What are you getting out of Houston's mysterious new giant billboard?
In September 2006, five years after the 9/11 attacks, Deborah M. Colton (founder of Deborah Colton Gallery and partner in Colton & Farb Gallery) brought Yoko Ono's striking IMAGINE PEACE billboard to Houston's skyline. Now, Colton is once again sponsoring the piece in conjunction with the Colton & Farb Gallery's Positive Perceptions exhibit.
Ono's work, only one part of her larger, decades-spanning peace promotion movement, was unveiled in early September, on a 14-by-48 foot billboard on I-45 North, near I-10. It's a stark, clean white with simple black text. Driving into downtown Houston from the north, you can't miss it.
Positive Perceptions, which runs until Nov. 5, also includes work by fellow peace lovers who were active in the sixties — Robert Indiana, William John Kennedy, Ultra Violet, and Jonas Mekas — as well as contemporary Texas artists Philip J. Romano, McKay Otto, and JD Miller.
"Although the exhibition starts with this foundation in the 1960s, it shows how the same ideas now transcend into the 21st century as a new vision going into the future," the gallery explained in a statement.
At a time when the U.S. is embroiled in seemingly never-ending conflicts abroad, and rebellions and revolutions are rife on every continent, Ono's public art piece serves as a poignant antithesis of the present — and the rest of the show's artists attempt to offer a glimmer of hope for what's to come.
Have you noticed the billboard on your way into town? How does it make you feel?
