City’s first artist-in-residence is shadowing workers.
Call her the artist charged with helping out the biologists and engineers.
Rehab El Sadek, Austin’s first city artist-in-residence, stood at the front of a boat cruising Lady Bird Lake on a recent Tuesday, listening to an enthusiastic stream of information from stormwater superintendent William Fordyce. There are 10,000 water quality facilities and flood control features in the city. Floods are increasing. Crews work seven days a week cleaning trash from the lakes and shorelines.
El Sadek listened intently, nodded occasionally and fixed her camera lens on water features and people. She’s in her first weeks of what will be a nine-month tenure embedded in the Watershed Protection Department, which deals with flood control, erosion and pollution. Her role there hasn’t been fully formed yet, but to her, it’s something of a visual translator.
“Everybody has hopes I’m going to be like a mirror to reflect what they do and be the link between the watershed and the public,” she said.
Cities including New York, Boston and Los Angeles have such artists, but Austin officials say El Sadek might be the first in Texas. Often they create public art. A project is likely to come out of El Sadek’s stint, be it artwork or some nontraditional public engagement. But Austin officials have made it clear they want this role to be more than that; they want El Sadek to be charged with problem-solving in the department.
“The role is really, generally going to be an artist who can solve any problems, to look at the process and give input to the department,” said Meghan Wells, the city’s Cultural Arts Division manager. “The artist is bridging that gap with a creative lens.”
So far, El Sadek has followed the crew answering 311 calls, watched footage from employees who send video cameras into city pipes, explored Waller Creek, scrutinized maps of stormwater systems up for inspection and learned the difference between rain gardens and wet ponds.
In her first week, El Sadek was shadowing a city biologist when she got too excited looking at a rare flower on a slippery slope, lost her footing and ended up in the emergency room with a dis-