Leo Villareal

Artist Leo Villareal works with pixels and binary code to create complex, rhythmic compositions in light. He creates glowing displays and expansive, site-specific works, including a 1.8-mile-long installation of 25,000 white LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge in 2013, and a multi-site piece in 2019 that unites nine bridges along London’s River Thames in a single monumental moment of public art.

Other site specific works include: Light Matrix in Auckland, New Zealand; Volume at the Dallas Cowboys World Headquarters in Frisco, Texas; Buckyball at The NorthPark Center in Dallas, TX; Light Matrix at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Volume for the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC; Radiant Pathway at Rice University in Houston, Texas; Cosmos, at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Multiverse, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Diagonal Grid, Borusan Music House, Borusan Arts, Istanbul, Turkey; Stars, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York; and Hive for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the Bleecker Street subway station in Manhattan.

Villareal's work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Villareal received his BA from Yale University and his Master of Professional Studies, Interactive Telecommunications Program, from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.