Chapel Hill is home to a variety of colorful, creative displays of art that adorn many of the Town’s public spaces. From bus shelters to storm drains and community centers, Chapel Hill’s commitment to art through the immersive pieces commissioned and installed this past year is evident.
One bus shelter, located on East Franklin Street at Couch Road, was transformed into Chapel Hill’s own starry night by Rashmi Krishnappa, an art illustrator from Cary. Krishnappa’s work “Under the Stars” reinterprets Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting “The Starry Night” by featuring iconic Chapel Hill landmarks such as the Old Well and Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower with a patterned design. Krishnappa hand-drew her design using markers, sharpies and paint, creating two panels that she digitally scanned and submitted for the Town of Chapel Hill to install.
Krishnappa believes that the Town of Chapel Hill’s art installation projects fulfill more than one goal, as they encourage people to use the Town’s public transportation, support artists from North Carolina and support art itself, she said.
“I think it gets the artist a lot of exposure, but it also gives art itself a lot of exposure,” Krishnappa said. “And it brings together people from other places within North Carolina, like myself. I mean, even though this is Chapel Hill doing it, it's still bringing in other parts of North Carolina together to create art for Chapel Hill.”
Another installation from the past year brought a colorful, whimsical work by international muralist Buffy Taylor to Chapel Hill for the Town’s Storm Drain Murals project. The Community Arts and Culture division selected Taylor for her artistic interpretation of the project’s larger mission, to educate Chapel Hill residents about the Town’s water system and pollution to waterways. The project started in 2022 as a collaboration between Community Arts and Culture and Stormwater Management.
Located at the Eubanks Park and Ride bus stop, Taylor painted a vibrant mural of flowers, animals and water cascading around, and down into, a storm drain leading to Old Field Creek. The title of the mural, “help flowers blossom, not algae bloom,” reflects Taylor’s goal of communicating the importance of storm drains in environmental protection.
“It's not just the flowers and the flora and the fauna, it's also other living creatures that survive and feed off of the water that comes through that river,” Taylor said. “And so that's what I wanted for the circular and cyclical nature.”
As a muralist, Taylor said that art has the unique ability to resonate with people and start important conversations. While painting the mural, she said many people stopped by to ask questions about the project and expressed that the issue and purpose behind the artwork was important to them.
Artwork centered around water quality is also an important endeavor to artist JR Butler, who created his mural “Watershed” at the Hargraves Community Center earlier this year. Butler’s work was also part of the Storm Water Murals project. For his piece, he painted a creek above and around a storm drain, showing directly how water moves from drains to waterways.
