Times Square Arts Announces Leo Villareal for November Midnight Moment 

Still from Pixel Dust, 2025 by Leo Villareal. Courtesy of the artist and Times Square Arts.

Villareal’s expansive, swirling orbs of layered light transform Times Square this fall

November 1–30 | 11:57pm–12am
Times Square | Between 41st and 49th Streets

Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary visual arts and performance, is pleased to present Leo Villareal for November’s Midnight Moment. His work will be on view for the month of November synchronized on over 90 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. 

Leo Villareal, Pixel Dust
November 1–30, 2025 | Nightly 11:57pm–Midnight

Using pixels and binary code as building blocks, artist Leo Villareal uses light to craft mesmerizing patterns inspired by nature and the cosmos, grounding viewers in a unique and harmonious experience. Interested in identifying the rules and governing structures of systems, Villareal designs custom software to choreograph his moving compositions, exploring spatial and temporal resolution as he modulates parameters such as opacity, speed and scale. Over the past two decades, his luminous installations have transformed public spaces across the globe, including the Bleecker Street subway station in Manhattan, nine central-London bridges on the Thames River, as well as commissioned light sculptures for museums, music houses, airports and hospitals.

In Times Square, Villareal will premiere his newest work, Pixel Dust, a hypnotic video of pulsating particles that envelop the district in dazzling light sequences, coalescing the vibrant energy of Times Square into a single monochromatic moment of inflection as November’s Midnight Moment. 

Villareal’s Midnight Moment presentation coincides with his new and expansive artist’s monograph, published by Monacelli Press, Leo Villareal: Coding Light. 

ABOUT LEO VILLAREAL
Leo Villareal is a Mexican American light artist based in New York City. Over the last 20 years, he has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. Represented by Pace Gallery, his work is in the permanent collections of museums including The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Villareal’s permanent, site-specific works include Evanescent Field, Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA; Star Ceiling (El Paso), El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Firmament (Mori), Toranomon Hills Station Tower, Tokyo, Japan; Infinite Composition, Lindemann Performing Arts Center, Brown University, Providence, RI; Fountain (KCI), Kansas City International Airport, Kansas City, MI; Light Matrix (Houston), Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine, University of Houston, Houston, TX; Volume (Frisco), Dallas Cowboys World Headquarters, Frisco, TX; Buckyball, Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA; Light Matrix (MIT), Morris and Sophie Chang Building, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Volume (Renwick), Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.; Radiant Pathway, Rice University, Houston, TX; Cosmos, Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Multiverse, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Diagonal Grid, Borusan Music House, Borusan Arts, Istanbul, Turkey; Stars, Light Matrix (BAM) and Volume (BAM), Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; and Hive (Bleecker Street), for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the Bleecker Street subway station in Manhattan. In March 2013, Villareal inaugurated The Bay Lights, a monumental 1.8-mile installation of 25,000 white LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. In April 2021, Villareal completed Illuminated River, which unites nine bridges in central London into a single, monumental work of public art. 

Villareal was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua. He attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island and received his BA in sculpture from Yale University in 1990 and his Masters degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University in 1994. After graduating from NYU, Villareal moved to San Francisco to work for three years at Paul Allen’s private research lab, Interval Research, in Palo Alto. Since 2004, Villareal has served on the board of Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas, a dynamic, contemporary cultural arts space. In 2011, Villareal proudly joined the board of the Burning Man Project. As of 2025, Villareal has joined the board of the Madison Square Park Conservancy. He currently lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife Yvonne Force Villareal and their two children.

ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.