For three minutes a night, the electronic billboards of Times Square in Manhattan, New York, offer an unexpected interlude from the usual advertising. Visitors and passersby strolling through the iconic plaza watch the commercial intersection transform into a massive art gallery in Midnight Moment, during which an artist’s work is featured from 11:57 pm to midnight. This past September, a piece by CalArts alum David Salle (Art BFA 73) synchronized across more than 92 billboards as the month’s featured artist.
“It’s got to be one of the most monumental secrets hiding in plain sight,” Jean Cooney, director of Times Square Arts, shared in a segment about Midnight Moment with NBC News (watch below). The series, established in 2012 and in effect 364 days a year, is credited as the longest-running digital public art program in the world.
Salle took over what Cooney describes as the “one-of-a-kind canvas” with A Well-Leafed Tree Remixed, a painterly animation that finds its roots in his earlier Tree of Life series (2020-21). More about Salle’s work from Times Square Arts:
With surprising color harmonies that coexist, and at times collide with the grisaille palette of the figures, A Well-Leafed Tree Remixed tells the story of a painting sprung to life. Binding together disparate pictorial languages with his signature wit and visual musicality, Salle uses animation to compound the narrative potential of his figures, producing in the process a complex yet legible mode of storytelling.
It was a noteworthy September for Salle, who was also among the artists whose works were featured in 50+50: A Creative Century from Chouinard to CalArts at The Armory Show in New York the same month. 50+50 is the unprecedented alumni- and artist-led scholarship endowment initiative commemorating the 50th anniversary of CalArts (plus Chouinard Art Institute’s centennial anniversary), with its inclusion marking the first time the Institute has showcased work at the leading fair. The 2024 Armory Show took place at the Javits Center—a little more than a mile away from where A Well-Leafed Tree Remixed danced across Times Square’s screens.
Salle is the fourth CalArtian whose work has lit up Midnight Moments:
- January 2023: Danielle Dean (Art MFA 12) with Long Low Line
- January 2020: Allison Schulnik (Film/Video BFA 00) with MOTH
- May 2016: Jennifer Steinkamp (Film/Video BFA 84) with Botanic
“It’s really a people-powered program,” said Cooney. “It’s people making decisions to say ‘yes’ to the same thing all at once to put on a really incredible show.”
