#OBMARTS

Since our inception in 2004, OBM has been committed to developing media that supports the production and presentation of art. We believe art is a powerful form of expression that enriches communities and encourages meaningful dialogue. Our Community Engagement team is dedicated to developing key partnerships with internationally recognized and local artists, as well as museums, art institutions, and curators, to activate art in highly visible areas. Represented by #OBMarts, these collaborative efforts and ongoing investments expand the reach of art in public spaces to broader and more diverse audiences, delivering on our mission to improve lives in cities through our media platform.

Meet Our Artists & Partners

Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District

Since our founding in 2004, OBM has been committed to pursuing a community-oriented model of outdoor media that integrates art, community content, and advertising. We have worked to ensure that each of our sites within A&E Atlanta serves as a community asset through a unique combination of signature design, public art, and meaningful community content. Since the launch of our first sign in September 2019, OBM has invested $7 million dollars in donated signage time to nonprofit organizations, local artist's, culture institutions and museums to support programs and initiatives throughout Atlanta.

Three years into the making, Orange Barrel Media and A&E continues to find new ways to highlight art and culture Downtown by supporting Atlanta artists and expanding the creative programming in the community.

Genvieve Gaignard

Look at them Look at Us, 2022

The mixed media installation of Gaignard’s work Look At Them Look At Us (As We Shine Brighter Than They Ever Imagined) will be a three-dimensional assembly of materials, including neon style illuminated letters, hand woven fencing, and sidewalk projections.

Gaignard is known for multimedia work that addresses questions at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Placing this public commission adjacent to a digital screen offers an enticing opportunity for local artists to engage Gaignard’s message.

Gerald Lovell

Grace, 2021

Looking at us directly with a faint smile, Grace exudes confidence and warm friendliness. A powerful image, an embodiment of thoughtful grace. Lovell’s signature impasto pasting style combines flat, minimally articulated backgrounds with densely layered brushwork on painted figures.

OBM partnered with Living Walls, an organization who advocates for social change through public art, to translate Lovell’s painting style to architectural scale.

Jiha Moon

Yellowave Blue

The artist Jiha Moon often returns to the color yellow in her work because of the many meanings and associations it can have. It is a high-key color used to signal caution or grab attention. It is also a color we associate with iconic images such as The Simpsons and the blonde hair of Goldilocks. Yellow can also be used as a derogatory term referring to Asian and Asian American people. Instead, for the artist, it represents her hope for the visibility of the Asian community in America. The massive, dynamic yellow brushstrokes, combined here with shades of bright blue, are like a powerful and ever-moving wave or river. The colors and forms of this work create a dialogue between symbols of nature, culture, and politics.

Alex Brewer (HENSE)

Lenticular Wall, 2022

"The imagery I created for the lenticular wall is based on recent public art projects as well as my studio work from the last few years. I wanted to create a bold design that would read as one unified composition but also break up into interesting areas when viewed from different angles. This is also the first time I’ve worked digitally to create a piece that would be printed and installed on site. As always with my public work, I’m considering the context, architecture, and overall space." - HENSE

Ash "WOLFDOG" Hayner

Color Connection

"The concept for this piece was both about bringing color and excitement to an otherwise bland landscape, and about bringing people together. Utilizing the cement texture of the bridge as the background allowed for the bright abstract shapes to tease the larger, solid image of color on the opposite side of the bridge. Similarly, people from all walks of life use this space to connect from building to building. My hope with this piece is to provide an uplifting and unexpected meeting place for years to come." - Ash "WOLFDOG" Hayner

Featured Artists

Walls for a Cause NYC

Walls for a Cause NYC, a multi-site public art exhibition and philanthropic initiative, launched in the late fall of 2020. Curated by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels of gallery We Buy Gold and Diana Nawi for Orange Barrel Media, the project presents commissioned paintings from nine contemporary artists in the form of large-scale murals on prominent OBM wallscapes throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Participating artists include Felipe Baeza, María Berrío, Theresa Chromati, Ariel Dannielle, Chioma Ebinama, Marcus Jahmal, Christopher Myers, Naudline Pierre, and Ilana Savdie. Murals were display for residents and visitors throughout 2021 in rotation with commercial messaging. The original paintings were featured in an online exhibition called On the Other Side of Something by We Buy Gold from January 21 – March 24, 2021. A percentage of the sale of each piece was donated to support NYC nonprofit Project EATS, a neighborhood-based initiative that uses art, urban agriculture, partnerships, and social enterprise to sustainably produce and equitably distribute essential resources within and between our communities.

