Imagine Los Angeles at night, illuminated by a neon glow.
There’s a smiling bluish-white Buddha perched atop a vintage gift shop, green art deco lettering above the entrance to a Jewish deli, a vibrant electric mural inside Grand Central Market, and the iconic arched sign that welcomes guests to the Santa Monica Pier.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, Americans discovered the advertising power of neon. Putting high voltage to gases inside glass tubes sparked bold, hypnotic hues that could be seen at night and from a distance. Flashing signs soon decorated cafes, car repair shops, liquor stores, nightclubs, dive bars, theaters, and restaurants. Flickering letters throughout L.A. pay homage to a city that came of age in the early 20th century.
Neon is a longstanding tradition at Grand Central Market, where each vendor is encouraged to hang an electric sign. Some of the market’s original signage can be found at MONA.
Photo: Bruno Coelho / Alamy Stock Photo
As neon peaked in commercial utility, the signs also caught the gaze of artists, who saw that they could use the fluorescent words to advertise art itself. One such figure was Bruce Nauman, a leading experimentalist who was drawn to making “art that was supposed to not quite look like art.” Surrounded by neon signage in his San Francisco neighborhood, Nauman decided to work with a neon fabricator to make a sign for his studio’s display window. A red-and-blue spiral of words proclaimed, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” (1967).
Nauman became one of the country’s most prolific neon artists, producing over 50 works in a span of five years. Alongside Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Chryssa, and others, Nauman formed part of a generation of artists who transformed the nature of neon forever, tilting it from ad to art.
Meanwhile, neon signage, once universally considered pure advertisement, became a heritage worth protecting as advocates saved historic signs slated for demolition. Some of those lights are now housed in galleries and museums, including L.A.’s own Museum of Neon Art (MONA).
That said, the medium poses challenges for collection stewards, who find neon art difficult to install, pack, repair, and document. Most conservation professionals don’t have a background in neon, let alone light-based art, explains Ellen Moody, an associate project specialist at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI). To make matters more complicated, there are currently no agreed-upon guidelines for how to safely oversee neon.
Moody’s goal is to help produce the first-ever published recommendations for neon art conservation. “They’re not meant to replace the expertise of the neon fabricator, which is necessary, in most cases, to care for neon art,” she says. But she hopes the guidelines, expected to be available in 2024, will reinforce the skills of both technicians and conservators and facilitate communication between them.
Neon’s Unique Challenges
Before joining the GCI in 2020, Moody served as a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for seven years, which gave her a firsthand look into the issues contemporary art conservators commonly face. “I felt totally out of my depth when I was working with neon,” she says. “I would go into storage to figure out if something was ready for display and realize, ‘I don’t even know how to wire this thing.’”
The always-handmade neon tubes are made of fragile glass that must withstand an especially high (think lethal) voltage, and the wire connections are sometimes damaged. There may be cracks in the glass, problems with a transformer, or contaminants inside the tubes. Tending to neon requires highly specialized knowledge, and although Moody was trained in objects conservation (she earned an MS in objects and preventive conservation from the Wintherthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation), she still felt lost. Light-based art is rarely covered in conservation programs, where it falls in between specialties, so most museum employees entrusted with protecting neon artworks learn everything on the job.
Neon fabricator and artist Michael Flechtner tests a transformer, used to deliver the high voltage needed to make neon glow.
To install neon, Moody reached out to experts in the medium. But despite their technical expertise, sometimes a new challenge arose. “Specialists are great at what they do, but they’re not necessarily trained in the ethics of conservation,” she says. “They may not be thinking about artist intent, which is the conservator’s job to bring into the conversation. But if the conservator doesn’t know the basics of the technology, it’s hard for them to take part in that conversation and advocate for the work or even know what the options are.”
Building the Guidelines
Some of the questions Moody and her team grapple with when thinking about neon are: If a light that was only produced in the 1970s goes out, how do we replicate it in 2023 so it produces the same look? How do we re-create its color and brightness? How do we measure color in neon? How do we photograph it in a reliable way? How do we document neon artworks when written descriptions are too subjective? What questions should we ask neon artists and fabricators to capture the essential qualities of their work? If a tube is broken, how can we deduce the color and brightness it originally had?
To develop the guidelines, the first step was to initiate a conversation between neon experts who know the technology inside and out and conservators familiar with the challenges of its long-term care. Moody worked with Taylor Healy, a time-based media conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago, who has focused her recent research on neon, to organize a focus meeting. This spring, a cohort of approximately 20 professionals, including experts from Getty and MONA, gathered to discuss the future of neon. They arrived from various parts of the country and even from locales outside North America, such as Sweden and Hong Kong. A meeting held at the Getty Center consisted of brief presentations and discussion sessions. At MONA, the group engaged firsthand with neon artworks and demonstrations on how to bend glass tubes.
