Digital Art in the Courthouse in El Paso, TEXAS?

Yes, it's true. A massive digital art piece by New York-based artist Leo Villareal has just been installed in the lobby of the newly built Antonine Predock-designed federal courthouse in El Paso, Texas. When you think of Texas and courthouses, digital art would NOT be your next thought. That is why I think Leo Villareal's digital art in such an environment is so ground breaking.  His constantly changing digital art pieces, comprising arrays of LEDs, are bridging the gap between digital animation and modern contemporary art. Villareal received a masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 1994. He is using what he learned to create mathematical, logical and simple digital coding to give his LED light pieces the capacity to display 16 million colors that move and change in random sequence and in random periods of time that seems to communicate to the whole body of the viewer. Villareal also has a large permanent instillation above a moving sidewalk inside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  He has had Solo exhibitions in Washington DC, New York, California, Florida, and Madrid, Spain. To see a large digital art piece in such a prominent place in a government building in Texas, to me, is a clear demonstration that digital art is being accepted as Art, and is here to stay. To see Leo Villareal talk about his work you can view a YouTube video here.