Heads Up for Local Artists Metro is offering significant opportunities for artists to contribute works for station art. As many of you have heard, Metro is in the throes of planning the regional connector in our area. The regional connector is a downtown subway project that will link the various Metro lines in order to provide more seamless service across the system. There will be a Little Tokyo/Arts District station on First and Central plus two additional downtown stations. Metro has ambitious plans for the station art content, a serious budget, and a completely re-vamped selection mechanism. Previously, the construction contractors were responsible for providing the art content. Evidently, this was not completely successful. Under the new plan, committees working under Metro Creative Services will choose artists to create the art works. Artists will design the content, but not supply the final physical pieces which will be fabricated by specialty houses with expertise in reproducing large works in any of several highly durable forms. This approach means that the artists do not need any specific experience with public art or the processes that will ultimately be used to reproduce the work. In the past, artists working in paint, print making, metal, photography, and other media have had works adapted for Metro projects. Artists will continue a consulting role during the fabrication stages to ensure that the artistic content is not compromised. The processes include glass sandwich panels with several possible etching or photo reproduction techniques used largely for station entry areas, ceramic tile panels and mosaics for walls, laser-cut metal panels for screening, and porcelain enamel on steel panel primarily for the train rooms. Additionally, there are light boxes with rotating displays proposed for some areas and various posters and temporary construction art opportunities. Metro has completely changed the selection process to parallel the processes used to select other contractors. They have a simplified on-line application and expect hundreds of artists to apply from which group a number will be selected for the final competition. Those artists will be paid an honorarium to create a proposal. The committee will select the most suitable proposals. Metro estimates that, ultimately, 12 to 15 artists will be contracted to create reproduction-ready images from their original designs. There will be some thematic coordination among the stations of each particular line, and an artist may be chosen to contribute in more than one area. There are no decisions yet made for artistic content, but Metro has a definite plan for the locations and sizes of the works. Metro will be holding workshops for artists in the upcoming months. There will be some in the Arts District/Little Tokyo area, but the schedule has not been set.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 00:51:51 +0000
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