{"id":240525,"date":"2025-10-21T07:53:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T07:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/240525\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T07:53:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T07:53:11","slug":"how-artists-are-keeping-the-lost-art-of-neon-signs-alive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/240525\/","title":{"rendered":"How Artists Are Keeping ‘The Lost Art’ of Neon Signs Alive"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says \u201ceverything will be fucking amazing,\u201d and a weed leaf, Geovany Alvarado points to a neon sign he\u2019s particularly proud of: \u201cThe Lost and Found Art,\u201d it says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a customer who called me, it was an old guy. He wanted to meet with someone who actually fabricates the neon and he couldn\u2019t find anyone who physically does it,\u201d Alvarado said. \u201cHe told me \u2018You\u2019re still doing the lost art.\u2019 It came to my head that neon has been dying, there\u2019s less and less people who have been learning. So I made this piece.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For 37 years, Alvarado has been practicing \u201cthe lost and found art\u201d of neon sign bending, weathering the general ups and downs of business as well as, most threateningly, the rise of cheap LED signs that mimic neon and have become popular over the last few years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen neon crashed and LED and the big letters like McDonald\u2019s, all these big signs\u2014they took neon before. Now it\u2019s LED,\u201d he said. In the last few years, though, he said there has been a resurgent interest in neon from artists and people who are rejecting the cheap feel of LED. \u201cIt came back more like, artistic, for art. So I\u2019ve been doing 100 percent neon since then.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

At his shop, Quality Neon Signs in Mid-City Los Angeles, there are signs in all sorts of states of completion and functionality strewn about Alvarado\u2019s shop: old, mass-produced beer advertisements whose transformers have blown and are waiting for him to repair them, signs in the shapes of soccer and baseball jerseys, signs with inspirational phrases (\u201cEverything is going to be fucking amazing,\u201d \u201cNEED MONEY FOR FAKE ART\u201d), signs for restaurants, demonstration tubes that show the different colors he offers, weed shop signs, projects he made when he was bored. There are projects that are particularly meaningful to him: a silhouette he made of his wife holding their infant daughter, and a sign of the Los Angeles skyline with a wildfire burning in the background, \u201cjust to represent Los Angeles,\u201d he said. There are old little bits of tube that have broken off of other pieces. \u201cWe save everything,\u201d Alvarado said, \u201cin case we want to fix it or need it for a repair.\u201d His workshop, a few minutes away, features a \u201cHome Sweet Home\u201d sign,\u201d a sign he made years ago for Twitter\/Chanel collaboration featuring the old Twitter bird logo, and a sign for the defunct Channing Tatum buddy cop show Comrade Detective.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The overwhelming majority of signs Alvarado sells are traditional neon glass. The real thing. But he does offer newer LED faux-neon signs to clients who want it, though he doesn\u2019t make those in-house. Alvarado says he sells LED to keep up with the times and because they can be more practical for one-off events because they are less likely to break in transit, but it\u2019s clear that he and the overwhelming majority of neon sign makers think the LED stuff is simply not the same. Most LED signs look cheaper and do not emit the same warmth of light, but are more energy efficient.<\/p>\n

I asked two neon sign creators about the difference while I was shopping for signs. They said they think the environmental debate isn\u2019t quite as straightforward as it seems because a lot of the LED signs they make seem to be for one-off events, meaning many LED signs are manufactured essentially for a single use and then turned into e-waste. Many real neon signs are bought as either artwork or are bought by businesses who are interested in the real aesthetic. And because they are generally more expensive and are handmade, they are used for years and can be repaired indefinitely.<\/p>\n

I asked Alvarado to show me the process and make a neon sign for 404 Media, which I\u2019ve wanted for years. It\u2019s a visceral, loud, scientific process, with gas-powered burners that sound like jet engines heating up the glass tubes to roughly 1,000 degrees so they can be bent into the desired shapes. When he first started bending neon, Alvarado says he used to use an overheard projector and a transparency to project a schematic onto the wall. These days, he mocks up designs on a computer aided design program and prints them out on a huge printer that uses a sharpie to draw the schematic. He then painstakingly marks out his planned glass bends on the paper, lining up the tubes with the mockup as he works.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou burn yourself a lot, your hands get burnt. You\u2019re dealing with fire all the time,\u201d Alvarado said. He burned himself several times while working on my piece. \u201cFor me it\u2019s normal. Even if you\u2019re a pro, you still burn yourself.\u201d Every now and then, even for someone who has been doing this for decades, the glass tubes shatter: \u201cYou just gotta get another stick and do it again,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After bending the glass and connecting the electrodes to one end of the piece, he connects the tubes to a high-powered vacuum that sucks the air out of them. The color of the light in Alvarado\u2019s work is determined by a powdered coating within the tubes or a different colored coating of the tubes themselves; the type of gas and electrical current also changes the type and intensity of the colors. He uses neon for bright oranges and reds, and argon for cooler hues.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Alvarado, of course, isn\u2019t the only one still practicing the \u201clost art\u201d of neon bending, but he\u2019s one of just a few commercial businesses in Los Angeles still manufacturing and repairing neon signs for largely commercial customers. Another, called Signmakers, has made several large neon signs that have become iconic for people who live in Los Angeles. The artist Lili Lakich has maintained a well-known studio in Los Angeles\u2019 Arts District for years and has taught \u201cThe Neon Workshop\u201d to new students since 1982, and the Museum of Neon Art is in Glendale, just a few miles away.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A few days after he made my neon sign, I was wandering around Los Angeles and came across an art gallery displaying Tory DiPietro\u2019s neon work, which is largely fine art and pieces where neon is incorporated to other artworks; a neon \u201cFRAGILE\u201d superimposed on a globe, for example. Both DiPietro and Alvarado told me that there are still a handful of people practicing the lost art, and that in recent years there\u2019s been a bit of a resurgent interest in neon, though it\u2019s not that easy to learn.<\/p>\n

On the day I picked up my sign, there were two bright green \u201cMeme House\u201d signs for a memecoin investor house in Los Angeles that Alvarado said he had bent and made immediately after working on the 404 Media sign. \u201cI was there working til about 11 p.m.\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

About the author<\/p>\n

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.<\/p>\n

\"Jason <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Next to technicolor neon signs featuring Road Runner, an inspirational phrase that says \u201ceverything will be fucking amazing,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240526,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-240525","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}