Client

Overview

Medium: Wool Dimensions: 6\' x 54\' .125\" Representing the first permanent art project for a Metro vehicle/bus, the seat fabric installed in the Articulated and 45

Goals

In the Demonstation Art Program for the Metro Rapid Bus, Beep’Inc. (artist Pae White and architect Tom Marble) drew from the serial nature of bus travel to tell a story. First we surveyed the tickets for symbols contained therein that intrigued us, then we created a story dividing it into 47 scenes corresponding to the number of bus stops, and assigned a symbol taken from the historic tickets to each stop. We then transformed the 47 scenes into vignettes, tales of each stop that link together to form the larger narrative.

The vignettes were realized in two places: in the fabric of the bus seats using abstracted symbols from selected vignettes; and in the advertising car-cards within the buses where each vignette and corresponding symbol came together to create a serial story.

The demonstration art program was completed in 2003. The seat fabric gained a second life, filling hundreds of LACMTA Metro Rapid and Local buses to this day.