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A "Public Art Coming Soon" sign at Waterfront Park is about to deliver on its promise.
The City of Alexandria's Office of the Arts announced Monday that installation is underway for Now or Never, the eighth edition of the annual Site See: New Views in Old Town public art series. The work, by interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert, opens to the public March 21 with a free reception from 1 to 4 p.m. at Waterfront Park, 1 Prince St.
The Alexandria Commission for the Arts unanimously approved Eggert's concept last September. The installation features two billboard-style sculptures — each roughly 17.5 feet tall and 40 feet long — standing face to face across a narrow passageway. One reads NOW, the other NEVER. The orientation is deliberate: from one direction, NOW appears on the left and NEVER on the right, but walk through and look back, and the relationship flips.
The passageway between the signs is framed by painted gray lines that radiate outward from the corridor, narrowing into a walkway meant to evoke a literal and symbolic middle ground. The shape echoes an hourglass. Up close, each word is rendered through an offset CMYK dot matrix pattern — tiny flecks of cyan, magenta, yellow and black that create the illusion of solid tones, a nod to lithographic printing. At night, floodlights illuminate the work. The installation is also oriented east to west to create what Eggert calls a "Stonehenge effect" during the summer solstice, when the sun aligns with the passageway.
Eggert was selected in April 2025 from 23 artists who responded to the city's open call. She centers her practice on giving material form to language and time, and has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery and Beijing's CAFA Art Museum. She holds a TED Fellowship and a Long Now Foundation Fellowship, and is an associate professor of studio art at the University of North Texas.
Now or Never follows Nekisha Durrett's Break Water, which was on display at the same site through last November.
The installation will remain on view through November 2026. Artist remarks are scheduled for 1:30 p.m. at the March 21 opening. Admission is free.
More information is available at alexandriava.gov/publicart.
Updated at 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday, March 11: This story has been updated to include additional details about the installation's design, including the CMYK dot matrix lettering, the hourglass-shaped ground pattern, the east-west "Stonehenge effect" orientation, the nighttime floodlighting, and Eggert's selection from a pool of 23 artists in April 2025.
