A 27-foot-long inflatable unicorn cow riding a jet ski is set to tower over Times Square's pedestrian plaza starting September 20, accompanied by a 34-foot inflatable rainbow, as part of a surreal new public art series launching this fall. The sculptures are the physical extension of a three-minute video work titled El Mundo es Niña, created by Miami-based artist duo LIZN'BOW, which will simultaneously flood more than 100 electronic billboards across the district every night at the stroke of midnight.
The video piece will open Times Square Arts' Fall 2026 Midnight Moment season, according to Time Out, which reports the piece will run throughout September 2026. Midnight Moment, launched in 2012 by the Times Square Alliance and the Times Square Advertising Coalition, is billed as the world's largest digital public art program, syncing artwork across more than 90 electronic billboards between 41st and 49th Streets nightly from 11:57 p.m. to midnight, according to research from NYU Wagner. For three minutes each night, the commercial screens that normally hawk ads pause to become a unified outdoor gallery.
LIZN'BOW is the collaborative project of artists Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty, who met at a Chicago party and began working together in 2015, per the Time Out report. Their body of work spans performance, installation, music, fashion and technology, all built around a fictional universe called Niñalandia. The duo describes Niñalandia as a “pro-pocalyptic” future, according to Time Out's reporting, and per background from United States Artists, the concept reframes environmental and technological upheaval as an opportunity for community resilience and joy rather than doom, drawing on queer and Latinx futurisms.
What Actually Shows Up On The Billboards
The imagery populating Niñalandia is deliberately strange and specific. Time Out's reporting lists floating milk jugs, islands of money, and Ferrer's own grandmother riding a flying bicycle among the visuals woven into the world, alongside the now-famous unicorn cow. Taken together, the piece imagines people adapting and finding joy and community amid climate change, rising waters, and technological disruption, according to the same report.
Bow also performs under the name Bow Ty Enterprises Venture Capital, per Time Out, and the duo fronts Niña, described as their feminist reggaeton band. Niña is scheduled to give a live performance in Times Square on September 23, according to Time Out's account of the schedule. That live event doubles as the on-the-ground counterpart to the video installation dominating the billboards overhead.
A Physical Takeover Alongside The Screens
Beyond the nightly video broadcast, the inflatable unicorn cow and rainbow sculptures will physically occupy Times Square's pedestrian plaza from September 20 through September 27, anchored by a live premiere performance at 10 p.m. on September 23, according to Times Square Arts. That premiere will include an appearance by Poncili Creación, a Puerto Rican art collective founded in 2012 by twin brothers Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro known for building large-scale interactive puppets out of salvaged foam rubber to stage improvisational public street spectacles, according to PBS. The collective has previously staged puppet interventions at venues including MoMA PS1.
LIZN'BOW's Times Square debut follows a string of institutional recognition for the duo. They received a 2026 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship and a 2026 Shandaken: Storm King residency, and their Creative Capital-funded project Novelas de Niñas is slated for a national tour, according to background from the City of Miami Beach. Before landing in Times Square, LIZN'BOW brought Niñalandia to a gallery setting in September 2024, launching a virtual-reality rollercoaster simulation called Niñalandia Skycoaster at Locust Projects in Miami, set in a post-apocalyptic, queer-futurist vision of South Florida, as reported by the Miami New Times.
What Follows El Mundo es Niña
El Mundo es Niña won't be the only stop on this season's Midnight Moment calendar. Hand-drawn chalkboard animation by artist Dustin Grella, titled Sunday Morning, will follow in October 2026, and French sculptor Julien Creuzet will present an exploration of Martinican carnival and mythology in November, according to Times Square Arts. The rotating lineup keeps with the program's practice of selecting a handful of multidisciplinary artists for each seasonal billboard series.
The scale of the audience for these commissions is difficult to overstate. Times Square draws an average of roughly 300,000 daily visitors, giving non-commercial public art a high-density audience during the nightly advertising pause, according to data cited by Blindspot. Making that pause possible requires a public-private arrangement: Midnight Moment draws support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, alongside donated screen time from commercial billboard operators including ABC SuperSign and American Eagle, according to Times Square Arts.
Since its 2012 launch, Times Square Arts has presented public art interventions from nearly 200 contemporary artists, using the district's screen network to display digital works by figures including Yoko Ono, Tracey Emin, Pipilotti Rist, and David Hockney, whose synchronized digital sunrise piece ran across 70 Times Square screens in May 2021, per NYU Wagner's research. LIZN'BOW's inclusion places the Miami duo in that same lineage, translating a world built for gallery VR headsets onto one of the largest advertising canvases on the planet. Hoodline previously covered a bronze statue series by artist Thomas J. Price that similarly paired a physical Duffy Square sculpture with a synchronized Midnight Moment video run.
