A Silver Lake billboard that recently hawked Avion tequila took on a very different tone last month. “SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION OR FACE CATASTROPHE!” read the near-apocalyptic message in stark black type. On Santa Monica Boulevard, the wisdom of Robert Frost crept by in the same foot-tall, all-caps characters, wrapped around a Metro bus: “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”

This campaign, which launched in October and has quickly become both the best-looking and most ubiquitous advertising on L.A.’s streets, is produced by art organization ForYourArt to benefit the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education (or LA Fund for short), a nonprofit co-founded by LAUSD superintendent John Deasy last year. And the artist is none other than the legendary Barbara Kruger, whose signature black, white and red graphics — like a public service announcement meets reassuring Mad Men-era advertising — reads spectacularly well in L.A.’s urban environment.

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