Marty Robbins billboards part of national art project

Ten billboards across El Paso with singer Marty Robbins’ face on them are part of a national art project called The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project.

The project is best recognized and remembered in sets of 10. Ten artists each got to design 10 billboards across 10 cities on Interstate 10 West from coast to coast.

Robbins helped put the West Texas town of El Paso on the map with his hit song “El Paso” released in 1959, topping the Billboard charts in 1960. He was the inspiration for internationally recognized artist Jeremy Shaw, who was chosen to participate by the Los Angeles Nomadic Division.

Shaw’s El Paso billboards join 90 others that have or will grace the lower southern half of the US I-10 corridor, a nearly 3,000 mile reach.

University of Texas at El Paso’s Rubin Center for the Visual Arts Director Kerry Doyle met Shaw last weekend. He told her he had never been to El Paso before The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project.

“I think as people look at the billboards they’ll have different kinds of connections, memories, associations with them,” Doyle said.

“I was quite excited about a prospect of being delegated an area of the highway and researching it until I found a key happening within its recent history,” Shaw said in a YouTube video.

The nonprofit public art organization LAND brought the project to life from Florida to California with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts, Clear Channel Outdoor and Lamar Outdoor Advertising.

Las Cruces has its own set of billboards called, “Pending Cipher for the Open Present.”

All 20 billboards across the Borderland will be up until the end of February. The next set to go up will be in Tucson, Arizona.