Now or Never, 2025
Alicia Eggert
Custom yard signs and stake, dimensions variable (each sign 12” x 18”)
Now or Never is a temporary public art intervention consisting of custom political-style yard signs that say NOW on one side and NEVER on the other. The signs were strategically installed installed on opposite sides of a suburban street, as if neighbors are on opposing sides of an unknown issue. But when viewers turn around and look in the other direction, the relationship flips.
The phrase “now or never” resonates on multiple levels. Collectively, it evokes the urgency of global challenges such as climate change, where action delayed is opportunity lost. Individually, it reminds each person that every moment is a turning point—an opportunity to determine one’s own future and to choose how to live from this moment forward, regardless of past experience.
Alicia Eggert in collaboration with David Wolske (custom typeface design) Photos and videos by Vision & Verve
On Site
About the Artist
Alicia Eggert (American, b. 1981) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice gives material form to language and time across a variety of mediums – from flashing neon to found clocks, from welded steel to inflated fabric, from cut flowers to carved stone. She derives her inspiration from physics and philosophy, and her work often co-opts the methods and materials associated with commercial signage to communicate messages that inspire reflection and wonder. She has made flashing neon signs that illuminate the way light travels across spacetime, billboards that allow Forever to appear and disappear in the fog, and signs that reveal the relationship between reality and possibility. These sculptures have been installed in locations where they can inspire a broad public audience – on rooftops in Russia, on bridges in Amsterdam, and on uninhabited islands in Maine, beckoning people to ponder their place in the world and the role they play in it.
Eggert’s work has been exhibited and commissioned by notable institutions nationally and internationally, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, Triennale Design Museum in Milan, Everson Museum of Art, Telfair Museums, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Nasher Sculpture Center, and many more. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Arlington Museum of Art (Arlington, TX), Urban Glass (Brooklyn, NY), Galeria Fernando Santos (Porto, Portugal), the University of Texas at San Antonio (San Antonio, TX), and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas (Beaumont, TX). Her work is held in numerous collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, City of Houston Civic Art Program, Light Art Collection, Long Now Foundation, as well as significant private collections.
The artist has received a TED Fellowship, Long Now Foundation Fellowship, Hopper Prize, S&R Foundation Washington Award, Harpo Foundation Direct Artist Grant, Nasher Sculpture Center Artist Microgrant, and Maine Arts Commission Artist Fellowship. Alicia Eggert lives and works in Denton, Texas, and is a tenured Associate Professor of Studio Art at University of North Texas.
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