Ariel Danielle

Felipe Baeza

Marcus Jahmal

Christopher Myers

Photo Credit: Paul Takeuchi

Naudline Pierre

Too Much, Not Enough, 2020

Oil on canvas
60 x 40 inches
Courtesy of the artist

Naudline Pierre creates works that explore a mysterious alternate universe populated by characters that often interact with each other in tender ways. She employs imagery from art historical references while building her personal mythology, depicting spiritual tableaus and portraits in an imaginary, fantasy world. Situated at the middle of the painting Too Much, Not Enough is an embodied, mauve-hued woman-seemingly an avatar for the artist herself-surrounded by angelic Black figures whose textured wings and radiating crown-like halos encircle her. The dense purple flesh of the central figure is contrasted against the more loosely rendered seraphic beings, the terrestrial situated among the ethereal. The resulting image is one of divine Black femmehood, conjuring the protective possibilities of the celestial and otherworldly in the day-to-day.

María Berrío

Miracles of Ordinary Light, 2020

Collage with Japanese paper and watercolour paint on canvas
92 x 118 x 2 inches
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

María Berrío is best known for her intricate representational works that imbue scenes, both quotidian and extraordinary, with a labor-intensive, textile-like surface. Collaging together small pieces of colored Japanese and hand-painted paper, the artist creates painterly but iconographic works. Her subject matter ranges, drawing from the folkloric and mythological to the biographical, and the resulting images suggest narrative tableaus of commune, refuge, and harmony between nature and people, as well as quiet scenes of danger drawn from our contemporary context. Her contribution to this project is an image of a citrus tree, its brightly colored leaves and fruits a multifaceted refraction of light. The unpopulated but inviting landscape offers us, the viewer, a lush place in the shade to rest a moment.

Photo Credit: Ariel Danielle

Ariel Danielle

Luxuriate Disorder, 2019

Acrylic on canvas
72 x 131 ½ inches
Courtesy of the artist

This work, a self portrait of the artist, pictures her in a large, open bathroom; it is an image of the self that is both powerful and informal, focusing on the pleasures of domestic ritual. At the fore, she lies across a divan filing her nails and looking directly out at the viewer-her pose is relaxed but her gaze is focused. The background of the image reveals many details, from personal and familiar objects such as underwear strewn about and a lush houseplant to the striking inclusion of a version of one of the artist's earlier paintings. This staged, frontal scene is punctuated by the discreet presence of a leg stepping into the overfilled and overflowing bathtub behind her, revealing the comfortable intimacies of daily life.

Photo Credit: Chioma Ebinama

Chioma Ebinama

Portrait of my beloved as an orchid, 2020

Watercolor on handmade Indian recycled cotton rag paper
9 x 10 ½ inches
Courtesy Fortnight Institute

Lovers, 2020

Watercolor and sumi ink on handmade Indian recycled cotton rag paper
6½ x 6 ¼ inches
Courtesy Fortnight Institute

Hugging Party, 2020

Watercolor on handmade Indian recycled cotton rag paper
8 x 9 inches
Courtesy Fortnight Institute

Lovers in the Grove, 2020

Watercolor on handmade Indian recycled cotton rag paper
6 x 6 ½ inches
Courtesy Fortnight Institute

Chioma Ebinama typically works in watercolor and ink, lending her talismanic images a sometimes ghostly, ephemeral quality. Drawing from her body of work Now I only believe in...love, Ebinama has brought together four works that suggest both familiar life and otherworldliness. Portrait of my beloved as an orchid shows isolated delicately rendered flowers, a kind of stylized botanical study of which the true subject is love. This emphasis on the natural world and the tenderness of our relationships is reflected in the surreal and layered flora that encircle the intertwined lovers of the last image. Their embrace, like the supportive, encompassing grasp of friends, family, or perhaps even strangers that we see in Hugging Party, suggest the necessary magic of the intimacies that sustains us.

