Public Art UHS is excited to debut The Billboard 2025 Contest Winner: Ashley Anika Herndon. Her original artwork, Starship, will be our latest addition to the UH campus experience. Selected through a public voting process among five finalists, our featured artwork for The Billboard in 2026 makes this Herndon’s first public art project.

Ashley Anika Herndon is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston whose work blends figuration, myth-making, and emotional futurism. She works in drawing and painting to build worlds where her figures are central.

About The Billboard, she writes:  

“With this billboard, I hope to offer UH students and faculty a moment of pause; a reminder that growth often begins with small, almost invisible steps, and that staying connected to one’s sense of wonder is a form of strength. The response I would most like to see from the UH community is recognition: a feeling of “I know this moment,” or “I’ve been this person,” that transforms the billboard from an image into a mirror of their own becoming. 

My work often explores what it means to return to yourself after periods of pressure, transition, or internal excavation. The piece I am submitting, Starship, reflects that process while responding directly to Houston, a city built on exploration, and to the environment of the University of Houston, where students are constantly shaping, testing, and reinventing their identities. Ultimately, Starship is about building, emergence, and landing. It is about the feeling of standing at the threshold of something immense:  a future, a version of oneself, a possibility, or choosing to step forward.”