Public Art
Rings of Love: The Voice of Community
RINGS OF LOVE
by Alexey Steele, 2025
Community handprint mural · Acrylic on canvas · 8 × 12 ft
Part of the Love My Neighbor Project
Created with the support of the Culver City Arts Foundation
Public Art
RINGS OF LOVE
by Alexey Steele, 2025
Community handprint mural · Acrylic on canvas · 8 × 12 ft
Part of the Love My Neighbor Project
Created with the support of the Culver City Arts Foundation
In the fall of 2025, Culver City faced a question: whether to take its place in the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games and welcome New Zealand’s Olympic team as its guests. The public conversation that followed revealed passionate and wide support across the community. Rings of Love was created to give that answer its visible expression.
On October 18, 2025, at the Culver City Art Walk & Roll Festival and as part of its International Artists Zone, people of every age and walk of life were invited to add their handprint if they supported Culver City’s participation. Residents, families, artists, and elected leaders answered, one hand at a time, creating a public declaration of support for a shared effort.
At the center, five linked rings each hold a heart: the artist’s image of a community joined by love and purpose. Around them, every handprint is a personal yes, given freely, side by side. A shared vision of a common future, whatever else might divide us. The artist designed the palette, the same one used in his Love My Neighbor murals in Long Beach and Carson. Each participant chose their own color from it, and the artist orchestrated where each handprint landed, treating each one as a single brushstroke in his composition.
Handprints are among the earliest marks of human creativity, found on cave walls tens of thousands of years old, a primordial way of saying “I am here, and I am part of this.” In Rings of Love they become a flowing, conceptually pointillist field, each hand individual, carrying its own story, an expressive moment frozen in time. Each print is made with a single push of the hand, with no chance to redo it. Bravura and expressionism at their most elemental. Hands of the same color return like leitmotifs in a Wagnerian score, weaving organic visual strands across the canvas that stand for the diversity of our community, united by a shared civic vision.
Together, these choices carry the work beyond the familiar community mural. It is art doing its civic work, answering a tangible public need in a tangible, perceivable form.
A public statement, made by the public, on a public question, Rings of Love expresses our love as neighbors, for each other and for the shared hopes the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games represent. It carries the spirit of the whole community and will travel with Culver City on the road to 2028.
Rings of Love continues Alexey Steele’s Love My Neighbor project and was created with the support of the Culver City Arts Foundation.
Every handprint was given on a stated condition. Around the canvas, a rope hung with dozens of copies of a printed statement inviting support for Culver City’s participation, so no one could reach the canvas without reading it first.
Rings of Love is an independent artwork by Alexey Steele and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the IOC, USOPC, or LA28.
