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COPYRIGHT 2002 Curve Magazine, Outspoken Enterprises, San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 863-6538
A military kid who attended fifth grade at six different schools, artist Lili Lakich spent a fair amount of her childhood looking up drowsily from the back seat of the family car. The horizon of her 1950s childhood sparkled in flamboyant roadside neon. Lakich passed long hours searching for the kitschy signs -- cartoon cowboys lassoing calves, brightly lit wheels spinning on animated trucks, and swimmers swan-diving into pools in vibrant turquoise splashes.
"My family was into road trips," Lakich says. "Our idea of recreation was to get in the car and drive on a weekend. So we would pick the motel by which one had the best neon sign."
When Lakich began studying art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, she began to fish around for a medium. "I hated painting and I didn't like printmaking. I just wasn't into the messiness," she says. "So I spent a lot of time thinking about what it was that I did like looking at and decided that I'd always loved looking at neon signs in a landscape."
By the 1960s, even as the wrecking balls were tearing down much of the neon advertising signage of the era, neon began to pass slowly into the realm of fine art. Lakich...
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