United Nations International Year of Light

West Harlem Art Fund, artist Vicki Da Silva and Duggal presented artworks that celebrated the UN International Year of Light in 2014. Image shot under the 12th Avenue Viaduct in the West Harlem neighborhood Manhattanville.

Vicki DaSilva was born in 1960 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. She began making time exposure photographs in 1980 as an undergraduate art student at Kutztown University of PA. After receiving her BFA Vicki moved to NYC. She was influenced by both postmodern art and the convergence of street and graffiti art during the birth of hip-hop. She coined the term ‘light graffiti’ in the 80s to describe the act of creating drawings for the camera on location at night using a variety of colored light bulbs to mimic spray-painted graffiti.

Vicki did an internship and later worked as an assistant for internationally acclaimed performance artist Joan Jonas. Through Jonas, she was introduced to many artists including Richard Serra, for whom she worked as a personal assistant throughout the 80s. Vicki’s work evolved during this time, and in the late 80s, she began to use four-foot and eventually eight-foot fluorescent lamps to make landscape-based light paintings in both urban and rural locations. She continues to make both light graffiti text works and abstract works using fluorescent tube lamps.

In November 2018 Vicki and Antonio relocated permanently to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. They have been making art and memories together there since 1988.

Exhibitions include Light Tartans at Studio 21 Fine Art Halifax (2021), The Billboard Creative 2021 L.A. Billboard Exhibition, Lumen Lineation at SL Gallery NYC (2018), Allentown X 7: Photographic Explorations at Allentown Art Museum (2017), Radical Love #FEMALELUST at The Crypt Gallery, London, UK (2017), Interference, International Light Art Project in Tunis (2016), East River Flows, NYC Art in the Parks (2015). In 2012 Vicki won the international competition Art Takes Times Square and her work was displayed on the 13 digital billboards of Times Square Arts Midnight Moment. In March 2015 during UNESCO’s International Year of Light, Vicki partnered with Oxfam in London’s Trafalgar Square to raise awareness of the Syrian conflict. Her work has been featured in individual and group shows, private and public collections, and has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Paper Magazine among many others.