The Third Street Tunnel in downtown Los Angeles is now displaying a new art installation.
The artwork was created by LA-based artist Tory Dipietro and includes a giant neon heart and a tunnel rainbow of neon lights. Dipietro talked about the inspiration behind the art with Deborah Vankin of the LA Times Today.
“The inspiration for this artwork took place in the darkest days of the pandemic. It was April 2020, and Tory, an artist who had been working in neon for a couple of years at that point, had a vision of an enormous heart wrapped in a rainbow. She wanted to bring it to the city in the form of a public artwork. And she didn’t know where it would go. She just had the vision that she wanted to present everybody with this visual monument of hope,” Vankin said.
“I’ve learned firsthand that you can live an entire lifespan of darkness and when that light turns on, it’s like boom! Look at us now,” Dipietro said.
Vankin expressed how Dipietro’s upbringing influences her work as an artist. “Tory had a really hard upbringing. She grew up in Los Angeles. She’s a hometown girl, but she grew up between her father’s house in Montebello and her mother’s house in Temple City, shuttling back and forth between divorced parents. Her father grew and sold pot for a living legally. So it was a sort of financially unstable environment. But art was the one thing that always steadied her. She told me that when she was growing up in this really unstable environment, that she had this happy place that she had conjured in her head. And it was essentially a garden of glowing flowers and plants. And when things got really tough, she would sort of escape there. Then one day in her mid-20s, she thought, ‘Oh my God, those plants and lay in this place in my head, those plants and flowers are neon.’ It all kind of made sense to her, and she got this idea that she was going to also create a garden of neon in real life. She later went on and took a neon workshop at a downtown arts district,” Vankin explained.