“I designed it as a place to sit and forget why you’re in the hospital.”

As classmates gaze at a two-foot model created by UW art major Krista Sanders—a playful combination of stools, gears, and spinning wheels—Sanders explains how the model will be transformed into a nine-foot artwork for the UW Medical Center.

During a design/build studio class, art student Krista Sanders discusses her model for a public artwork.

The students are in a studio course on public art, one of several courses offered through the UW’s new interdisciplinary Public Art Program. The program is—as far as its originators know—the first of its kind in the country. Open to both graduate and undergraduate students, it blends sculpture, industrial design, architecture, and landscape architecture.

“Traditionally, landscape design has dealt with sites; sculpture has focused on the creation of objects placed on those sites; and industrial design has been about functional details,” says Young, sculpture professor in the School of Art and one of the program’s creators. “We wanted to break down those boundaries to reflect the way public art is being practiced by professionals. It requires skills from all of these disciplines.”

The term public art refers loosely to artistic expression located outside an art gallery. That covers everything from traditional statues to site-specific works such the downtown stations for the Seattle bus tunnel.

“Public art involves more than the design of objects or structures,” explains Young. “A public artist needs to know how to evaluate a site and integrate his or her work into it. Those are traditionally the domains of architecture and landscape architecture.”

Public artists also must learn how to navigate yards of red tape to get approval for their ideas before an artwork can be installed, since the sites on which they will be located are most often publicly owned.

The Public Art Program covers all of these topics. The program was designed collaboratively by five faculty colleagues: John Young; Jim Nicholls, architecture and industrial design; Louise St. Pierre, industrial design; Daniel Winterbottom, landscape architecture; and Steve Badanes, architecture. Many of the courses will be team taught.

“We wanted to provide a good mix of information,” says Young. “It’s a studio-based program, but it also includes courses in theory and design, business practices, and field study.” The field component involves visiting public art sites around the city, accompanied by local artists who created the pubic works.

The program is made possible through a UW Tools for Transformation grant, which will fund two classes per quarter for the next three years. The program’s creators hope that interest in these courses will eventually lead to a major in public art.

If the initial response is any indication, the program is filling an important niche. Young, who describes the response as “incredible,” says that student interest extends far beyond the UW campus. He’s received numerous emails from students at other universities hoping to participate through an exchange program.

Jennevieve Schlemmer, a UW sculpture major, was immediately attracted to the program because of its emphasis on collaboration with students from other fields. “In most of our classes we’re very much divided by field and you never think to work with someone,” she says. “But in public art you’re not just making a piece by yourself.”

Schlemmer, who is interested in public art as a career path, is particularly interested in the program’s design/build studios—courses in which students design a project and then have the opportunity to actually create it. But she recognizes that she also needs to learn the nuts and bolts of the profession.

She’ll get those nuts and bolts in a course titled “Professional Practices,” which covers the business side of public art, including making a contract, preparing a portfolio, and applying for grants. A second course, “The Public Context,” taught by Nicholls, focuses on how to analyze a site in terms of its history, cultural and physical parameters, structural elements, and traffic patterns. “This course is the intellectual backbone of the sequence,” says Young. “It covers the essential intellectual concepts in public art.”

Most quarters the program will also offer a design/build studio. Landscape architecture and art students in a studio course taught by Winterbottom and Young have been working with a real client, the UW Medical Center (UWMC), to design individual artworks for the Center—like Krista Sanders’ playful sculpture. They also have worked collaboratively to design a site-specific outdoor work for the Center’s “barrel vault,” a long corridor on the first floor, with UWMC providing a $10,000 budget for completion and installation of the work.

During spring quarter, St. Pierre’s industrial design students will be added to the mix, and the group will be faced with a different challenge: to design a public artwork near the mouth of the Columbia River to celebrate Lewis and Clark’s arrival at the Pacific Ocean. The project was proposed by the Washington State Parks Department, which wants to commemorate the 200th anniversary (in 2003) of Lewis and Clark’s journey.

During the same quarter, students will design a public artwork for Tukwila Elementary School, with the school’s teachers and children involved in the process. Sharon Sutton, professor of architecture, assisted in initiating the project.

“People are coming to us,” says Young. “They’ve heard about the program, and they want us to participate in their projects. The word is out.”

There’s yet another component to the ambitious Public Art Program: visiting artists. Every quarter for the next three years, the program will invite two internationally renowned practitioners of public art to the UW campus. Students will have the opportunity to talk with the visitors about their work and hear how they deal with the politics and bureaucracy that are part of the public art process.

“We’re inviting people who are pushing the envelope in the field,” says Young. “These are the pioneers. And they are all very different, with different strategies for surviving.”

Several creators of the Public Art Program are veterans of public art themselves. Steve Badanes is well known for the Fremont troll under the Aurora Bridge. Young’s Fin Project: From Swords into Plowshares is installed in Magnuson Park.

“The new program isn’t an original idea on our part,” Young says. “We’re just doing something that seems very natural to us. We’ve discussed creating a program like this for quite a while, and UW support has finally made it possible. It’s been very gratifying.”

Related Story-- A Very Public Art Gallery: The UW Campus

[Winter/Spring 2001 - Table of Contents]