Recycled Vinyl Increasingly Popular With Artists

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 10, 2008 (VNS) – Twelve original works of art painted on recycled vinyl billboards are going on display across Los Angeles, where they will be seen by an estimated 500,000 commuters a day, according to the organizers.

The dramatic outdoor exhibit, “ReVisions 08,” was conceived by artist and environmentalist Peter V. Schulberg, director of the Los Angeles-based Eco-Logical Art Gallery. Previous exhibits of vinyl-backed works of art were organized by Schulberg to coincide with Earth Day.

The Vinyl Institute and advertising companies Van Wagner and CBS Outdoor are cosponsors of ReVisions 08, which will officially open with a gallery premiere Jan. 12.

VI also cosponsored Schulberg’s “Off the Wall 3” exhibit last April. That exhibit featured the work of more than 60 artists who painted on repurposed vinyl billboards that had been used previously for advertising.

Sales of artwork from all “Off the Wall” exhibits held in the last three years have totaled more than $25,000 and about 10,000 square feet of vinyl has been diverted from local landfills.

Schulberg, who calls the art on recycled vinyl “renewable imagery,” said the idea came to him in 2004 as a way to capture and re-use discarded billboard advertising and as a way to turn the “staid gallery world literally inside-out.” He developed a technique to stretch the billboards so they could be used as canvases, then invited artists to paint on them.

“I asked artists to work for free on a new material to be exhibited outside the gallery – hostage to heat, wind, rain and a kid with a paint-ball gun,” Schulberg said. “But the artists – some who sell for thousands of dollars – came and keep coming.”

Schulberg plans to take the ReVisions exhibit to San Francisco for Earth Day later this year. He estimates that with it and the Los Angeles exhibit, as many as 50 million people will experience the “drive-by” recycled vinyl billboard art in 2008.