8H Consent 2015 0302 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

File Number: 15-065 City staff, community arts leaders, and others and presented preliminary recommendations on the selection and development process to the San Leandro City Council in December 2012. The Artistic Enhancement Consultant Team in consultation with AC Transit made several recommendations to ensure artistic treatment throughout all stations on the BRT Corridor - a limited artistic treatment for each standard station and a greater artistic treatment for enhanced stations. The choice of enhanced stations was based on a variety of factors including anticipated ridership levels, linkages to important destinations and proximity to proposed development. AC Transit followed a comprehensive and inclusive process to design artistically enhanced BRT stations. AC Transit issued an RFQ for Lead Artist or team and an RFQ for Supporting Artist in October, 2013. A BRT Artist Team was selected following a national search. Representatives from San Leandro served on the advisory committee to recommend the semifinalists, and also on the Artist Selection Panel to recommend a finalist to the AC Transit Board, which approved the recommendation in April 2014. The team is comprised of four nationally distinguished and experienced public artists: Johanna Poethig, Mildred Howard, Joyce Hsu and Peter Richards. The team visited neighborhoods, businesses, and community centers along the Corridor and documented its findings through photos, research, mapping exercises, and text descriptions. In Summer 2014, AC Transit invited the community to meet the Artist Team to learn about their previous experience as public artists who work with communities on large-scale and complex projects. The Artist Team also engaged the communities along the BRT corridor in interactive sessions. A community meeting was held at San Leandro City Hall. Residents, merchants, and transit riders viewed a visual presentation of the artists' work followed by an interactive mapping exercise during which participants completed questionnaires about the community. From these sessions, along with library and other research, the Artist Team gleaned valuable knowledge about the distinctive physical and social community patterns associated with the neighborhoods along the corridor. In addition, Youth Focus Workshops with young people ages 15-22 were held with one of these meetings occurring in San Leandro in partnership with the San Leandro Main Library. The youth were excited to learn about the new BRT and to play a role in helping the Artist Team learn more about the community from their perspective and to evolve the artistic concept. Together the community meetings and Youth Focus Groups and the input from the stakeholders (City of Oakland and City of San Leandro) served to guide and inspire the development of the Artist Team's refined artistic enhancement approach. A Corridor-Wide Approach was used to integrate the artistic enhancements for each station with the station architecture and to create a transit corridor for thousands of people to "flow" along on one of the longest continuous streets in the Bay Area. The overall theme for artistic enhancement is Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow, establishing multiple points of connection and ways in which transit riders and the public can relate to the BRT Corridor as they move through the surrounding neighborhoods. From this overall theme evolved the concept of utilizing four overlapping artistic elements that, when combined, reflect the overall Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow theme, distinguish clusters of stations through a neighborhood theme, and identify each platform as unique in the sequence of stations. The four artistic design elements are: color, icon (historic or contemporary), a "ribbon of text" and a flow line (the Page 2 City of San Leandro Printed on 2/24/2015