 |
Leo Villareal | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1967  Albuquerque |
| Alma mater | |
| Occupation | Installation artist, sculptor, digital artist |
| Works | Hive (Bleecker Street) |
| Style | digital art |
| Spouse(s) | Yvonne Force Villareal |
| Website | http://villareal.net/ |
Leo Villareal (born 1967) is an American artist. His work combines LED lights and encoded computer programming to create illuminated displays. [1] He lives and works in New York City.
Villareal was born in 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and raised in El Paso on both sides of the US/Mexico border. [2] [3] [4] [5] He graduated from Portsmouth Abbey School in 1986. [3] He received a BA degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 1990 and a graduate degree from New York University Tisch School of the Arts, in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). [6]
The decisive moment that started his career came in Nevada's Black Rock desert during the 1997 Burning Man festival, when Villareal rigged up a strobe-light array above his tent so that he could find it more easily. [7]
On March 5, 2013, Villareal debuted his largest piece to that date, The Bay Lights , a public light installation consisting of 25,000 LEDs strung on the vertical cables of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. [8] The installation cost $8 million to install and was activated nightly through 2015. [9] It was replaced in 2016 with a permanent version. [10]
In July 17, 2019, the first stage of his Illuminated River project went live with lighting added to London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Millennium Bridge, and Cannon Street bridges. [11] Phase Two added Blackfriars Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Lambeth Bridge, and the Golden Jubilee Bridges, and was completed in April 2021. [12] [13]
His piece Optical Machine I was featured in The Miami Beach Edition hotel during the 2019 Art Basel art fair. [14] His piece Liminal Gradient for (RED) was displayed at the 2018 (RED) auction co-founded by Bono. It was described by architect Sir David Adjaye as "an L.E.D. Rothko". [15]
Villareal is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Renwick Gallery and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, as well as in the private collections of contemporary art collectors CJ Follini. His work has also been on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Madison Square Park in New York City, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York, The Northpark Mall in Dallas, and Brooklyn Academy of Music.[ citation needed ]
| Year | Project name | Location | Material | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | Multiverse | National Gallery of Art, East and West Buildings, Washington DC | ||
| 2010 | Sky | Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, Florida | LED-studded aluminium veil for the Museum | |
| 2013 | The Bay Lights | San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge | western section of the 7.1 km Bay Bridge linking San Francisco to Oakland | |
| 2016 | Light Matrix | Auckland Theatre Company, Auckland, New Zealand | illuminated three-storey facade of the Auckland Theatre Company [7] | |
| 2019 - 2021 | Illuminated River | London, England | creative lighting on 15 of the bridges of the River Thames in central London [16] | |
| 2023 - | Infinite Composition | Lindemann Performing Arts Center, Providence, Rhode Island | illuminated panels of white LEDs that flow in a variety of patterns in lobby of the performing arts center of Brown University [17] |
Villareal has been represented by Pace Gallery since 2016. [18]
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture".
Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. He is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism", and its most important theoretician through such writings as "Specific Objects" (1964). Judd voiced his unorthodox perception of minimalism in Arts Yearbook 8, where he says, "The new three dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school, or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities."
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian electronic artist living and working in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He creates platforms for public participation by using robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his interactive works are “anti-monuments for people to self-represent.”
The Renwick Gallery is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located in Washington, D.C. that displays American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to 21st century. The gallery is housed in a National Historic Landmark building that was opened in 1859 on Pennsylvania Avenue and originally housed the Corcoran Gallery of Art. When it was built in 1859, it was called "the American Louvre", and is now named for its architect James Renwick Jr.
Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.
Doug Aitken is an American multidisciplinary artist. Aitken's body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. He currently lives in Venice, California, and New York City.
Connersmith is an art gallery in Washington, DC, owned and founded by Leigh Conner and Jamie Smith.
Light art or the art of light is generally referring to a visual art form in which (physical) light is the main, if not sole medium of creation. Uses of the term differ drastically in incongruence; definitions, if existing, vary in several aspects. Since light is the medium for visual perception, this way all visual art could be considered light art absurdly enough; but most pieces of art are valid and coherent without reflecting on this basic perceptual fact. Some approaches on these grounds also include into light art those forms of art where light is not any medium contributing to the artwork, but is depicted. Thus, luminism may also refer to light art in the above sense, its previous usage point to painterly styles: either as an other label for the Caravaggisti in the baroque, or 19th and 20th centuries, fundamentally impressionist schools.
Chul Hyun Ahn is a South Korean artist who works primarily with light.
Jordan Wolfson is an American visual artist who lives in Los Angeles. He has worked in video and film, in sculptural installation, and in virtual reality.
The year 2013 in art involves some significant events.
The Bay Lights was a site-specific monumental light sculpture and generative art installation on the western span of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, designed to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its opening. The installation by light artist Leo Villareal included 25,000 individual white LEDs along 1.8 miles (2.9 km) of the cables on the north side of the suspension span of the bridge between Yerba Buena Island and San Francisco. The installation was controlled via a computer and displayed changing patterns that were not meant to repeat. The opening ceremony was held on March 5, 2013.
Iván Navarro is a Chilean artist who works with light, mirrors, and glowing glass tubes to craft socially and politically relevant sculptures and installations. As of 2019, he lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Frank Gillette is an American video and installation artist. Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information. He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments". His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history. Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art. In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.
Illuminated River is a large-scale public art commission which lights up nine bridges in central London across the River Thames. Designed by American artist Leo Villareal in collaboration with British architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, it uses LED light fittings to produce sequenced patterns of moving light across the bridge structures.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |