Expo Park/USC Poster by Local Artist Featured on Metro System through April 30

Monday March 01, 2010

A new poster celebrating Expo Park/USC - one of many destinations customers can travel to via Metro - will be on display on Metro buses and rail cars from March 1, 2010, through April 30, 2010.

Editors: Print-sized digital image of vertical and horizontal poster is available. Contact Metro Art: 213.922.2721

Commissioned by Metro Creative Services, the new poster is by local artist Stas Orlovski. Combining a dramatic indigo sky, romantic architecture, archival imagery, and a dense landscape of roses, Orlovski visually intertwines history and the natural world to depict a place that is both familiar and exotic, a place dreamed about and remembered.

“I wanted to create an image for the Expo Park/USC Poster project that would draw on my personal experience with the neighborhood which I associated with notions of collective memory, history, romance, nostalgia and wonder,” said Orlovski. “The iconography is based on archival photographs of public sculpture and romantic architecture on the USC campus, the ornithological collections/galleries at the Natural History Museum, and the iconic Rose Garden in Exposition Park.”

Stas Orlovski received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Southern California. His work has been exhibited throughout the nation at venues that include Mixed Greens (New York City, NY), Overtones Galley (Los Angeles, CA), Peter Miller Gallery (Chicago, IL), Naples Museum of Art (Naples, FL), Arkansas Arts Center (Little Rock, AR) Koplin Del Rio Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Carl Berg Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). His work is included in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Phoenix Art Museum, Davis Art Museum, and the American Embassy in Brussels. Stas Orlovski has also been the recipient of a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant, J. Paul Getty Trust Fellowship and California Community Foundation Grant.

In the tradition of celebrating transportation through colorful travel destination posters, Metro commissions a diverse range of Los Angeles artists to create original artworks for the Metro Neighborhoods poster series. The purpose of the series is to express the distinctive character of neighborhoods and destinations served by Metro. The posters are displayed throughout the Metro system, including on trains and buses, in stations and various other locations. The limited edition posters are available for purchase at the Metro Store, metro.net/metrostore.

The Expo Park/USC poster is the 20th in a series of posters commissioned by Metro Creative Services. Posters in the series have garnered a Print Magazine Regional Design Annual Excellence Award, Tranny Merit Award, “Fresh” Illustrations Award from Illustrations Magazine Annual, Los Angeles Society of Illustrators Silver Medal, and a Society of Environmental Graphic Design Award.

Metro seeks to change public perception about transit and to transform the customer’s experience through excellence in art and design. Central to this objective, Metro Creative Services includes the agency’s in-house design studio, which creates Metro’s brand communications, and the agency’s art and design excellence programs, which commission wide-ranging projects by visual artists and promote overall design quality of customer environments. From intelligently designed, user-friendly customer information, engaging and effective advertising and a newly designed fleet of buses and trains to large scale site-specific artworks by world-class artists and live poetry readings, Metro employs art and design to create a sense of place, engage transit riders, and improve quality of life throughout Los Angeles County.

For more information about Metro’s art programs and it’s free docent guided tours, visit metro.net/art of call 213/922-4ART.