Art Installation Draws Traffic—Signed, Sealed, Delivered!
- Tracy Eire
- Mar 29
- 4 min read
If you've never been on one, an LA freeway is a half-decent analogy for modern life—it's messy, congested, and everyone is somehow going too slow at the same time they're moving very, very fast.
Hanging like a fulsome moon above all this, freeway signs hit like cautionary tales. You've got sarcasm, 'Expect Delays', your 'Exit Only' for the existential crises at the roadside, and 'Merge with Caution'—which should be hung inside the door out of everyone's house if you ask me. LA is a place where road work is more of a life goal than a public works project that has actual beginning and end date.
This all started in Los Angeles, circa 2001, a city where cars were everywhere, and guidance, apparently, was not.
You wouldn't expect an artist to have much impact here.
Enter Richard Ankrom, an artist and painter with a plan so bold it could only be born from the depths of utter rebellion. And probably unrequited road rage. Just sayin.
On a sunny LA morning Ankrom got plenty fed up with a missing a freeway exit that sprang up on traffic so suddenly, most didn't have enough warning to change lanes before it was behind them. Unmarked, it had become infamous, like that headless Hessian soldier charging around Sleepy Hollow at night. A ghost exit. A zombie.
Artists Have Impact
Ankrom had experienced that jump-scare ghost exit, and heard about it from other hapless drivers for years, and though there aren't ironclad statistics behind this, your average artist is a bit... counterculture. A bit likely to take matters into his or her own hands. And, well, not all heroes wear capes, folks—some show up in a hard hat, a reflective vest, and, yes, toting a homemade freeway sign.
This is no small thing. Literally. They may seem small from your car, but overhead exit signs are about 8 to 12 feet long, and 4 to 6 feet tall in America—so as tall as a grown man, and long as a bull shark. Even made of light weight aluminium, these signs weigh 50 to 150 pounds or more.
So, he was that kind of done.
Ankrom, in a stroke of artsy disobedience, crafted a sign so beautiful, so perfect, and so exceptionally green that it would make the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) blush. This sign wasn’t just painted—it was a straight masterpiece of meticulous color matching, font replication, and undistilled audacity.
That day, he wasn’t just making art; he was making a point.
It Gets Better
Dressed as a Caltrans worker, Ankrom scaled the heights of the 110 Freeway, near the interchange with the I-5 North, and installed la pièce de résistance. Cars whipped and crawled by below—drivers occasionally absolutely losing their minds as they missed the zombie exit—oblivious to the high-stakes art installation going on above them.
Ankrom was a determined painkiller. He'd worked the sign game before, officially. It came as no surprise when he completed this mission without a snag.
Then he sat back and awaited discovery!
And Awaited... and Awaited....
In rousing reinforcement of the notion 'The medium is the message', getting caught, and talking about how ludicrous it was to have an exit no one could find was the point.
But he waited. And he waited. For weeks he watched traffic sort itself out, and saw his highly illegal, technically perfect sign unsnag the commute. Till he realized he was good. Too good. He'd gotten away with it.
It took months before anyone realized this sign wasn’t government-sanctioned.
The truth came out thanks to a strategically leaked video by Ankrom himself. It tickled the public pink, not the normal outcome when and artist defaces public property.
Sweet Infamy of Life I Think I've Found You
For a beat, papers and news channels across the nation couldn’t get enough of an artist who duped a city's transport authority with nothing but his skills and a can-do attitude.
Caltrans’ reaction was surprisingly chill. Or maybe not. It is LA.
They appreciated Ankrom's craftsmanship so much that they left the sign where it had been bolted down. It was, after all, precisely what drivers needed. In a twist, when the freeway signs were updated, Caltrans also kept Ankrom’s correction to the traffic flow, which is what we call 'a testament to the impact of well-placed art on the lives of others'—even if the piece wasn't officially commissioned, as they say.
Ankrom's artsy sign-making story is now legend and an excellent example of guerrilla art as a public service. Fellow artists can take from it the fact that, sometimes, to make a difference, you’ve got to break a few rules with your art. Maybe avoid going that far though. I mean... I would.
A girl could break a nail. ;)
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