Sunset Strip Billboard Art: Your Guide to the Hourly Gallery

At 8501 Sunset Boulevard, above the corner at La Cienega, the SunCienega billboard shows ads for most of the hour. At the top of the hour, and again at twenty and forty past, it switches to a double-board installation of people walking in hand-knit sweaters with words across the front, next to close-up stop-motion footage of a tapestry coming apart and being knit back together. The piece is Unraveling Parade by Lisa Anne Auerbach. It will keep that schedule until January 31, 2027.

The City of West Hollywood requires every billboard in its Sunset Arts and Advertising Program to give 17.5% of each hour, or 10.5 minutes, to City-curated moving-image art, and every one of those boards plays its artwork at the top of the hour. The program is called MIMA, short for Moving Image Media Art. On the hour, the most commercial stretch of Sunset turns into a coordinated public exhibition that runs on a published timetable.

How the Art Got on the Clock

The art traces back to a City program. The City launched the Sunset Arts and Advertising Program in 2017 to bring art and architecture into the Strip's outdoor advertising. The off-site signage policy that followed in 2019 requires each new sign to be governed by a development agreement that delivers public benefits. The City Council adopted that policy on April 1, 2019. The City then screened proposals for design quality before any of them could file a formal application.

The screening was strict. The City received 43 applications by November 4, 2019. A seven-member Design Excellence Review Committee, drawn from architecture, urban design, advertising, digital sign technology, arts, media and historic preservation, reviewed them from December 2019 to May 2020 and scored each one on 33 criteria. In July 2020, the City announced 21 projects selected at the concept stage. They included The Now, SunCienega Revival, Invisible Frame, Streamlined Arbor, the Comedy Store, and a project then called The Sunset Worl, now known as The Whorl. The architects named for the selected proposals included Office Untitled for Invisible Frame, Mithun|Hodgetts + Fung for The Now, and RCH Studios for the Comedy Store.

The City's 2020 announcement set out what the selected projects would give back. Their digital signs, which the City said can bring in at least six times the revenue of a typical static sign, would dedicate 17.5% of operating time, or 91,980 minutes a year, to art and/or civic announcements. Each new sign would also include a monetary contribution toward the City's arts programming, and each project would share revenue with the City.

The Rules Behind What You See

The City's exhibition standards explain why the art on these boards looks so different from the ads around it.

• Silence. The billboards can't play audio, so every work is designed without sound.
• No flash. Flashing, strobing and rapid cuts between high-contrast colors are prohibited.
• No pure white or pure black. Solid white backgrounds aren't allowed because of glare, so artists use a slightly gray white instead. Solid black is effectively "off" for an LED and makes the individual tiles visible, so artists use near-black.
• Fixed run lengths. A work can run 10:30 once an hour, 5:15 twice an hour, or 3:30 three times an hour. The 3D board at 8497 Sunset runs its own shorter set of timings.
• A four-month license. The City licenses each work exclusively for its exhibition period. Rotations are scheduled more than 18 months in advance.

Because of these rules, the art is slower and quieter than the ads. Most of the current works are about weather, landscape, repetition or text that takes time to read. The City also encourages artists to visit their billboard sites before they make the work, because the Strip itself shapes how the piece is seen.

The Current Rotation, East to West

The current rotation runs from October 1, 2026, through January 31, 2027, on nine boards.

Several of the works are about Los Angeles itself. Joshua Dawson's piece at The NOW reimagines the Bradbury Building as a giant stepwell. Its atrium becomes a vertical water commons, and the building's stewards perform a ritual to welcome rain at the end of a drought. For earlier 3D works on that board, the City named the southeast sidewalk corner of Sunset and North La Cienega as the best place to watch.

Three boards west, Rebeca Méndez's Any-Instant-Whatever at 8743 Sunset records one early-January day in the winter of 2019–2020 from dawn to dusk. It moves through stratocumulus, altocumulus, cirrocumulus and cirrus clouds in a single Los Angeles sky. Next door, Jennifer Gunlock's Wilacre at 8775 Sunset focuses on a native oak on a hiking trail in the hills above Studio City and Beverly Hills, the home of TreePeople. The two pieces show the canyon weather and hillside oaks that sit just above these billboards.

Farther west, two works deal with music in a stretch long known for it. Nikita Gale's JAZZ 2, on the Whisky a Go Go board, shows nine short imperative sentences from Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz. They're set in Electra, the typeface of the novel's first edition, and the pace of the words shifts from one repetition to the next. Boris Seewald's Ostinato, at 9015 Sunset, is built from looping "visual riff figures" that were hand-painted frame by frame in acrylic on paper. Seewald points out that drivers will see the silent loop while listening to their own music, so every passing car gets a different version of it. If you're going to a show downstairs, the Roxy's eight-night Jingle Bell Roxy series starts December 9, while Ostinato is still on the board.

Walking the Hour

The schedule is precise enough to plan around. Starting just before the hour at the east end gives you the most works in sequence.

1. 8433 to 8501 Sunset, a few minutes before the hour. Start at the Comedy Store board, then stand at the southeast corner of Sunset and La Cienega to see The NOW and SunCienega together. Unraveling Parade repeats at :20 and :40, so you won't miss it if you're late.
2. 8730 to 8775 Sunset, at the half hour. hidden in the night lights at The Whorl repeats at :30. It's Amanda Teixeira's hand-drawn animation of a tree planted in a boat, drifting toward an unknown destination. Invisible Frame and Sunset Spectacular sit just past it.
3. 8901 to 9157 Sunset, at the next hour. At the top of the next hour you can see Ostinato and Basma al-Sharif's ten-minute piece at Streamlined Arbor. Her piece is made from footage she shot in the Fertile Crescent, mirrored into kaleidoscopic landscapes held between sky and water. JAZZ 2 repeats at :20 and :40, so you can catch it on the way.

Two current conditions affect the walk. LADWP contractor S E Pipeline is scheduled to do permanent restoration at Sunset and Holloway through November 12, including bus-pad replacement and asphalt paving with lane closures. The City says at least one lane will stay open in each direction and calls the schedule tentative. At the west end, past the last board, the Hwood Group opened Little Luck, an izakaya, on October 19 at 9229 Sunset in the former Bootsy Bellows space, Eater LA reported.

If you'd rather browse than walk, the City keeps a Flickr archive of stills from past MIMA works. Its MIMA page has a map of the billboard sites and a full statement for each artwork.

The Schedule Is Getting Longer

More boards are coming. In February 2025, the City Council approved a double-sided digital billboard at 9200 Sunset and authorized three dedicated billboard-related positions in the Community Development Department, according to the Beverly Press. The City's MIMA page lists that site's Legacy Loop as "Coming Soon." Once it's running, the hourly art schedule will extend west of Streamlined Arbor.

The City has also tightened the standards new billboards must meet. Its 2025 policy amendment strengthened the luminance, illuminance and orientation requirements for new signs. The pipeline of artists is set well in advance. The Art on the Outside Subcommittee of the Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission reviews applications to the program's prequalified list twice a year, in November and May. The most recent deadline was October 15. The current rotation leaves the boards on January 31, 2027. The rotation after it was scheduled more than a year and a half ago.

If you live above Sunset and want to talk through how the Strip's next round of billboard projects bears on your home, The Pennel Group welcomes the conversation. Request a Confidential Consultation.