[caption id="attachment_89" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Poster from Barriball's series on the London Underground. Credit: Flashboy Flickr."]
[/caption]The New York Times reported on 26th December (2009) that Show Media and Art Production Fund have combined efforts to temporarily replace current NYC taxi cab advertising which appears on the tops of vehicles with commissioned works by Yoko Ono, Shirin Neshat and Alex Katz. The strongly message-orientated artworks will adorn 160 taxis including amongst others Neshat's illustration of a handshake (symbolizing unity), and Ono's 1969 'The War Is Over' slogan in English and sign language.
The use of public transport advertising space for the display of artworks, of course, is not new. London Underground has a long history of using its advertising hoarding spaces for public announcements as well as commissioned artworks as part of Platform for Art. One of the more recent popular campaigns was created by American writer Judith Chernaik, 'Poems on the London Underground' (1986) where selected historical and contemporary poems replaced advertising spaces in the tube trains. Her idea was to 'bring poetry to the wide ranging audience of passengers'. In 2008, British artist Anna Barriball's typographic works from the series 'About 60 miles of beautiful views' consisted of phrases taken from the back of found photographs. The phrases were represented in the now familiar New Johnston font and recontextualised in the format of large-scale posters inserted into spaces across the London Underground network. The tube passengers were jarred by seemingly banal phrases such as 'Looking back the way we had come' and 'Off to work 8.15AM. (Nylon uniform.)' interspersed amongst more conventional advertising and safety posters. tt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/arts/design/26taxicab.html
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corporate/projectsandschemes/artmusicdesign/pfa/
