Drivers heading south on Aurora Avenue, right around North 47th Street, have noticed a mysterious billboard. Over the course of a week in February, a blown-up charcoal drawing of a sleepy baby cradled in an adult's hand was put up piece by piece, a little bit every other day, until the billboard was complete. No explanation accompanied the ambiguous drawing.
On the backside of the same billboard, visible to drivers headed north, there's another baby, this one a smiley infant photographed wearing a green jumpsuit. There's nothing mysterious about this image, though: It's a Pro-life America ad that screams out, "Cherish life! It begins at conception." The back-to-back baby images make the billboard seem like one giant pro-life ad.
That has angered Linda Thomas, the artist who designed the charcoal drawing image. She wanted her art, which she says "represents the passage of time," to stand on its own. "It seems that Clear Channel Outdoor [which owns the billboard] has co-opted my art image by positioning it on the flip side of a pro-life billboard," says Thomas, who also teaches art and art history at schools like Seattle Central Community College. Thomas secured funding for the drawing through state art organization Artist Trust's Grants for Artist Projects program in late 2001, finished the work last summer, and has been working with Clear Channel Outdoor since then to get the work installed. She had hoped it would go up closer to Seattle Center. Now, she's upset that the proximity to a pro-life ad has turned her art into a political message: Thomas says that her sons noted that any ambiguity about her drawing would be erased on the drive home from downtown Seattle, when commuters see the pro-life ad and could easily assume her art is related.
Frank Podany, president of Clear Channel Outdoor's Northwest division, says there was no intention to connect the two billboards. "We donated the space to [Thomas'] project, and there was no particular reason for the space that she went up on," Podany explains.
Thomas' piece is slated to start coming down, again piece by piece over a course of several days, on March 22. Coincidentally, as we went to press, the pro-life ad was replaced by a previously scheduled Comcast ad.