MIMA Turns the Sunset Strip into a Canvas for Digital Art

The Sunset Strip has always known how to make an impression.

For generations, its towering billboards have helped define the visual identity of West Hollywood, promoting everything from legendary musicians and movies to fashion, nightlife, and some of the world’s biggest brands.

But at the top of every hour, something different happens.

Advertising gives way to art.

The City of West Hollywood’s Moving Image Media Art Program — better known as MIMA — transforms the Sunset Strip’s spectacular digital billboards into an ever-changing outdoor gallery, presenting moving-image artworks by emerging creators, established innovators, filmmakers, and internationally recognized artists.

Presented by the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division in conjunction with the City’s Sunset Arts and Advertising Program, MIMA takes advantage of the very technology that has reinvented outdoor advertising and puts it into the hands of artists.

The scale is hard to beat.

Rather than encountering an artwork inside a traditional gallery, people experience MIMA while walking along Sunset Boulevard, sitting at a restaurant, heading to a nightclub, driving through West Hollywood, or simply going about their day. Art becomes part of the streetscape — enormous, unexpected, and accessible to anyone who happens to look up.

Each digital billboard participating in the Sunset Arts and Advertising Program dedicates 17.5% of every hour — 10.5 minutes — to MIMA artwork and program content, with artwork appearing at the top of every hour. Individual works are created or selected with their specific billboard locations in mind, considering everything from the architecture and shape of the screen to the surrounding buildings and history of the site.

That makes the Sunset Strip, itself, part of the artwork. Check out this video to learn more about MIMA and see it in action.

MIMA exhibitions rotate throughout the year and draw from a diverse roster of artists working in film, video, photography, animation, performance, and other forms of digital media. The City provides artists with both the opportunity and funding to experiment with state-of-the-art digital displays at a scale few conventional galleries could offer.

The result is a distinctly West Hollywood approach to public art: ambitious, inclusive, technologically innovative, and impossible to contain within four walls.

It also adds a new chapter to the Sunset Strip’s long visual history. The billboards of yesteryear that once made Sunset Boulevard famous for record album promotions, movie campaigns, and iconic advertising now periodically become something else entirely — public space devoted simply to creativity, experimentation, and connection.

So, the next time you’re traveling along Sunset Boulevard, keep an eye on the clock. At the top of the hour, the Sunset Strip transforms into a large-scale art gallery.

Learn more about the City of West Hollywood’s Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA), discover participating artists, and find digital billboard locations at www.weho.org/mima.