Messages to the Public: Pesticides!

In the 1980s, Carrasco used digital graphics to model innovative ways of reaching a mass audience on the street. The Public Art Fund invited her to present a computer-generated work on an 800-square-foot digital billboard in the middle of New York’s Times Square. Frame by frame, Carrasco “electronically shouted” the harmful effects of chemical pesticides, following their path from a dust cropper spraying fields, to a farmworker picking grapes and falling ill, and finally to consumers’ rejection and subsequent boycott of the “poisoned” grapes.