ A Moment’s Pleasure inverted “male gaze” assumptions around representations of the female body. Then, in November 2014, the work moved to West Florissant Avenue, five miles from the site of Michael Brown’s killing and the Ferguson protests, and its feminist content shifted to encompass race. Thomas’ women, with their direct poses and dignified expressions, functioned as sentinels guarding and witnessing a scene of national pain. My PAD project documents— and continues— the boundary-blurring elements of the “Sign Show.” A grid mixes billboard artworks with ordinary Missouri signage. Short essays explore the complexity of works in their second I-70 locations. And three artworks infiltrate new territory in the public “space” of the PAD journal, dispersed on pages among other content.