'Fox and Muskie’ Public Art Manhole Covers

Pain Point

As a part of the downtown redevelopment initiative, Village leadership wanted public art installations, but the Village had no public art process in place, and more importantly, no funding earmarked for public art. Additionally, while some segments of the population were enthusiastic about public art, there was not a lot of support for spending tax dollars on it. My team did considerable research on other community’s public art programs and identified potential sources of funding, but they were either incredibly labor intensive and unrealistic given our staffing, or subject to the whims of developers in a community that valued investment dollars over Percent for Art models.

Solution

Before placing orders for a major construction project in our downtown, my Public Works Director mentioned the possibility of adding a Village logo to the manhole covers. When I started asking more questions, we realized that the covers had space for any kind of customization and were inspired by Japanese manhole cover art. Because the medium was constrained in dimensions and materials, it became a great first project for developing a call for artists and an art selection process.

Outcome

We had a custom mold developed based on the winning artist’s submission, with the minor cost of the mold rolled into the road reconstruction project, and a small honorarium paid to the artists from our Cultural Arts Commission’s existing annual budget. The total cost for the manholes, which now feature the piece ‘Fox and Muskie’ was approximately $2,000, and the manhole covers are now installed on streets designed to be shared with high pedestrian traffic. They can also be reproduced for any other applicable road projects in the community at no additional cost, and the project got a lot of local press coverage to help us build community support for investing in the arts. We now have a second piece of public art installed earlier this spring by a developer.