The Billboard Creative: An Ode to Public Art

The Billboard Creative is the Los Angeles-based nonprofit that exposes artists in the most innovative and affordable way. In a nutshell, the business takes unused and remnant billboards and turns them into public art around Los Angeles. This quintessential display of diverse artwork across the city is viewed by thousands on their daily commute, and it increases the impact of original art greatly.

The 2015 Billboard artists currently displayed includes dreamy photographer Mona Kuhn, surrealist painter Ed Ruscha, trans-media artist Carolyn Doucette, and documentary photographer Andrew Bush.

The Billboard artists are creatively challenged, emerging and well-established, and long to “stop traffic with art,” said Kuhn. The Billboard Creative is run BY artists FOR artists. Their purpose is to expand the mass audience of art in a feasible and ingenious way, as well as to promote public art visually and culturally. Donations can be made for sponsoring a billboard at thebillboardcreative.com, and submission-based shows are year round.

Mona Kuhn

“I want to stop traffic with art,” said Mona Kuhn, the Los Angeles-based dreamy photographer and Billboard artist best known for her large-scale photographs on human anatomy and emotion. Kuhn’s images of people are naturally intimate and collected, especially her naked portraits which create a realist effect.

Kuhn’s work has been exhibited in art museums around the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Miami Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Art in London, and Le Louvre in France. Her collection of photographs, Acido Dorado, showcases the female form in its most comfortably natural state and experiments with sunlight against fair skin.

To view more of her art, visit monakuhn.com/collections

Ed Ruscha

Ed Rushca is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist who attracted attention during the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. His antecedents include Dada, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism, which are all hinted in his paintings, drawings, prints, books, and films. His work compliments pop art by enlarging rich text and creating vivid imagery.

Rushca’s collection of art, Catalogue Rasionne, mixes cool and warm colors to create a 3-D style. In his piece, “Pay Nothing Until April” (acrylic on canvas, 2003), the tall snowy mountains are dark blue shades and the sky is a musky yellow color. Ruscha’s style is minimalistic and experimental, yet he still creates powerfully rich work reminiscent of the ‘60s.

To view his art collections, visit edruscha.com

Andrew Bush

Andrew Bush is a documentary photographer who’s artistic purpose is to expose the culture of cars as being an inseparable part of American life. Bush photographs individuals of various racial backgrounds driving in cars in and around the city. He calledthis well-known series, Vector Portraits (1989-1997).

Bush juxtaposes the tension between private and public in his series, exposing American ideals of mobility, independence, and human expression. Bush’s work has been featured in galleries including Angles Gallery, California Center for the Arts, and the Society for Contemporary Photography. Bush is also the author of “Drive,” a written and cultural look at his Vector Portraits series.

To learn more about Bush, visit andrewbush.net

Deanna Lee

Deanna Lee is a Brooklyn-based illustrator and ink pen painter whose work manifests in her “perpetual interests.” At an early age, Lee was inspired by the growth and decay in the natural world, which led to her creations of psychological and sensual art pieces. Her public art collections, Perpetual Nature and Groundswell, are her most popular features around New York and Los Angeles.

Lee’s passion for documenting the “presence and effect of natural systems,” ismconveyed in her drawings of minerals, cells, and DNA strands. Her Asian background and modernist abstraction-influences contribute to her original multi-cultural style. Lee’s work has been displayed in the Courthouse Gallery, the Robert Henry Contemporary, and Blank Space Gallery.

To view her art collections, visit deannackee.net