Since its opening at LACMA in February 2008, Chris Burden’s Urban Light has been unofficially adopted by Los Angeles as a symbol of the city and is indisputably the most popular artwork on campus. Composed of 202 historic street lamps dating from the 1920s and 1930s originally spread throughout Southern California, the large-scale sculpture, has become ubiquitous as the face of LACMA, a point of pride for many Angelenos, and a destination for visitors from around the world.
In February 2018, LACMA celebrated the 10th Anniversary of Urban Light. In preparation for the anniversary, our team sought to learn more about and improve Urban Light’s online presence.
We began by asking students from USC’s Marshall School of Business to explore a the user journey to Urban Light. We learned that users could easily find the sculpture‘s collections record through a simple Google Search. However, the page also had a 98% bounce rate.
This project sought to answer a simple question that prospective visitors to the sculpture were unable to find on the collections record page: Is Urban Light On? The microsite launch in August 2018.