It’s been quite a week. On Friday, the United States set a grim milestone: 85,000 COVID-19 cases reported in one day, a new record for the country. On Saturday, New York state got to work: Early voting has begun, 93,000 New York City voters set their own record by showing up in person on day one. On Sunday, we installed a pair of ad takeovers that touch on both topics.

Addam Yekutieli (Know Hope) and John Fekner collaborated to reimagine the iconic FRAGILE packing label for 2020, and John Fekner’s solo work is… well I guess you could say it’s a test that we are all expected to pass.

Addam Yekutieli (Know Hope) and John Fekner. Photo by Luna Park.

Yekutieli has been on our wish list as someone to work with since before Art in Ad Places launched, and he has the story on how this collaboration came about:

A while back, John found a 'Fragile' packing/shipping sticker and suggested that we collaborate on something using that as the base of the piece. At a certain point John sent me this version of the sticker where he reworked the letters on one of the stickers to spell out 'Life'. I thought that the image of a severed tree trunk was fitting as an analogy to and a reminder of fragility of Life, especially poignant in light of mismanagement of the health crisis in Trump's America and Netanyahu's Israel. I feel that the image conveys fragility in all forms of Life, also that of nature, with the virus and the recent wildfires showing us that it has the upper hand. Forceful things need to be handled with care as well.
I'm participating in this project in order to be part of this ongoing action of reclaiming public space by replacing advertisements with opportunities to reflect on our shared environments, our place within them and the act of being able to take part in shaping our collective reality. We're so used to advertisements being a natural part of our visual periphery, and there's something powerful about creating glitches in this dynamic.
- Addam Yekutieli (Know Hope)

And then there’s Fekner on his own with his classic stencil-style text approach. A longtime inspiration to the Art in Ad Places team, and we first worked with Fekner back in 2017 when we recreated one of his iconic works from 1980. This time, he is back with a very 2020 poster and a simple message: “VOTE.”