Documented artwork / sculptural marquee with neon
Hotel
Credit as documented: Tom Fruin
Tom Fruin’s Hotel turns a building marquee into a collage of New York’s discarded commercial signs. Created for the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the 2012 sculpture rises fifty feet and carries red neon across a patchwork of recovered signage. Fruin gathered its material around the city over two decades, including signs from a demolished DUMBO deli and a converted Bowery paper warehouse. Fruit and pizza illustrations, repair advertisements, warnings and telephone numbers retain traces of their former uses. Hand riveting joins those fragments into the artist’s largest found-signage work, linking the hotel’s new identity with older street-level businesses.
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At a glance
- Year / version
- 2012
- Materials
- found signage, steel, neon, rivets
- Documented setting
- unknown
- Dimensions
- 50 × 8 × 1.5 feet
- Dimensions apply to
- Artist-published overall sculpture dimensions; axis order is not labelled.
- Availability
- Unconfirmed
Places & versions
Installation history
Historical presentations. A past installation does not establish the current location or suitability for a new site.
May 2012 artist installation listing; current condition not independently verified
Wythe Hotel, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York
Materials and construction
The artist lists found signage, steel, neon and rivets, with dimensions of 50 × 8 × 1.5 feet. One reused sign incorporates a mid-1990s three-dimensional piece by Dan Witz; this credit refers to that embedded sign, not joint authorship of the entire marquee.
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Sources
- tomfruin.com ↗ · Checked 2026-10-17
- www.tomfruin.com ↗ · Checked 2026-10-17