Urban Light, Art installation at LACMA entrance, Los Angeles, US
Urban Light is a grouping of 202 restored street lamps positioned at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance, arranged in a symmetrical grid. The posts vary in height and style, with some displaying Corinthian capitals while others show smooth concrete castings from different decades of California municipal design.
Chris Burden began collecting the lamps in December 2000 at a Pasadena flea market, adding more pieces from scrapyards and municipal storage over several years. The installation was permanently mounted outside the museum in February 2008 after Burden donated the entire collection to LACMA.
The street lamps retain original paint layers from their former cities, showing weathered color schemes from Hollywood and Glendale municipal standards. Visitors walk between the posts at dusk, pausing to watch how the light changes texture on the cast-iron surfaces as evening deepens.
The lamps illuminate automatically from sunset to sunrise, with the best photography during blue hour just after dark. Visitors can walk freely between the posts, though the grid extends over the sidewalk and can be crowded in the evening.
The entire collection weighs roughly 136 tons (272,000 pounds), with each lamp disassembled, sandblasted, and repainted in a uniform neutral color before installation. Some posts still carry foundry marks and production stamps from the 1920s and 1930s.
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