At the top of every hour, the digital billboards between the Comedy Store and Doheny pause their ads for a city-supplied countdown leader. Then each screen plays a silent video artwork chosen by West Hollywood. The city requires this. Every billboard in its Sunset Arts and Advertising Program has to give 17.5% of each hour, or 10.5 minutes, to the city's Moving Image Media Art program, known as MIMA. As a result, the gallery grows each time a new ad screen is approved. In 2024, the program's exhibition history lists art on three boards. The current cycle, which started October 1, 2026, has art on nine.
The Art Is Part of the Billboard Deal
West Hollywood started the Sunset Arts and Advertising Program in 2017 to bring art and architecture into outdoor advertising. In 2019 it adopted a Sunset Off-Site Signage Policy that replaced the billboard chapter of the 1996 Sunset Specific Plan. Under that policy, a new billboard needs a Development Agreement that gives the city public benefits, including revenue and physical improvements to the Strip. The MIMA airtime comes with that same package. The city approved its first twenty-one digital screens in 2020, after a competitive vetting process.
The exhibition history shows how the gallery has grown with the boards:
- 2022 to 2024: Invisible Frame at 8743 Sunset, Sunset Spectacular at 8775 and Streamlined Arbor at 9157 are the only addresses with exhibitions listed.
- 2025: The Now at 8497, SunCienega at 8501 and The Whorl at 8730 join.
- 2026: The Whisky at 8901 and Rainbow/Roxy at 9015 join, and the Comedy Store board at 8433 carries a work in the current cycle.
City records back up that timeline. A February 18, 2025 project update listed The Now as under construction with an April 2025 go-live target. It gave The Whorl a spring 2025 target, expected construction at 8501 to start the week of February 10, and projected fall 2025 for the Whisky and Rainbow boards. All of those addresses now run MIMA work. Most of this gallery has existed for less than two years.
How to Catch a Screening
The rules make the works easy to spot once you know the format. Every piece includes 30 seconds of city material: a countdown leader, a card naming the artist and the work, and an end credit with the city logo. When a countdown appears where an ad was running, an artwork is about to start.
Artists can use the hour in one of three ways: one 10:30 piece at the top of the hour, one 5:15 piece at the top and bottom of the hour, or one 3:30 piece at :00, :20 and :40. The Now at 8497 Sunset can show 3D art and runs shorter versions of each format. The works have no sound because the billboards can't play audio.
The guidelines also cover brightness. Flashing, strobing and rapid high-contrast cuts are banned. Pure white backgrounds aren't allowed because of glare, so artists use a slightly softer white. Pure black is also discouraged, because a black LED gives off no light and leaves the individual tiles visible. Each work is licensed to the city only for its four-month run, and the city sets schedules at least 18 months in advance.
What's Playing Through January 31, 2027
Listed east to west, as you'd pass them driving toward Beverly Hills:
Board | Address | Work | Artist | When it plays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Comedy Store | 8433 Sunset | Vanitas Impia | Chuck Hohng | Top of the hour |
The Now | 8497 Sunset | Bradbaori: The Invocation | Joshua Dawson | Top of the hour |
SunCienega | 8501 Sunset | Unraveling Parade | Lisa Anne Auerbach | Top of the hour and every 20 minutes |
The Whorl | 8730 Sunset | hidden in the night lights | Amanda Teixeira | Top and bottom of the hour |
Invisible Frame | 8743 Sunset | Any-Instant-Whatever | Rebeca Méndez | Top of the hour |
Sunset Spectacular | 8775 Sunset | Wilacre | Jennifer Gunlock | Top of the hour |
Whisky a Go Go | 8901 Sunset | JAZZ 2 | Nikita Gale | :00, :20 and :40, for 3:15 |
Rainbow/Roxy | 9015 Sunset | Ostinato | Boris Seewald | Top of the hour |
Streamlined Arbor | 9157 Sunset | Sometimes land loomed where there was no land | Basma al-Sharif | Top of the hour, for 10 minutes |
The eastern end of the Strip leans toward Los Angeles architecture and craft. Dawson's piece at The Now imagines the Bradbury Building as a giant stepwell, a type of water-storage structure from South Asia. His version turns the building's atrium into a water commons as storm clouds end a drought. Auerbach uses both faces of the SunCienega board. One side shows her knitted sweaters worn in a Sweater Parade, and the other shows a stop-motion tapestry coming apart and being rebuilt.
