“Aug 1-7,” Annette Lawrence for Modern Billings.
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has announced that the eighth season of its outdoor billboard exhibition program Modern Billings will feature the work of Texas artist Annette Lawrence in a solo presentation — a first for the series.
Modern Billings, led by the Modern’s Assistant Curators of Education Jesse Morgan Barnett and Tiffany Wolf Smith, asks artists to program billboard spaces which are traditionally used for commercial advertisements along Jacksboro Highway and the Lancaster corridor in the northwest and southeast suburbs of Fort Worth.
“I’ve always been intrigued by the sheer size of billboards,” Lawrence writes in a statement about the project. “As a child, the larger-than-life scale of New York subway advertisements and the overwhelming bombardment of Times Square billboards made a lasting impression. The billboards along Texas highways play a strong horizontal counterpoint to the verticality of my earliest visual influences.”
“October 23-31,” Annette Lawrence for Modern Billings.
Glasstire checked in with Lawrence earlier this year, at the beginning of the first Coronavirus lockdown, where she said about continuing to work during troubling times: “It’s not essential medical, it’s not essential emergency, but it is essential human.”Lawrence is also the focus of a new documentary series on installation Art, and her work was recently featured in Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
The billboards will be at the following locations in the Fort Worth area (titles of works included):
Title: Mar. 17-24 04. Location: 1316 Jacksboro Hwy 76114
Title: Aug 1-7. Location: 3800 E Lancaster Ave 76103
Title: Jun 28-30. Location: 2130 Jacksboro Hwy 76164
Title: Sept. 17-23. Location: 2810 E Lancaster Ave 76103
Title: May 17-23 03. Location: 2130 Jacksboro Hwy 76164
“In selecting images for MODERN BILLINGS, I strove for quiet in order to stand out against the noise,” Lawrence says. “The images of open journals offer an understated moment for busy travelers, something for those with sensibilities not often rewarded by billboards. Stacks of open journals at the scale of billboards hold a larger-than-life-size hint at introspection, a paradox.”
For more on Modern Billings, and to learn more about Annette Lawrence’s project, please visit the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s website here.
