The East Baton Rouge Parish Housing Authority and the BR Choice Neighborhoods Initiative will dedicate a new public sculpture at the Cypress at Ardendale Community Center (5800 Imagination Parkway). The installation is called Love Motel for Insects: Great Purple Hairstreak Variation, and its creator is internationally recognized artist and biologist  Brandon Ballengée. Ballengée will be there in person to meet the community, share the story behind the piece, and witness something genuinely magical: a butterfly release and a glow-in-the-dark sculpture lighting up a Baton Rouge evening.

Register at eventbrite.com and come see for yourself.

What Is a Love Motel for Insects?

The answer starts in a Costa Rican rainforest in 2001, where a young artist and biologist named Brandon Ballengée draped a bedsheet between trees, switched on battery-powered black lights, and waited. Within hours, hundreds of species had descended: moths releasing pheromones, beetles navigating by ultraviolet, lacewings and caddisflies drawn from the dark. The sheet became a painting made by living things. Ballengée was changed by what he saw.

That original experiment has since grown into one of the most widely traveled public art series in the world. Love Motel sculptures built from aluminum, stainless steel mesh, and UV LED lights, each shaped after a locally significant butterfly species. The sculptures have been installed on boats at the Venice Biennale, on peat bogs in Ireland, on moors overlooking Loch Ness, in shopping malls in Delhi, outside Aztec ruins in Mexico, at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington D.C., on rooftops in London, and in neighborhoods across the United States.

At dusk, the sculpture activates, ultraviolet light pours through the mesh wings, and then the insects arrive. Moths, beetles, pollinators of all kinds are drawn into a soft, glowing encounter with whoever happens to be standing nearby. The sculpture is not static art to be observed from a distance. It is a living event, happening in real time, right in front of you.

Each variation in the series is named after a local butterfly: the Monarch Variation at the University of Houston, the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Variation in Charlotte, the Saint Francis Satyr Variation in North Carolina; honoring an endangered endemic species. In Baton Rouge, the Purple Hairstreak. The butterfly is a real species present in Louisiana's ecosystem, chosen as a living indicator of environmental and community health. Its presence here is worth protecting.

Meet Dr. Brandon Ballengée

Brandon Ballengée is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Creative Capital Award recipient, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow whose work has been exhibited in more than 20 countries. He holds a Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology from Plymouth University and is currently Adjunct Faculty of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Tulane University, where he researches the long-term impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Gulf of Mexico fish species. In 2026, he will take up a fellowship at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

He is also the co-founder of Atelier de la Nature, a STEAM education center and nature reserve in Arnaudville built from the ground up. For Ballengée, art and science and community are not three separate things. They have always been one.

On Tuesday night, he will be at Cypress at Ardendale to give a short presentation on the sculpture and the ideas behind it. This is a rare opportunity to have a real conversation with a world-class artist who has chosen Louisiana as his home and Baton Rouge as the site of his work.

Why This Night Matters for Our Community

Purple Hairstreak Variation is not the first Ballengée sculpture placed through the BR Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. The first stands on the campus of CTEC in Baton Rouge.

Together, these two works are doing something that housing investment and infrastructure alone cannot do: they are giving the communities of Melrose East, Smiley Heights, and Fairfields a visible, beautiful, living symbol of who they are and who they are becoming.

The BR Choice Neighborhoods Initiative was built on the belief that transforming a community means more than rebuilding housing, it means rebuilding identity. It means creating places that say, clearly and publicly, that this neighborhood matters and has a future. Public art is central to that vision.

The butterfly has always been a symbol of transformation, sometimes an invisible process that eventually produces something extraordinary. These neighborhoods are in the middle of exactly that kind of process. On Tuesday night, we get to mark that moment together.

May 5, 2026  |  7:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Cypress at Ardendale - 5800 Imagination Parkway, Baton Rouge, LA 70806

Free & Open to the Public  |  Register at eventbrite.com

The evening includes a presentation by Dr. Ballengée, the official sculpture dedication, a community butterfly release, a glow-in-the-dark sculpture viewing at dusk, and a meet & greet with light activities.

Bring your family. Bring your neighbors.

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