New billboard raises questions for fall election

Hanging on a brick wall at the intersection of North Sixth Street and Walnut Avenue, a billboard designed by Boston-based illustrator Christopher Serra depicts the United States sectioned into numbered columns and bands of color.

The map represents a “stylized version of a DNA autoradiograph,” according to a press release.

The billboard went on display Aug. 30 and will stay until the end of the fall semester.

“We kind of wanted something vaguely political due to the upcoming fall elections,” Your Art Here Curatorial Director Natalie Hegert said. “We didn’t want anything too overt, however. We had a look at Serra’s existing portfolio and chose this particular work.”

Serra, a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art, has worked for clients such as the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and Newsday. His work was part of the Society of Illustrators’ 48th Annual Show.

“We wanted to have an image that was intriguing and had a powerful message,” Hegert said. “It has an air of mystery, of not knowing, that I really appreciate. It’s open to the viewer’s interpretation.”

The billboard is meant to raise questions about the ethnic and cultural makeup of the U.S.

“It is not the intent of this billboard to provide answers, solutions or clear-cut messages, but rather to provoke — via an ambiguous incorporation of geography and genome — questions and introspections,” according to a press release.

Your Art Here, an Indiana-based nonprofit organization, has founded three community-run artist billboards in Bloomington and Indianapolis since 2002, according to its website.

The group has exhibited more than 50 art billboards, and in 2006, YAH displayed art on city buses for the first time.

“We’ve put many billboards on that particular space,” Hegert said in reference to the wall on Sixth and Walnut. “It’s been kind of vacant since spring of this year. The organization has been going through some changes.”

Founded in September 2002 by Shana Berger, Alyssa Hill, Owen Mundy and Nathan Purath, YAH is an all-volunteer organization that seeks to “extend visual expression beyond traditional museum and gallery spaces in order to create a public venue where art and ideas can be expressed freely,” according to the organization’s website.

It was created to provide local communities with an opportunity to engage in visual communication through the use of billboards.

Many of the people who founded and worked for YAH were IU students who have since graduated and moved away, Hegert said. Though YAH has lost some initial members, it has gained new ones.

“We wanted to keep the organization going,” Hegert said. “We want to keep
it alive.”

Serra’s billboard is the first Hegert has hung, and she said she looks forward to hanging many more.

“We’re going to be sending out a call for entries,” Hegert said. “We’ll ask for artist submissions of ideas they have for billboards.”

The billboard hanging in such a signature location indicates that YAH is still in business, Hegert said.


— Makenzie Holland