Why Urban Light matters.
Urban Light is a luminous public sculpture where Miracle Mile's museum character meets historic street furniture, rigorous geometric composition and Chris Burden's transformation of obsolete civic infrastructure into one of Los Angeles' most recognizable works of contemporary art.
Set along Wilshire Boulevard near South Ogden Drive and just steps from Smidt Welcome Plaza, the sculpture occupies Los Angeles County Museum of Art's street-facing edge as a dense field of cast-iron poles rising between the boulevard and the museum campus. Repeating globes form a luminous canopy above closely spaced columns whose standardized gray finish draws attention toward variations in height, ornament and casting. Moving between the rows continually reorganizes the apparent geometry, with straight alignments appearing and dissolving as overlapping shafts compress or open the surrounding field. Daylight emphasizes the sculptural mass and decorative differences among the poles, then illumination after dusk converts their upper register into an intensely bright plane suspended above the pavement. The result is a work whose architectural scale turns fragments of Los Angeles street history into a public environment experienced from both inside and outside its ordered field.
What defines Urban Light.
Urban Light is best known for Chris Burden's assembly of 202 restored cast-iron streetlamps into an expansive installation completed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. Burden's collection began after his friend Paul Schimmel's son Max drew his attention to dismantled antique lamps being sold by Jeff Levine at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. Levine possessed additional examples at his home, and Burden acquired 70 from him during the following year before continuing the search across Southern California. The finished collection contains 17 designs dating principally from the 1920s and 1930s, a period when expanding municipalities commissioned distinctive streetlights for individual communities and districts. Pasadena examples carry floral ornament associated with the city's rose imagery, Anaheim poles incorporate the letter A into their bases and a group from Lynwood stands twelve feet high with single globes. Six Glendale examples rise to nineteen feet with paired globes, creating pronounced variations in height within the assembled field. Burden grouped lamps by their originating communities and standardized the collection with a neutral gray finish, allowing differences in fluting, bases, shafts and decorative casting to remain legible across the installation. Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired the work as the Gordon Family Foundation's gift to Transformation: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art Campaign, and installation at the museum's Wilshire Boulevard entrance was completed in February 2008. The arrangement converts municipal objects originally dispersed across Southern California into a concentrated sculptural archive whose 202 components preserve the individualized civic design of an expanding twentieth-century metropolis.
Maintaining Burden's field as functioning electrical sculpture has required an extensive conservation program extending beyond conventional surface treatment. Eight years of outdoor exposure oxidized and blanched the paint, produced flaking and exposed sections of iron to rust, prompting Los Angeles County Museum of Art conservators to test replacement coating systems for color, sheen, durability and compliance with California volatile-organic-compound regulations. A two-month campaign beginning in May 2016 divided the installation into sections so part of the work remained accessible as specialists cleaned the poles, treated corrosion, applied primer and renewed the protective finish. Electrical conservation followed for the work's tenth anniversary in 2018 when support from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation funded replacement of 309 incandescent bulbs with LEDs. The conversion reduced the installation's power consumption by 90 percent and lowered greenhouse-gas emissions associated with its illumination. Conservators worked with lighting specialists to reproduce the appearance Burden had established through incandescent bulbs, treating color temperature, brightness and distribution as components of the artwork itself. The lamps subsequently shifted to solar-generated electricity, preserving nightly illumination through a substantially different energy system from the one installed a decade earlier. Burden's sculpture joins historic ironwork with continuously maintained electrical technology, requiring conservation of both its physical surfaces and the precise qualities of the light that complete the work after dusk.
How Urban Light fits.
Urban Light works as the anchor for a Miracle Mile sequence connecting cinematic architecture, automobile culture and Ice Age paleontology across institutions created from radically different chapters of Los Angeles history.
Begin at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which occupies the former May Company department store at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue alongside a new spherical structure designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Albert C. Martin and Samuel A. Marx designed the 1939 department store in Streamline Moderne form, including its cylindrical corner wrapped in gold-colored glass mosaic; the Academy later restored the structure as the 250,000-square-foot Saban Building and connected it by glass bridges to a 45,000-square-foot sphere containing the David Geffen Theater and Dolby Family Terrace. Continue to Petersen Automotive Museum, founded by publishing entrepreneur Robert E. Petersen and his wife Margie on June 11, 1994 to examine the automobile's influence on American history and culture. Its home began as a Welton Becket-designed department store completed in 1962, then underwent a $90 million reconstruction unveiled in 2015 with Kohn Pedersen Fox wrapping the existing building in sweeping stainless-steel ribbons. Twenty-five rotating exhibitions and more than 150 displayed vehicles now occupy the reworked interior, linking automotive design with a city whose twentieth-century development became inseparable from the car. Conclude at La Brea Tar Pits, where asphaltic deposits preserve an immense paleontological archive extending across the last 50,000 years. George Allan Hancock granted Los Angeles County exclusive excavation rights for two years in 1913, leading museum crews to excavate 96 sites and recover more than 750,000 specimens of plants and animals before Hancock donated 23 acres for a protected park in 1924. Construction of an underground parking garage in 2006 exposed 16 previously unknown deposits and a near-complete Columbian mammoth, producing Project 23 and another immense body of fossils for continuing study. The progression moves from a preserved Streamline Moderne department store adapted for cinema through a midcentury retail building reconstructed around automobile culture into asphalt deposits yielding Ice Age fossils, compressing architecture, transportation and deep natural history into a single stretch of Miracle Mile.
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