Photo Credit: Adam Reich

Theresa Chromati

rested erection, moment collision ( she is watching and I am shifting ), 2020

Acrylic and glitter on canvas
50 x 25 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Kravets Wehby Gallery. New York

Theresa Chromati's narrative figurative imagery is obscured and distorted through a lens of abstraction. Employing dynamic lines, bold patterns, and radiating colors her characters weave through amorphous settings on a truth seeking inner journey. The works often hold space for sustained observation to make out the women and objects that populate them as they seem to merge with their surroundings, fragmenting and coalescing across the canvas. Chromati's new painting features a contorted body at its center with extending limbs and extremities breaking up the surface of the work while reaching for a scrotum flower, the artist's motif for balance. The figure's face is an expressive, swirling storm of emotion and blue glitter, seeming to transform before our eyes and, as in much of the artist's work, suggesting the ever shifting terms of self and identity.

Photo Credit: Brad Farwell

Felipe Baeza

Unruly Suspension, 2020

Ink, graphite, flashe, cut paper, acrylic, watercolor, varnish, and embroidery on panel
14 × 11 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley. London/Hove

Felipe Baeza has a background in printmaking, and his attention to materiality, texture, layering, and surface is evident in his paintings and drawings. His ongoing investigations deal with bodies in flux as they transform, dematerialize, and fuse with the natural world and one another. These bodies are often traveling through interstitial spaces in search of a new landscape where they where they are free from regulation and oppression. Unruly Suspension exemplifies this impulse as a body seems to hang or float in midair, overtaken, or perhaps merging with, an ambiguous purple form. Thread has been patterned across this shape and hangs down the surface of the work, adding to the sensation that the body is defying gravity and reaching beyond itself.

Photo Credit: John Dennis

Ilana Savdie

Entrañadas, 2020

Oil, acrylic, and pigmented wax on canvas mounted on panel
58 × 48 inches
Courtesy of the artist

Ilana Savdie's work deals with themes around invasion, control, defiance, and the ways in which power is propelled and mediated through bodies. A particular focus is placed on the carnivalesque themes of defiance through the inversion of social norms and the exaggerated body as a form of mockery and protest. Entrañadas is part of a larger series of works that feature aspects of the Marimoda, a fantastical, brightly costumed figure who appears in the Carnaval de Barranquilla-the Colombian city where Savdie was raised-and who emerged as a means to ridicule the elite. These paintings reflect and embellish aspects of this folkloric tradition, exploring both its aesthetic, and more significantly, its political and social histories of subversion. The central figure of Sadie's painting is surreal and grotesque, but even atop an abstracted ground, it is visceral and familiar-it is an unbound body; a body in flux, pain, revolt, and transformation.

Photo Credit: Dan Bradica

Marcus Jahmal

Ocean interior, 2020

Oil on canvas
100 × 80 × 1 ½ inches
Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech

Marcus Jamal's paintings are grounded in the observed and imagined moments of daily life-they feature subjects and details drawn from the familiar and inscribed with an expressive surreality that takes its inspiration from a range of visual lineages.

The artist's new work features a shirtless man seated in a gold chair crossing his arms over his chest, his fists tightly closed; it is a protective and powerful gesture, at once drawing himself inward and shielding his body. The quick and open brushstrokes that comprise the background and the man's jeans are in contrast to the clear, graphic style in which his face and striking red hat are depicted. With his eyes focused outside the frame of the image, Jahmal's subject seems to reside in an interior world beyond us.

