Red Line Cars to be Made Rolling Art Exhibit

A nonprofit group in Cleveland plans to transform some transit cars of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority into a rolling museum of contemporary art.

LAND Studio is looking for artists who will create artworks that will be placed in the windows of 25 Red Line cars.

Each artist will receive $1,500 to create designs for artworks capable of being digitized and printed on vinyl.

Five Red Line cars with have works by five artists to match one of five literary passages taken from the work of a Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner.

The art placed on the five cars will be duplicated five times on Red Line cars thus presenting 25 responses to the five individual literary passages by five writers. Excerpts from the writings will also be displayed on the windows.

LAND is taking applications from artists through April 30. Applicants must submit portfolios of their work through an online portal or by contacting LAND Studio’s Joe Lanzilotta at info@land-studio.org with subject line: INTER|URBAN RFP.

The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award is administered by the Cleveland Foundation to “recognize books that contribute to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of diversity.”

The passages to be interpreted by the artists will be chosen from: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, by Langston Hughes; The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson; The Fortunes, by Peter Ho Davies; Far From the Tree, by Andrew Solomon; and The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, by Lillian Faderman.

The Cleveland Foundation is providing $185,000 for the project to place the art on the Red Line cars.

This is the second project involving LAND Studio and RTA. In 2016, painters and photographers produced a dozen large-scale indoor and outdoor murals that were placed along the Red Line.

Tags: Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, artists, Cleveland RTA, Cleveland RTA Red Line, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, LAND Studio, Public transportation, rapid transit cars, RTA, RTA Red Line