Toward the western end, the pieces work with the music clubs below them. Gale's JAZZ 2 above the Whisky shows nine short imperative sentences from Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz. They're set in Electra, the typeface used for the novel's first edition. Seewald hand-painted the patterns for Ostinato frame by frame in acrylic. His statement notes that drivers will watch the silent loop while listening to their own music, so it becomes "a different music video for every viewer."
The Three Screens Closest to Sunset Plaza
The Sunset Plaza shopping strip lists its address as 8623 West Sunset Boulevard. Three boards stand within about a block and a half west of it, at 8730, 8743 and 8775 Sunset. On this end of the Strip, the art is a short walk from the Plaza.
The Whorl, 8730 Sunset. Teixeira's hand-drawn animation shows a tree planted in a boat, drifting toward an unknown destination. It's based on a book by the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe. The piece runs five minutes and repeats at the top and bottom of each hour, so this board gives you the most chances to see it.
Invisible Frame, 8743 Sunset. Méndez filmed one Los Angeles winter day in early January, from dawn to dusk, during the 2019 to 2020 season. Her video tracks the cloud types that can cross the sky in a single day, from low stratocumulus to thin cirrus streaks. Méndez is a tenured professor and chair of Design Media Arts at UCLA, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Invisible Frame has the longest record in the program, with listed exhibitions every year since 2022.
Sunset Spectacular, 8775 Sunset. Gunlock's Wilacre is the most local piece of the season for anyone living in the hills. The city's description says it "depicts a native oak in the hills above Studio City and Beverly Hills." The same description says the trail where she took the photographs is home to TreePeople. It presents the video as a call to rethink housing and infrastructure so they work alongside nature. Sunset Spectacular is one of the program's original exhibition sites. Its past artists include Patrick Martinez, Christine Sun Kim and Jacolby Satterwhite.
The program's full list of past artists also includes Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie, Pipilotti Rist, Nick Cave and the Guerrilla Girls.
Where the Next Gallery Walls Are Proposed
Because the art obligation comes with each new billboard, the pending billboard projects double as a list of where the gallery could grow next. Three are on file:
- Legacy Loop, 9200 Sunset. The MIMA page lists it as "coming soon." The city record describes the revised project as a one-sided, 1,500-square-foot full-motion billboard. Ordinance 26-02, which approves its Development Agreement, was introduced on January 20, 2026, on a 3-1-1 vote, with Councilmember Meister voting no and Councilmember Erickson abstaining. It was placed on the February 2, 2026 consent calendar for adoption. An earlier static design was sent back for redesign as a digital board in February 2025, after residents raised concerns about light pollution and neighborhood disruption, WEHOonline reported.
- 8801 Sunset, the former Tower Records site. The proposal calls for a two-sided, mixed-orientation, full-motion billboard above the Supreme Building, plus public-realm improvements. It came before the Planning Commission's Sunset Arts and Advertising Subcommittee on October 8, 2026, for initial design feedback. WEHO Times noted that it was not a final approval hearing.
- 8250 Sunset. The same October 8 session reviewed a one-sided, vertically oriented full-motion billboard with public art, public-realm improvements and a façade remodel. A February 2025 city update called it "Dog & Wolf" and described it as a 1,000-square-foot board.
No outcome from the October 8 meeting had been reported as of this writing. Any board approved from here on falls under rules the city tightened in 2025, which added stricter brightness, illuminance and orientation standards for new billboards. For homes above the Strip, the screens' brightness and direction are as relevant as the art they show.
Amir Jawaherian follows the Strip's billboard agreements as closely as any other entitlement in these hills. If you own above Sunset and want to understand how a pending sign at 8801, 8250 or 9200 might affect your view or your street, Amir Jawaherian offers a Private (Confidential) Consultation.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