Christopher Myers

My Body is a Burning House, 2020

Collage
18 × 24 inches
Courtesy of the artist

Christopher Myers works between mediums and forms creating encompassing and boldly iconographic images that often focus on the figure. Exploring the figure as both an embodied self and mythological being, his works suggest the larger narratives of history and the spiritual. My Body is a Burning House is a collage that depicts the image its title describes- Black man's torso transformed into a grid of windows engulfed in flames. His lower body is composed of images of wreckage that implies the destruction we are witnessing, but the graceful pose of his hand and seemingly still face suggests that this is not a momentary catastrophe but the kind of acute terror that burdens the everyday.

Featured Artists

Art for Action

Launched in advance of the 2020 election, “Art for Action” was an artist-driven non-partisan voter awareness campaign developed to counteract voter suppression, encourage engagement, and drive action through the deployment of dynamic public art and voter resources. It was the largest and most geographically diverse effort of its kind. Curated by the Wexner Center for the Arts and Diana Nawi, the campaign featured the works of seven local and four national artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Jeffrey Gibson, Jenny Holzer, and Tomashi Jackson. The art component worked synergistically with OBM’s “You Can Vote” ads to enable action through resource links, customized digital tickers counting down to key state-specific deadlines, and proprietary software that allowed IKE kiosk users to register to vote and request an absentee ballot via QR code handoffs. The campaign ran on a network of digital billboards and kiosks in 16 cities nationwide, including key battleground states Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and Georgia.

Featured Artists

Nari Ward: We the People

MCA Denver and internationally recognized artist Nari Ward partnered with OBM on an ambitious public art project to extend a retrospective exhibition of Ward’s work entitled We the People beyond museum walls. The artist’s famous wall-drawings, which he creates by drilling shoelaces into architectural walls to form images and texts, appeared as digital content on 38 large-scale displays and kiosks throughout Downtown Denver. As a companion project to the retrospective, Ward debuted a major new work entitled LAZARUS Beacon (2020) – a powerful site-specific digital content that champions equal access to art and urges closer inspection of American history. The dynamic multi-story video projection was unveiled on the Daniels and Fisher Clocktower, a highly visible 325’ tall structure located in the heart of the City. The projection was on display several nights per week from July through September 2020.

Featured Artists

For Freedoms: 2020 Awakening

For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that harnesses the power of art to encourage civic engagement, public discourse, and direct action. Over the past two years, we have used our media platform to support various For Freedoms initiatives, including our recent participation in their 2020 Awakening campaign. Created to drive greater participation in American democracy and timed to coincide with the November elections, 2020 Awakening featured more than 100 billboards by over 85 artists in all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands

For Freedoms

For Freedoms

For Freedoms

For Freedoms

For Freedoms

Various Artists

Boston Arts Academy

Boston Arts Academy (BAA) is the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts, serving students who reflect the diversity of Boston’s neighborhoods.

Boston Arts Academy mission is to serve as a laboratory and a beacon for artistic and academic innovation, preparing a diverse community of aspiring artist scholars to be successful in their college or professional careers and to be engaged members of a democratic society.

Orange Barrel Media displayed their student artwork on several of our large format signs throughout the city during spring 2022.

Featured Artists

Charles McGee x Library Street Collective

Orange Barrel Media partnered with Library Street Collective in their efforts to display Charles McGee’s work throughout Detroit. The artist and educator, who called Detroit home since the age of only ten years old, passed away in February of 2021 at the age of ninety-six. His prolific career spanned nearly eight decades.

In 2017, Library Street Collective began working closely with McGee, and since his passing the gallery has worked alongside his daughter, Lyndsay McGee, to assemble a collection of his remaining works. As part of these efforts, with support from Orange Barrel Media, McGee’s 2011 work Play Patterns II will be on display in Detroit’s historic Washington Blvd district September 26th through October 16th, 2022.

April McGee-Flournoy, daughter of Charles McGee explained that, “all 50 elements of Play Patterns II are essential and represent the world and nature as a consortium. The piece represents my father's work and legacy. It inspires us as a family to strive for unity in a collective effort to honor who Charles McGee was, and his tenacity to overcome challenges with the hope we will live a life that brings inspiration to the world, and our community. My hope is that the billboard sends a message that we all are essential, and must work in concert together, in unity, to fulfill our purpose in this world."

Featured Artists

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