Following the October unveiling of a mural installation in the Clinch Park tunnel – the largest public art project in the four-year history of the Traverse City Arts Commission – commissioners are gearing up for more major art projects and events across Traverse City in 2020. Those include a live pitch night for local artists to compete for funding in March, a new Hull Park sculptural mural, and art installations along the Boardman Lake Trail. Arts Commission staff and board members say it’s a crucial time for the growing organization, with an increased focus this coming year on public outreach, engaging local artists, and raising more funds for projects.

Traverse City commissioners Monday will be asked to approve the Arts Commission’s proposed 2020 Pitch Night, a one-night event scheduled to take place March 5 at The Workshop Brewing Company in downtown Traverse City. Starting in January, artists exclusively from Antrim, Benzie, Grand Traverse, and Leelanau counties will be invited to submit proposals for two or three-dimensional art installations. The Arts Commission’s selection panel will narrow the field down to five finalists, who will each have five minutes and five visual slides to share their projects with a live audience at Pitch Night. The audience will vote to pick the winner, who will be awarded $1,000 and given a public space to install their artwork in the park near the Sara Hardy Downtown Farmers Market.

“The project is temporary in nature, but we won’t know the duration (the artwork will be up) until we get the submissions,” says Marketing and Communications Director Colleen Paveglio of the Traverse City Downtown Development Authority (DDA), which provides staff support to the Arts Commission. “Somebody could pitch a mural to go on the side of the bird house, and that might last longer versus a project that’s made out of paper.”

Paveglio says the Arts Commission hopes to have the artwork installed by the first Friday in May, since the first Downtown Art Walk of the season takes place that day and the farmers market kicks off the next day. “One of the reasons we like that space is it has a lot of pedestrian traffic…it’s a great way to create exposure for the project,” says Paveglio.

The Arts Commission made an intentional decision to limit the competition to local artists. “The Arts Commission is a very young organization, and they’ve done a few projects now where not everyone has been local,” says Paveglio. Though projects like the Clinch Park tunnel mural and the memorial sculpture for former DDA leader Bryan Crough at Lay Park were open to local artist submissions, artists from outside the area – including Colorado and New York – were ultimately selected for those projects. National and international artists will still likely be featured in future Arts Commission projects, but Paveglio says the board also wants to focus on engaging more local artists, some of whom have complained they haven’t been aware of opportunities to apply for projects.

“We’re at a pivotal point where we need to engage with the community and with local artists,” says Paveglio. “If we’re going to foster a robust public arts program, we need the public to engage with us. Pitch Night does just that.”

Public art projects are also slated to come to other areas of the city in 2020, including a planned partnership with Up North Pride in downtown Traverse City in June (details are still being finalized) and several art installations in the Boardman Lake Trail area. Petoskey artist Daniel Roache was selected to create a sculptural mural that will be affixed to the outside south-facing wall of the Traverse Area Community Sailing boathouse, called the Gordon and Jean Cornwell Sailing Center, in Hull Park. The piece was commissioned by an anonymous donor to honor a deceased sibling who loved sailing, with the donor covering the majority of project costs. Paveglio says Roache finished the piece this month, but the Arts Commission will wait until May to install it and hold a dedication ceremony.

The Arts Commission and TART Trails plan to collaborate to bring more art installations to the Boardman Lake Trail to coincide with the planned completion of the trail loop in 2020. The organizations already partnered this year with the Michigan Legacy Art Park to install four sculptures by Detroit artist Robert Sestok on the trail at the bottom of the hill at the end of Tenth Street near Oryana Community Co-Op. TART Trails has committed another $20,000 – with a $10,000 match from the city’s Public Art Trust Fund – to place more art at locations that could include the Sixteenth Street trailhead and the top of the hill at the Tenth Street trailhead. While the Sestok sculptures are envisioned to be a rotating exhibition, the other pieces would be permanent and created through a public call for artist proposals. Paveglio notes that city funds can only be spent on the city side of the Boardman Lake Trail loop, so installations wouldn’t reach the southern end of the loop, which falls in Garfield Township. Art is expected to fall into themes including “history,” “education, “ecology,” and “economy.”

That project still requires approval from Traverse City commissioners, who must give conceptual sign-off to the cost and location of public art projects. Final authority for other project details, meanwhile – including artist selection – remains with the Arts Commission. City commissioners also decide how much funding to allocate to the Public Art Trust Fund in the city’s budget each June. Paveglio says the fund will likely be around $40,000-$50,000 at the end of this fiscal year, with $15,000-$20,000 allocated for an ongoing maintenance fund. “Every public art project in the city is now the Arts Commission’s responsibility to fix, so I want to make sure for every project, we’re identifying five to ten percent of project costs to go into the maintenance fund,” she says.

While the Arts Commission is hopeful city commissioners will continue to make a “healthy appropriation” to the Public Art Trust Fund annually, the board is also looking at other sustainable long-term funding sources. Those include more grant opportunities, donations from individuals and community partners (such as TART), and potential public fundraising campaigns for projects. Arts Commission Chair Debbie Hershey says generating more revenue, updating the board’s master plan, and streamlining processes for artists to propose projects – as well as property owners to offer space to host art – are all priorities going forward.

“One thing that would also be beneficial is for us as commissioners to come up with a project we want,” says Hershey, noting that all of the Arts Commission projects to date were either proposed prior to the group’s forming or have been driven by outside parties. “It’s time for us to come up with a project we feel is important for Traverse City. I think that’s the next thing for us to think about.”