Utility box beautification
Taos MainStreet, LOR and others commission public art project
The street corners of Taos have gotten a little bit easier to look at recently, thanks to work by Taos MainStreet, the LOR Foundation and the Town of Taos to recruit artists to help redecorate the silver utility boxes that dot the county’s intersections.
A grant from New Mexico Clean and Beautiful (a division of the state tourism department) for $5,500 was matched by the Town of Taos to help kickstart the project. The money was first used to hire supervising artist Jackie Kolbenschlag, who worked with Taos MainStreet to put out a call for submissions.
“[Kolbenschlag] did a lot of networking with some of the local schools and their art programs, and we had some success with that,” explained Charles Whitson, executive director of Taos MainStreet.
“I really wanted to give a voice to the youth artists in the community and have them be proud of community art and see what they could accomplish,” Kolbenschlag said in a press release.
Due to complications of online schooling in 2021, Whitson said they didn’t get enough submissions from students alone. “We didn’t have quite enough for all 18 boxes that we were looking to cover, so after about one month of it being open exclusively to student artists, we just kind of opened up the rest of it to any artists of any age in the Taos community.”
LOR Foundation stepped up to provide an additional $100 spidend for artist submissions as an incentive. A $3,200 grant from the nonprofit also helped pay the artists for their work.
“[Taos MainStreet’s] ask of our foundation was to provide artists stipends to encourage youth artists to be able to participate in the utility box program,” said Sonya Struck, LOR Foundation’s Taos community officer. “We were really just trying to solve for these eyesores in the community with all the graffiti that they had. I guess it’s an assumption that’s made around public art — when there’s murals, people typically don’t tag on murals.”
The artists were given a theme of “New Mexico True,” Whitson explained. “They were asked to produce a piece of art that represents something that you believe is unique to New Mexico.”
The works of art were then taken to Acorn Graphics, where the art was printed on to wraps to go around the utility boxes. Now, instead of looking at graffiti or old posters, residents and tourists are met with colorful creations in 18 different areas throughout the county, 11 of which are student works.
“We can only hope that these types of public arts projects will continue to inspire those young artists to keep creating,” Whitson said.
Struck agreed: “Hopefully this utility box project is wayfinding into the art world, and inviting more creatives in Taos to come forward and do these types of projects.”