UrbanArt Commission
UAC’s piece ‘rise’ painted at Humes Preparatory Academy
Leaders in the art community, Memphis City Council staff, and city officials have been working, somewhat quietly, to streamline the rules and processes around public art here.
The city council voted in March to place a 120-day moratorium on art projects going up on public right-of-ways, and then re-approved that measure again last month.
The moratorium exempts projects funded by the city’s Percent-for-Art program, as well as certain ongoing projects by the Downtown Memphis Commission and the Memphis Medical District Collaborative.
It was first put in place after the council publicly criticized one organization’s murals. The council deemed a handful of murals sanctioned by the nonprofit Paint Memphis as offensive and, in some cases, “satanic.” Some of the less popular murals featured Elvis Presley with a snake coming from his orifices, a cow skull, a dancing skeleton, and a zombie.
After months of heated debate with Paint Memphis and a vote to remove six murals, the council approved the moratorium. The hold was originally implemented to establish a “road map” or legislation that regulates art in public spaces done by outside entities, chairman Berlin Boyd said at the time.
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Though the council has not been very vocal about their ongoing efforts and quickly reinstated the moratorium at a meeting last month without any discussion, since then, Boyd said the body and others have been working to improve legislation.
Included in the effort, Lauren Kennedy, executive director of the UrbanArt Commission (UAC), has been working with council staff, as well as Nick Oyler, manager of the city’s Bikeway and Pedestrian Program to improve the process of handling public requests for public art.
“The council isn’t trying to stop public art,” Kennedy said. “The goal is to sit back and assess the guidelines for public art on city-owned property. There are good intentions here and this will be useful down the road.”
The Bikeway and Pedestrian Program, which manages the city’s artistic crosswalk/intersection program, is one of many the city divisions that often gets public art requests. Kennedy said the program has strong guidelines in place for handling those requests.
The process, in part, consists of an entity requesting to install an artistic crosswalk/intersection, submitting a design for review, and fulfilling a number of requirements to ensure public safety and proper maintenance associated with the project, Oyler said.
“Perhaps one reason that the program could be described as working is that we have a written guidelines and policy document for the program,” Oyler said. “This sets standards and expectations for everyone involved – the artist, sponsoring entity, and city staff.”
The idea is to develop those guidelines to be applied across different city divisions, Kennedy said.
The new guidelines will lay out the how the city should respond to public art requests, as well as ensure there are opportunities for design review processes to “make sure some of the things that happened in the past don’t come up again,” Kennedy said.
“We want to find a solution to address concerns of the council and administration, but also trying to make sure that the process put in place is friendly enough for people to navigate and doesn’t create too many barriers,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said the goal is to have the guidelines completed before the current moratorium ends in March 2019.
