Shana Lutker created Onward and Upward Sky Box #6 as part of her body of work commissioned by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) for the Manifest Destiny project. Expansive in scope, Manifest Destiny explored the titular concept through 100 artist billboards installed in “chapters” along the I-10 from Florida to California, along with adjacent programming and works. The initiative was conceived by artist Zoe Crosher and co-curated by LAND’s Shamim M. Momin: Crosher wrote, “The intention was to give a physicalized reminder of this extraordinarily influential (and often times destructive) 19th century belief which unabashedly dictated the expansion west, that still dictates our movement west, and to gently place/implicate/remind the people unknowingly participating in that landscape along the way.” Lutker was among ten participating artists, including John Baldessari, Sanford Biggers, Matthew Brannon, Zoe Crosher, Eve Fowler, Jeremy Shaw, Daniel R. Small, Bobbi Woods, and Mario Ybarra Jr.
For Manifest Destiny’s first chapter, installed along the interstate from Jacksonville to Lake City, Florida, Lutker created works contemplating the sky and its depictions in early American history. Titled Onward and Upward, these billboards used sourced material including a painting of pre-Spanish Florida, a 1909 photograph of Jacksonville, and a 17th century etching of explorers’ ships. Collectively, the works represented “the excitement of exploration and expansion in concert with a sense of disappointment associated with the realization that this new world does not always live up to the idealized fantasy.”
