Billboard ─ Art on the Road : A Retrospective Exhibition of Artists' Billboards of the Last 30 Years

foreword by Joseph Thompson This book accompanies the exhibition of artists'billboards that opens the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art's (MASS MoCA's) inaugural season.The exhibition comprises a twenty-work retrospective of billboards designed by artists over the pastthree decades as well as five newly commissioned ones. The retrospective includes works by, amongothers, John Baldessari, Genevieve Cadieux, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gran Fury, Group Material, theGuerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Joseph Kosuth, and Barbara Kruger. The new works, made in cooperationwith the communities where they will be installed, are by Julie Ault and Martin Beck, LotharBaumgarten, Sue Coe, Leon Golub, and Gary Simmons.In addition to the descriptions and color imagesof the historic and new billboards, the book contains almost three hundred short entries, offeringthe first broad survey of the medium. More than half of these entries include a small colorimage.The book also contains three essays. In "Disturbances in the Field of Mammon: Toward a Historyof Artists' Billboards," Harriet Senie finds precursors for contemporary billboards in European artposters (Toulouse-Lautrec), modern political posters (Rodchenko), and war billboards ("Uncle SamWants You"). She looks at the subject matter of contemporary artists' billboards--racism, feminism,environmental issues, war and peace, consumerism, and AIDS--and at artists' strategies and sitechoices. Public artist Peggy Diggs discusses the process through which billboards are made and theproblems encountered by billboard artists, and curator Laura Heon writes about works in theexhibition, in particular the (often conceptual) billboards that do not "sell" any politicalmessage.Copublished with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.