Leo Villareal Lights Up the Art World

From the desert of Burning Man to Miami’s Superblue immersive art show, light becomes rhythm in Leo Villareal’s monumental installations.

Portrait by Chris Sutton

Like many of us emerging from the cocoon of COVID-19, Leo Villareal is feeling reborn. He’s asking, What’s next? For himself. For art. For the world. It’s been a pretty wild ride so far. Personally, he’s just come off an intense 10-year run of making monumental-scale public art that has propelled him to the very pinnacle of the international art world

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"The Bay of Lights" 2013

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"The Bay of Lights" 2013

Consider “The Bay Lights,” which was conceived back in 2011 as a way to honor the 75th birthday of the bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland. Nearly two miles of the bridge is lit up by 25,000 individually programmable LEDs that Villareal has orchestrated into a nightly light show: an ever-changing work of art which is seen by millions of people a year.

"The Bay Lights” set off a slew of high-profile commissions, culminating in another monumental bridge project: London’s “Illuminated River,” which lights up nine bridges over the River Thames and stretches through the heart of the city. Completed during the lockdown, it is a singular art piece that extends from the London Bridge to the Lambeth Bridge—four-and-a-half nautical miles.

"Escape Velocity" 2018

The new work that Villareal is most excited about will soon debut at Superblue, an experimental art center (with outposts in Miami, New York, and London) offering immersive art experiences in alternative spaces: Think of a giant warehouse on the outskirts of town, instead of the usual white cube gallery. Superblue is the brainchild of Marc Glimcher, the president and CEO of Pace Gallery (which represents Villareal), and is backed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple founder and CEO. “It’s a new idea, and really exciting. It’s like going to Mecca,” says Villareal, of the Superblue flagship in Miami which has featured experiences by James Turrell and Es Devlin. “It’s the most incredible display and sound system —all the stuff you could never have in your home.

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"Particle Chamber" 2017

Villareal’s signature light installations have a rather unusual origin. As a young man, who grew up on a huge ranch in Marfa, Texas, he was enthralled by art and technology in equal measures. He studied sculpture at Yale and then technology at New York University before landing an internship at Interval, a research and development lab in Silicon Valley, in 1994. Interval was a high-minded experiment: What would happen when one mixed up a heady brew of artists and technologists and gave them big budgets and free reign? For Villareal, the sweet spot where art intersected with technology seemed to be virtual reality. “I wanted to do VR,” remembers Villareal, “but this was back in the day when you needed a half-million-dollar Silicon Graphics machine” just to drive the headsets. Virtual reality was the hot technology in the ’90s, but as an artistic medium, it proved to be just too niche.

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Leo Villareal with his wife Yvonne Force Villareal

Ironically, it was when Villareal was taking a break from everything technological that he finally found the medium that would define his career. “I started going to Burning Man in 1994, and by my third year I was like, ‘You know, what I really need is to figure out how to get home at night.’” There was no city plan at Burning Man in those early years. And even with streets, navigating the desert festival after dark—especially under the influence of psychedelics—can be challenging.

Villareal’s solution was to wire up 16 strobe lights to a primitive computer-on-a-chip called a microcontroller and then to program it to flash the lights in distinctive patterns. It was a bat signal, guiding him and his fellow party-goers back to camp at the end of a long night. I can remember using the lights culpture myself during the first Burn of the new millennium, in the year 2000, to guide myself back to Villareal’s camp, which was a youthful artists' collective named Disorient.

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"Buckyball" 2014

Cut off by the COVID-19 pandemic from his traditional wellspring of inspiration, Villareal has burrowed even deeper into his own past. “I’ve been interested in immersive experiences from the beginning,” Villareal explains, gesturing back to his days as an intern at Interval. This time around, however, the experiences that he aspires to build no longer require us to don a half-million-dollar VR headset in order to explore them. It’s simply a matter of buying a $40 ticket and walking into Superblue’s state-of-the-art holodeck.

"Ellipse” 2017

Indeed, Villareal himself has also evovled over that same period. He's gone from an intern at an R&D lab to a world-famous artist. But it all feels strangely familiar: "Just like I was at Interval Research before, I feel like now I am really building my own research lab."

Villareal has a team of creative technologists working for him at his main production studio in Brooklyn. “And it feels like we can do pretty much anything."