The lesson for today (with Josh Neufeld)
2010

Billboard on Sunset Boulevard at Cahuenga Boulevard
Commissioned by MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Los Angeles, California

Twenty-one artists were commissioned to create artworks in the form of billboards to be sited across Los Angeles, a city whose skyline is punctuated by thousands of billboards and large-scale advertisements. Artists were invited to investigate the role of these images in the urban fabric. As Rosler's several billboard and signage projects suggest, the format encourages a didactic, data-driven tone and embodies a conjunction of Conceptualism and architecture. Rosler collaborated with her son, Josh Neufeld, a graphic novelist and cartoonist, to point out that California at that time was spending more on incarceration than education. The billboard depicts an earthquake in which a schoolhouse breaks apart, and its pupils slide toward a prison.