Neon Dreams: The Art and History Behind a Glowing Culture
This program is supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs.
High & Dry surveys the legacy of human enterprise in the California desert and beyond. Together, writer Jack Eidt and photographer Osceola Refetoff document human activity, past and present, in the context of future development
Neon, the warm, buzzing glow of bent glass tubes, has illuminated Los Angeles’s streets, storefronts, and imagination for over a century, when it began to flourish as a modern form of advertising and artistic expression. Neon signs are not mass produced and must be sculpted by extremely skilled people.
We met with renowned neon artist Michael Flechtner in his Van Nuys studio, where a number of his works illuminate the walls in a pink-blue-glow. At Columbus College of Art and Design he pursued illustration, sculpture, and experimented with colored light and electronics. There he learned from Greek-New York artist Stephen Antonakos that beyond advertising, neon could provide a new perceptual and formal meaning to the culture.
"Stephen Antonakos, he's this famous neon artist, came and he did a slideshow and showed all these big neon pieces on the sides of buildings. And they weren't advertising. They were just embellishments, or they were art statements on their own." – Michael Flechtner
Yet, when in 1981 artists Lili Lakich and Richard Jenkins founded the Museum of Neon Art (MONA) in downtown Los Angeles, neon invoked a seedy, rundown part of town where underground happenings abounded. According to Corrie Siegel, Executive Director of today’s MONA now relocated to Glendale, neon signs were in fact illegal in many parts of the U.S.
I remember the original MONA was next to the iconic art-thrash-not-exactly-punk-rock Al’s Bar, in the then dilapidated-and-later-restored American Hotel, located in what would one day become the Downtown Arts District. You can listen to first-person accounts of that vibrant art-architectural-social-history in the documentary Tales of the American. When Flechtner discovered this neon art oasis, he moved to Los Angeles, to learn how to “bend in the fires” on commercial pizza signs and palm trees during the day and on his own sculptural art at night.
In the early 1900s, electrical engineer Daniel McFarlan Moore created the first commercially viable light source based on gas discharges, with help from Nikola Tesla. It is not so easy to isolate neon gas, but with supercooling, they were able to extract it. Neon signs embody physics at work: long, narrow glass tubes filled with neon gas, and combined with high-voltage electricity, they glow the classic red orange. By adding other noble gases like argon, mercury, krypton, xenon, helium, or using phosphor coatings, a wide range of colors are possible. First commercialized in Paris, by the 1920s neon signs signified the height of technology in the U.S. and were even funded by the New Deal Works Progress Administration.
Corrie Siegel told us that during World War II, a lot of the signs went dark in major cities because of fears about air raids. During normal use, neon signs can last about one hundred years. Once that gas flows into the tube, it will radiate color, unless a pigeon crashes into it or someone throws a rock. But if one shuts down the transformer for a length of time, it stops working properly, and the signs flicker or zap out. Thus, the glowing signs of the Roaring Twenties became the seedy, blinking, red light district and film noir crime signals of the 50s and 60s.
Post-World War II, many used the GI Bill to learn how to bend neon. There was an explosion of streetside glowing colors, becoming part of mass culture, no longer the pinnacle of modernity. By mid-century, anyone could have a neon sign, and Los Angeles boulevards became electric forests where bars, motels, diners, movie palaces, and car dealerships all competed for attention through the blinding luminosity of neon tubing. These signs soon defined the sprawling-car-created visual vernacular of Southern California, Route 66, and beyond, with neon considered passe by the 1970s.
By the early 1980s, witnessing historic signs around L.A. relegated to the scrap heap, Lakich and Jenkins decided to create a non-profit art museum as an alternative to abandoning L.A.’s iconic neon history. The institution has preserved iconic pieces such as the dragon that once adorned Grauman's Chinese Theatre and has worked to return signs to their original neighborhoods in Chinatown and elsewhere.
In 1991, Flechtner presented his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Neon Art. His relationship with the institution has deepened ever since, and in 2025-26, was the subject of a major retrospective there titled Ecce Artifex, Latin for “Behold the Craftsman.” Flechtner is known for his two- and three-dimensional creations, humorous visual puns, and his role in mentoring future generations of neon benders, like Michie Hondo from Japan, who we met doing an apprenticeship at his studio.
Flechtner’s public work has blended into the Los Angeles landscape: his best-known local landmark, the Neon Aquarium at Olympic and Sawtelle, completed in 1998. He has also fabricated neon for major contemporary artists including Bruce Nauman, Betye Saar, and Doug Aitken — bridging the worlds of fine art and craft with quiet authority.
In his most widely seen commission, the United States Postal Service engaged him to create the first-ever neon postage stamp for the Forever series. The Celebrate stamp was released in 2011, reissued in 2015, with the original neon now held in the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.
The story of neon art in Southern California is, at its core, about what a city chooses to remember. As MONA's Siegel has put it, as neon "became part of the counterculture, they started realizing, this is potent.” Artists like Nauman, Lisa Schulte, Mario Merz, Chryssa, Laddie John Dill, Dan Flavin, and Tavares Strachan have all stretched the boundaries of neon art. Moreover, in the hands of artists like Michael Flechtner, and through the advocacy of institutions like MONA, that historical and countercultural glow will not fade.
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