Marine Tanguy works where images meet everyday life. Through MTArt Agency and her new book The Visual Detox, she argues for a fairer visual commons—and shows how artists can rewrite what cities choose to see.
Marine Tanguy has spent the past decade building infrastructure that helps artists shape the public realm. In 2015, she founded MTArt Agency in London; the company couples talent representation for visual artists with a studio that delivers public commissions for cities, brands, and cultural organizations, and has been certified as a B Corporation since 2019. MTArt positions itself as the art sector’s leading talent agency and presents its model as the first of its kind for visual artists.
A through-line in Tanguy’s work is the unequal distribution of visual power. She argues that ads and billboards are not just background—they’re a system that signals who belongs, what’s valued, and where attention is directed. The evidence is clear in the UK: more than four in five outdoor billboard advertisements are located in the poorest half of England and Wales, with ad density increasing in the most deprived areas. In interviews, Tanguy links this to wellbeing and equity, noting the cumulative impact of constant commercial messaging in lower-income neighborhoods. “In the US, there are 370,000 billboards with 15,000 new ones every year,” she says. “In the UK… four out of five billboards are in working-class areas.” Her answer, via MTArt, is to displace a portion of that visual noise with artist-led projects—installations and commissions that surface local stories and widen who gets seen.
Tanguy’s new book, The Visual Detox: How to Consume Media Without Letting It Consume You (Square Peg/Penguin, 2024), extends the argument from policy to personal practice. The book frames “visual hygiene” as both self-care and civic action—teaching readers to sharpen visual critical thinking, decode the images saturating streets and screens, and take back some control over what enters the field of view. The publisher describes it as “packed with tiny yet potent hacks,” a practical guide to “reclaim your focus and sense of wonder.” In conversation, Tanguy puts it more bluntly: “We haven’t been educated to speak the visual language,” which makes it harder to call out harmful imagery or demand better representation. (via imaginationstatepod.com)
All of this lands squarely with the CODAworx community’s focus on public art as shared civic infrastructure. At CODAsummit 2025 in Washington, D.C., Tanguy will deliver the closing keynote—an urgent and inspiring call to action about visual storytelling, advocacy, and the evolving role of artists as global leaders. The invitation is practical: rebalance what people see, where they see it, and who gets to author it. After almost ten years, Tanguy’s project is consistent and direct—move artists into the center of everyday visual life and widen the frame until our streets reflect the communities that live there.
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