Artist Dani Moore in Washington, D.C. (Photo by George Newcomb)
It’s not everyday we get an awesome piece of art by email with the instructions, “Use as you see fit.” But that’s exactly what happened last week, when Washington, D.C.-based artist Dani Moore sent us a print she did of Robert Indiana’s famous (and Philadelphia landmark) “LOVE” sign reimagined as the word “BIKE.”
That image is below and available for download here.
After receiving the image, we asked Moore a little about herself. Turns out, the former Swathmore College and Moore College of Art and Design student grew up in Flemington, New Jersey and, after defending her Ph.D dissertation at Arizona State University, biked her way from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., where she currently lives.
Here’s what else she told us:
“I took art fairly seriously in high school; in fact, my dad and I used to drive an hour from the New Jersey suburbs to Philadelphia on Saturdays so that I could take classes at Moore College of Art and Design.
Eventually I realized that I was not destined to be the next Picasso, and this turned out to be a liberating discovery. Instead of feeling obligated to revolutionize humanity with my creations, I felt that anything I made that brought the smallest modicum of joy to another person was a success.
With this modest ambition, I designed and printed postcards with the letters of the word “BIKE” arranged in the fashion of Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” sculpture to give away at local businesses in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood.
Why “BIKE”? Because too few people have embraced this extraordinary technology. The bike is a simple, inexpensive, aesthetically pleasing machine that costs almost nothing to run, and yet its benefits are nothing less than a cleaner environment, more health, stronger local economies, and greater human happiness.
I like to believe that the postcards I printed with this design brightened someone’s day on at least three separate occasions. I like to imagine the thrill of finding the card at a coffeeshop and the delight pulling it out of a mailbox, but most of all, I like to imagine the joy of the bike rides I hope these cards inspired.”
She will debut her second bike postcard at the League of American Bicyclists’ National Women’s Bicycling Forum in March.