One participant, Jacob Fishman, brought a unique perspective to the group as both a neon conservator and fabricator, as well as an artist. Based in Chicago, he owns Lightwriters Neon with his wife, Petrie, and has been fabricating and conserving artworks for museums and collections around the globe for almost 50 years.
Fishman’s career in neon began as a love of playing with light in his photography, which led to an interest in making neon sculptures that would exist in real space rather than the virtual plane of camerawork. But he quickly realized that learning neon meant seeking a mentor, lest he burn down his apartment.
“At this time, it was very difficult to find anybody who would talk to you,” he recalls. It was 1977, when glassblowing (both for neon sculptures and glassmaking in general) was still a tightly guarded trade. “I’d walk into shops and talk to the glass people and say, ‘Hey, I’m interested in learning…,’ and they’d start hiding their tools. I had to look all over to find somebody who would even talk to me, and finally, I did.”
The nearest shop that would teach him was on the opposite side of town on the South Side of Chicago. He studied and worked there until the owner retired. Although it took Fishman a long time to get the results he wanted (and to make more than a few bucks an hour), he eventually found full-time employment in the neon signage industry. He saw his products as a kind of art. A sign advertising “corned beef” was more than just block letters—it had to be well designed. This eye for quality drew the attention of the fine arts world.
One day in 1983, a man visited Fishman’s shop and showed him some “very strange drawings.” “Can you make this?” the person asked, to which Fishman replied, “I don’t understand it, but sure, I could make this for you.” The man turned out to be the Chicago representative for Bruce Nauman. Fishman has been Nauman’s main fabricator ever since.
As neon transcended its association with advertising, Fishman went from making mostly signs to making mostly art. The culture surrounding neon also shifted in another significant way. The neon-making technique, once fiercely gatekept, is now widely circulated through in-person and online groups. Art programs with neon workshops also allow mentors like Fishman to pass on their skills to a younger generation of artists. As more people learn about neon, they go on to push the boundaries set by their predecessors.
Neon’s Bright Future
Zoelle Nagib, a neon artist and Fishman’s daughter, was also one of the participants at the focus meeting. She designs and sculpts all her own work, often from scraps left behind from previous projects, sometimes decades old, and she’s interested in working with neon that is sustainable.
Unlike most neon artists, Nagib avoids using mercury, which at least half of neon works contain. This substance creates UV radiation that helps produce a vast array of brilliant colors, but she doesn’t think it’s worth the health risks. With a mercury ban underway in Europe, artists like Nagib are looking for safer alternatives.
“I’m just trying to be a little more caring towards the people who are going to handle my pieces in the future,” Nagib says. “It’s important to me to be able to acknowledge that if my pieces break, the breakage may be hazardous to another person.”
A significant component of the guidelines is ensuring that the risks posed while handling neon are kept to a minimum. To write the recommendations, Moody and Healy, along with GCI researchers such as Art Kaplan, Flavia Perugini, Anna Flavin, Giulia Rioda, Stavroula Golfomitsou, and Vincent Beltran, are drawing from experiences shared at the focus meeting, as well as Getty’s pioneering research in he conservation of light-based art. The guidelines are part of the GCI’s Modern and Contemporary Art Research Initiative, founded in 2007 to address the critical need to devote research, workshops, education guidance, and information dissemination to art involving new materials and technologies.
Associate Project Specialist Ellen Moody hopes the guidelines will help secure neon’s future.
At MONA, Tommy Gustafsschiöld demonstrates a European-style 90-degree glass bend.
“The amazing community that has coalesced around this art form makes me feel very hopeful about its future,” Moody says. “I’ve learned that neon is a field that has been cloaked in secrecy, so I was worried that people would not want to share their expertise during the focus meeting. But they all went above and beyond with their generosity.”
To people like Fishman, sharing how neon is fabricated is precisely what makes the art form feel special. “For me, it’s sort of mundane and second nature, but when I do it as a demonstration and students are around, they get so excited,” he says, adding that he would show how to make a simple letter A and garner applause. “You’re playing with all these different elements from the earth to create something that comes to life—and it’s kind of magical. The glass is exciting enough, but when you start to light it up and get all these colors, it’s probably the same feeling people got when they first discovered fire.”
