ARTifacts

A series of 13 art billboards designed by the late Felix González-Torres (1957-1996) were put up earlier this month and will rotate through monthly — changing images and roadside locales in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, and El Paso through December 31, 2010. Cuban-born, Puerto Rico-raised, and an NYC art star from ’88 on, Gonzáles-Torres was an inaugural Artpace fellow in 1995, a year before his death from complications from AIDS. González-Torres created installations both innovative and intimate, minimalism-inflected yet hands-on. An architectural stack of plastic sheets were free for the dissemination, sheet by sheet; individually wrapped candies heaped in a gallery corner were meant to be taken and consumed by visitors (this series, called “candy spills,” was the subject of some ham-fisted-“criticism” by a hilariously indignant Morley Safer in a now-infamous 1993 episode of 60 Minutes).The González-Torres billboard images will include birds in flight, faded and crumpled denim (now showing in San Anto, former home of a Levi’s plant), the German phrase for “It’s only a matter of time” in Gothic script, and more. This unique and über-public project was made possible by the Linda Pace Foundation and mounted on billboards owned by Clear Channel Outdoor — perhaps to equalize their electronic-billboard karma. Public discussion, free, 6:30 p.m. February 18, Artpace, 445 N. Main, artpace.org. — Sarah Fisch