Jeffu Warmouth

Art on the Marquee

In 2011, the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center created a unique 80 foot high, seven-screen LED marquee. The organization Boston Cyberarts partnered with the BCEC to create Art on the Marquee, a juried program in which winning artists are commissioned to create works for the largest video screen in New England. Since 2012, I have submitted ten successful proposals to create new works, all juried by curator George Fifield and administrators at the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. Several of these were reviewed favorably in regional press, including WGBH-TV, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald.

These works are based on the kinds of actions staged in the Marginalia works. I re-created two of the Marquee works, Fall and 1UP, for the 2014 exhibition Jeffu Warmouth: NO MORE FUNNY STUFF at the Fitchburg Art Museum. In her Boston Globe review of the exhibition, Cate McQuaid writes:

The most affecting work, unreservedly, is the most recent. Warmouth leaves food behind and makes himself an everyman... In Fall, several versions of him plummet through a cloud-filled sky, like Yves Klein's photomontage Leap Into the Void, and Don Draper's silhouette in the opening credits of Mad Men, landing in a pool of limpid blue water, where they swim. 1 UP riffs on old arcade video games, with little Jeffus scrambling up ladders and jumping over precipices. Pac- Man's plight - and by implication, Warmouth's and our own - is life as an endless round of pursuit, consumption, peril, and destruction.

In addition to my artwork for the Marquee, since 2013 I have coordinated the Student Art on the Marquee program, in which we solicit and jury student proposals; I then lead workshops to help the winning students complete their works.