The Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation is using a city bus to display new art. Painter Alex Brown is the first of four artists to have his work photographed then printed on a vinyl seal surrounding the bus. Brown says his paintings are comprised of aircraft and faces that are hard to make out at close range, but they become clearer from a distance.
“I was playing with the registry of things sort of slipping and being out of focus,” he says. “Kind of a varied combination of things that my eye was attracted to.”
Public Art Foundation director Jessica Rowe says this is an inexpensive way to exhibit new art.
“A temporary work gives you a lot of freedom to do something spontaneous, something exciting, something that’s happening in different places around the community and hundreds of thousands of people seeing it," she says.
Only one bus traveling various city routes is being used for this project. Works by four artists will be displayed at six-month intervals through 2016.
