Raising Arizona - and Winston-Salem

Imagine driving down an expressway and, within the space of just a couple of miles, three different pedestrian bridges turn your head because of how different each is from a normal concrete span and from each other. Such was the experience of local Arts Council Public Art & Design Committee Chair Thorns Craven last week on a trip to Scottsdale, Arizona - and here are his photos of the pleasant driving surprise.

Winston-Salem resident Ruby Bailey read about our PA&DC's efforts in the paper last summer and called me to talk about how she loves driving when she's visiting her daughter out in Arizona for the same reason. It's the unexpected surprises of her driving trips, the care of placed beauty that the locals give to you to help you remember and appreciate the space. Ruby sent me some materials about the "petroglyphs" incised along the retaining walls and bridges of some Arizona highways that mimic other area rock writings, both at historic Native American sites and those incised in the modern landscape. She sent along drawings her family and friends there secured from the Arizona DOT as a way of encouraging us locally in our push to get our downtown Business 40 done in an artistically distinct manner.

Other government agencies have been impressed how transportation officials and artists and designers have raised Arizona highways to a special level of excellence. Seattle transportation planners have reprinted an article featuring the Arizona success story in a three-part manual they had artist Daniel Mihalyo create as a guide for urban design - scroll down this page of the city's public art plans to the section on the Seattle Department of Transportation. You can read that article, "Road Work," by Harriet Senie originally in Public Art Review in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue, on page 135 here of the Seattle design "toolkit."

All three parts of Mihalyo's Seattle toolkit make important reading for anyone interested in better transportation design through public art. Keep lobbying NCDOT and local elected officials if you think this effort is important. Rock art from City of Phoenix website.