Urban Light, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Urban Light, the very Instagrammable installation of 202 historic streetlamps created by the late artist Chris Burden ’69 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gets a lot of love. Maybe a little too much love.
The 2008 sculpture needs a paint job and is one of 23 works selected by the Bank of America Art Conservation Project for grants “for the preservation and conservation of the world’s cultural treasures” in 2023.
“Conservators will apply protective paint layers that have been extensively tested on all the streetlamps, ensuring that substances such as lipstick, permanent marker and dye can be easily cleaned from their surfaces,” the bank announced. Other works selected for preservation grants included 15th-century Armenian manuscripts, Andy Warhol’s Oxidation series and two paintings by Paul Cézanne.