Gorgeous Billboards Around San Francisco From the 1970s and 1980s

Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel are two pioneering street artists who shared their colorful visions with the world via appropriated billboards from 1973 to 1989, and their works look just as fresh today as they did forty years ago.

Here’s more about this dynamic art duo and their billboard appropriation project:

“Beginning in 1973 and up until 1989, we worked together on open ended, allusive designs for outdoor advertising billboards, under the name Clatworthy Colorvues. The billboards were exhibited mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we lived, but sometimes installed in other parts of the country, the result of workshops we led with graduate students, or exhibitions on appropriation and public art. With the billboard, we wanted to reach a larger and more varied public than would ever find its way into an art institution.”

Oranges on Fire / 1975

Alaska: Tectonic Features, from the series Sixty Billboards / 1976

Kansas Counties, from the series Sixty Billboards / 1976

Electric Energy Consumption, from the series Sixty Billboards / 1976

Chicago Workshop / 1978

Ties / 1978

Whose News? / 1980

Ooh La La! / 1982

You're So Easily Influenced / 1983

We Make You Us / 1985

Japan, from the series Trouble Spots / 1988

White Corn Meal, from the series Trouble Spots / 1989

(Billboards by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, via Neatorama)