T4America Blog

News, press releases and other updates

Posts Tagged "arts and culture"

The Scenic Route is getting a makeover

Back in early 2016, we launched the Scenic Route website, a new interactive guide to help transportation professionals collaborate with artists and to introduce creative placemaking to transportation planners, public works agencies, and local elected officials. This guide was an important touchstone, but the evolutions in this field and the notable projects that have happened since its launch have left it in need of an update, which we’re pleased to announce is on the way.

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Looking back on Minnesota and Washington State DOTs’ inaugural artists-in-residence

Last week, we brought together the artists and agency staff involved in the nation’s first ever artists-in-residence at state departments of transportation to reflect on the inaugural year of the program. Speakers shared their reflections on the residencies, how they coped with the current pandemic, lessons learned, and plans for the future of these novel programs.

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Get to know Minnesota’s new Community Vitality Fellow Marcus Young

As announced earlier this week, Marcus Young, a behavioral artist, will be embedded within the Minnesota Department of Transportation for a year serving as an artist-in-residence in a program created by Smart Growth America. Marcus will be taking a fresh look at the agency’s goals to promote economic vitality, improve safety, support multimodal transportation systems, and create healthier communities.  

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Marcus Young to be Minnesota Department of Transportation’s first Community Vitality Fellow

Transportation for America and the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) are excited to announce MnDOT’s inaugural Community Vitality Fellow, Marcus Young. Young will be embedded within the agency for a year in its Saint Paul headquarters where he will serve as an artist-in-residence, taking a fresh look at the agency’s goals to promote economic vitality, improve safety, support multimodal transportation systems, and create healthier communities

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Washington State Department of Transportation announces the selection of two artists to serve in the country’s first statewide artist-in-residence program

With today’s announcement that Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome have been selected to serve as artists-in-residence with WSDOT for a year, Washington becomes the first state to embed an artist in a statewide agency.

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Get to know Washington state’s new artists-in-residence

We announced earlier today that Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome have been selected to serve as artists-in-residence with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) in a new fellowship program created by ArtPlace America and T4America, bringing a dose of creativity to the statewide transportation agency. Get to know this team of two artists with this brief Q&A.

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Minnesota Department of Transportation to host a Community Vitality Fellow to advance transportation goals

Minnesota Department of Transportation joins Smart Growth America’s artist-in-residence program, by hosting a Community Vitality Fellow to creatively meet the agency’s goals of promoting economic vitality, improving safety, supporting multimodal transportation systems and creating healthier communities.  

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Planning for a better future with arts and culture

Transportation for America is helping three communities across the country use arts & culture as a vehicle to shape local transportation investments. So what has been happening in Dothan, AL; Indianapolis, IN; and Los Angeles, CA over the last few months?

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Three communities selected to receive training to help improve transportation projects through arts & culture

Transportation for America is pleased to announce that Bozeman, Montana; Buffalo, New York; and Mariposa County, California have been selected to receive State of the Art Transportation Trainings. These three communities will each receive tailored technical assistance to equip them to utilize arts, culture and other creative approaches for solving specific transportation problems.

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Webinar recap on State of the Art Transportation Training

Catch up with our webinar on new creative placemaking technical assistance workshops This past Tuesday, Ben Stone, T4America’s Director of Arts & Culture, and Patricia Walsh, Americans for the Arts’ Public Art Program Manager, spoke about our upcoming State of the Art Transportation Training. During the webinar we discussed the opportunity for three communities in […]

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Join us for the only national conference about arts, culture and safer street design

Smart Growth America’s arts and culture team and National Complete Streets Coalition, now in partnership with the Urban Land Institute, invite you to the only national conference focused on the intersection of arts, culture, and building safer, complete streets.

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New creative placemaking technical assistance workshops available

T4America is eager to help communities better integrate artistic and cultural practices into the planning and construction of transportation projects, and is now offering free workshops to help three communities build their capacity to do so.

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Beautiful animations help illuminate the power of creative placemaking

Creative placemaking in transportation is an emerging, powerful way to integrate artists to deliver transportation projects more smoothly, improve safety, and build community support. But the practice can also be difficult to describe with words alone, so we commissioned an artist to illustrate the concepts visually.

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Catch up with the launch webinar for Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan

Catch up with the launch webinar for Arts, Culture and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan, our recently released national examination of creative placemaking in the transportation planning process. 

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Irrigate: Turning a huge Twin Cities construction project into an opportunity

Though the new Green Line light rail line would finally connect the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul with rail transit, business owners, local leaders, and advocates raised red flags about construction disrupting the corridor’s businesses as well as immigrant and communities of color. To mitigate the negative effects, Springboard for the Arts and other local organizations created a series of artistic interventions that did more than merely prevent painful disruptions; they helped the corridor thrive during a period of vulnerability.

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Engaging east Portland to plan a more inclusive bus rapid transit line

When roughly 14 miles of a bus rapid transit line was proposed along Division street in East Portland, the effort was greeted with interest in an often-neglected area of the city, but also concern about the possibilities of displacement and development disengaged from the unique local culture. To address those concerns, community members throughout the Jade and Division Midway districts were engaged through arts and culture projects to recalibrate the plan to better serve community needs.

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El Paso’s Transnational Trolley: How art can help imagine creative transportation solutions

What begun as a sort of arts-driven guerilla marketing campaign for the fictional return of a historic streetcar in the border communities of El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is becoming a reality, a demonstration of the power of art to capture the imagination of a community and help them look at old problems in different ways and imagine creative solutions.

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Celebrating a month of arts and culture in transportation

Throughout the rest of September, along with our parent organization Smart Growth America, we’ll be celebrating the positive, measurable impacts that arts and culture can have on transportation projects by sharing a handful of inspiring local stories, culminating with the release of a new examination of creative placemaking we produced with ArtPlace America at the end of this month.

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National brain trust gathers to strategize around arts, culture and transportation

Last month, a group of twenty four transportation officials, engineers, planners, artists, policymakers, and advocates from around the country gathered together in Indianapolis to sweat and scheme about how to use arts and culture to build support for more equitable transportation infrastructure.

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Announcing the winners of our three creative placemaking grants

Transportation for America is pleased to announce the selection of three communities to receive $50,000 creative placemaking grants through our Cultural Corridor Consortium program. Our three winners, from Dothan, AL, Los Angeles, CA, and Indianapolis, IN, all propose to apply artistic and cultural practice to shape transportation investments — positively transforming these places, building social capital, supporting local businesses, and celebrating communities’ unique characteristics.

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