Commuting on the east side of Lake Washington, you can see a ghost of the future. Sound Transit is running test trains, unpeopled, on what will (eventually) be a connected system of light rail joining Seattle to Bellevue and Redmond, north to Everett and south to Dupont. Being able to access more of Seattle’s surrounding cities will be a boon in many ways, including culturally. With each opening of a new station, the public embarks on a new long-term relationship with a work of public art. And considering the latest numbers, in the third quarter of 2023 ridership was nearly 85 thousand per day, this is one of the most consistent ways the public has contact with art.

Barbara Luecke, the Deputy Director of Public Art for Sound Transit, STart, says that some of these projects have been in the works for nearly a decade. “We want to get artists involved as early as possible,” she says. The level of design, engineering, and planning that go into the creation of a public art piece that can withstand the environmental specifics of existing in a heavily trafficked station is exceedingly complex. The nature of art itself, to strive for innovation, means that these projects are something akin to re-inventing the wheel as it’s already rolling down the road. “We keep needing to top ourselves,” Luecke says. This level of commitment to a single project is something that only highly experienced artists with lengthy resumes can accomplish, but Sound Transit is finding ways of bringing emerging artists into the visual dialogue through contracts that assume some of the fabrication and installation while allowing the artists to focus solely on design. 

“We’ve been taking on more fabrication and installation,” Luecke says, “For example…in downtown Redmond we worked with city staff. We often join cities in their dreaming and scheming,” she says. The “dream” in Redmond is to showcase a range of artistic styles and voices that can speak to a worldly audience. “People come from all over the world to work in their tech companies,” Luecke says. Rather than a single artist or a small group of artists to make a mark on the station, the Redmond station will be visually transformed using one of public art’s oldest and most reliable mediums-mosaic. Selected artists submitted designs to be “translate[d] into mosaic” at the scale of 6 x 12 feet. Sound Transit has paired with Tieton Mosaic in the production of a total of 27 glass mosaics designed by artists for the project. The benefit rebounds to the artist both financially, and as a line on their burgeoning c.v.’s; a necessity when applying to future opportunities. But it also helps to spread public dollars across the region to craftspeople like those who construct the porcelain enamel artworks in Tieton. Luecke says, “We know that we play a vital role in nurturing the artists in the region. We try to grow artists and ancillary jobs.”

Federal money provides funding for the overriding agency, but the artworks are funded locally, using a common model of 1% for civic construction projects. Luecke has been with the art program since projects along the MLK corridor were in their design phase, in 2006. Artworks like Nori Sato’s Pride, a grouping of eight lions in bronze, stone, and brick, located at the Columbia City station, become part of the everyday lives of passerby, a moment of delight or discovery, or at the very least, a visual marker to confirm you’re not lost.  

As we saw in early 2023 with the much-remarked-upon unveiling of Embrace, a monumental sculpture in Boston by Hank Willis Thomas, reactions to new public art can be swift and forceful. But the true impact of public art unfolds over years. For the moment, the trains are still empty, and the as-yet-unveiled artworks have not begun to work their slow magic on the eyes. 

So, for now, STart is pairing with 4Culture, helping to support their “poetry in public project.” They host a space in south Seattle called the Roadhouse, which hosted its first event in October, and continues to serve as a community space for performance events. “It’s an experiment in bringing people together around performance art,” Luecke says. Whether the work is ephemeral or designed to withstand the whoosh of trains through a tunnel, the goal is to find out “what artistic thinking can bring to a new place,” Luecke says. It’s about, “helping people feel like a place is theirs.”