The artwork will remain on buses through Jan. 20.
You can hide under the covers all you want, but winter is almost here. And while your daily commutes are likely to become increasingly frigid, a new mobile art exhibit might make it a little more bearable to hop on the bus.
The artwork on the buses is part of Art en Route, a collaboration among local writers and artists conceived and co-curated by Yusi Liu, art director for the Wisconsin Union Directorate, and Alex Polach, the organization’s former associate development director. The project features eight different photographic wraps, which will be on buses through Jan. 20.
“We wanted to bring art to the campus and the city,” says Liu, adding that the project, which was developed over six months beginning in January 2017, was inspired by a similar initiative in Athens, Georgia, which decorated bus shelters.
Part of what makes Madison’s project special is the collaborative nature of the work. “We wanted it to be something interdisciplinary,” says Liu, who noted that WUD Art created separate visual and literary categories to field submissions. Out of roughly 100 total applicants, eight visual artists and eight writers were chosen to work together on dually created pieces. “When we paired them, it was quite intentional on our part,” says Liu.
One of the works, created by Master of Fine Arts candidate Rebecca Kautz and playwright Gwendolyn Rice (also an Isthmus theater critic), depicts a multiracial crowd of people holding two signs that slant diagonally downward to span the entire wrap. One sign reads “There is strength in numbers,” while the other declares “There is also strength in one.”
Another original comes from Yeonhee Cheong, who graduated recently from UW-Madison with a Master of Fine Arts, and Antonio Byrd, a Ph.D. candidate in composition and rhetoric. It features a minimal representation of a man’s face with the words “Plan accelerated. Juan married a man in a courthouse to stay here. El amor es el amor.”
“A bus rider has about 10 to 15 seconds to look at a bus wrap before getting on, thus both image and writing had to be simple,” says Cheong. “I like the self-reflection that happens when people see these pieces and that leads to an emotional or thoughtful realization about marginalized people.”
