Drive-By Art: Eye-Catching Visuals from L.A. to New York

Chris Burden‘s “Urban Light” is made of some 200 salvaged cast-iron lampposts from the 1920s and ’30s.

Jori Finkel writes: Chris Burden‘s “Urban Light,” located in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has become a leading example of a type of public art growing more prominent in Los Angeles: art that you don’t have to leave the comfort of your convertible to experience.

Two years ago, the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama planted a bed of overgrown, colorful fiberglass and ceramic tulips in a Beverly Hills park visible from Santa Monica Boulevard and Rodeo Drive.

To kick off Lance Armstrong’s coming Nike-sponsored benefit project with artists, Shepard Fairey created a huge mural of the cyclist on the side of the Montalban Theater in Los Angeles.

This month, the Italian-born, California-based artist Piero Golia is placing an aluminum sphere atop the Standard Hotel, also in West Hollywood. The sphere will light up whenever Mr. Golio is in town and go dark when he is not.

While Mr. Golia imagines his work could be camouflaged by its surroundings, other public artworks announce themselves prominently, such as Simon Rodia’s soaring monuments of Watts Towers.

An untitled film still by Cindy Sherman at Sunset Boulevard and Olive Street.

The line between art and entertainment is deliberately blurred in the case of Cindy Sherman’s billboards, which featured Hollywood-inspired images from the artist’s celebrated “Untitled Film Stills” series and were placed near actual movie billboards.

A 2007 April Greiman mural of a super-sized bowl of rice on the façade of an Arquitectonica-designed building at Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue in Koreatown spans 8,200 square feet.

Images and text via nytimes.com