About
Travis LeRoy Southworth. Marfa, Texas.
Biography
Travis LeRoy Southworth is an artist working between generative systems and fabricated objects. His practice takes the standardized surfaces of public life, from signage to forms to official notation, and reworks them until their authority reads as material rather than instruction.
He has worked in digital imaging for two decades, and the exactness of that work sits underneath everything here: the tolerances of a cut sheet of aluminum, the fixed grid a generative system draws on, the reflective sheeting specified by a state highway department.
He lives and works in New York, with the fabrication and installation of this project taking place in Marfa, Texas.
The Project
There Will Be Signs is a series of public signs and sculptures for Marfa, Texas. The work borrows the vocabulary of American road signage, its palettes, its regulation shapes, its authority, and turns it toward statements the highway was never built to carry.
The project exists in two forms. A generative system produces digital editions on chain. Fabricated aluminum and steel signs stand in the landscape. Neither is a version of the other. Both are public art, made public by different means.
The system draws from a library of forty-eight glyphs across four themes, each theme carrying its own veins of variation. A sign encountered at speed gives you one reading. The same form, held as an edition, gives you another.
Context
The work descends from Donald Judd's specificity, Ed Ruscha's deadpan, and the serial roadside poetics of Burma-Shave. From Judd it takes the conviction that a work belongs to a particular place and a particular set of dimensions. From Ruscha it takes the flat, unhurried delivery of language set against a Western sky. From Burma-Shave it takes the idea that a sentence can be built out of distance.
Marfa is the reason those three sit together comfortably. It is a landscape where the sign and the sculpture have always been the same object, seen from different distances.
Partners
- Art Blocks × OpenSea
2026 Marfa Artist Residency - Installation
October 2026, Art Blocks Marfa Weekend