Traffic signal box art - the new street art

LINK - On Traffic Signal Boxes


Photo credit - Douglas Healey for The New York Times
A traffic-signal box in a park in Stamford seems to echo its surroundings. Local artists have been painting the metal boxes.



First page of the article here -
see link above for the second page.

On Traffic-Signal Boxes, Art That Stops Traffic
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN
Published: November 25, 2006

STAMFORD, Conn., Nov. 24 ?- A blown-up version of the green-and-yellow crayon box familiar from childhood sits by the Boys and Girls Club. Down the road is a white takeout carton that could feed the Chinese Army. The box outside the firehouse on Washington Boulevard appears to be aflame. And there is a half-painted picket fence on Palmers Hill Road, the brush hovering in midair as if Tom Sawyer himself had momentarily stepped away, with a sign warning, "wet paint."

What began four years ago as a tiny, grass-roots experiment to beautify the unsightly boxes that control traffic signals around town has become an unexpectedly impressive public art collection, with head-turning installations cropping up constantly to transform drab streetscapes into outdoor galleries.

About 50 of the city's 190 boxes, once covered with graffiti, are now suitable for framing.

"They appear overnight," said Renée Kahn, a local preservationist and a fan. "One weekend you drive by and there's nothing, and the next weekend it's suddenly there."

When civic boosters first asked local artists to paint the boxes, the results often looked like shrubs or faux stone walls. But the artists grew bolder and began to riff on Stamford's pastimes and passions as more neighborhood groups began to commission the boxes, which are usually 58 inches tall, 44 inches wide and 27 inches deep.

Thus, bag-laden shoppers were soon spotted at a shopping center, knicker-clad golfers teed off near the links, and a pigtailed girl scribbled on a chalkboard filled with equations outside an elementary school.

Two must-sees, resembling Pop Art at its wackiest, popped up in recent weeks. They give anyone stuck in traffic along Broad Street much to look at ?- too much, perhaps, if traffic suddenly starts moving. That crayon box, with the legend "Crazola," holds an assortment of "X-tra Big" crayons. And the fine print on the oversize takeout carton, paying homage to a nearby Chinese restaurant, says, "No msg."

"They make you smile," said Sandy Goldstein, who as head of a downtown business group enlisted artists to decorate a dozen boxes in and around the central business district.

Most of the boxes in Ms. Goldstein's collection, which received an award last year from the International Downtown Association, were the work of Zora Janosova, a former set designer for the Palace Theater. Ms. Janosova carried an oxygen tank with her as she scrambled to complete several boxes around town before her death last year from breast cancer at age 33.

On one she left behind near Curley's Diner, a cow tumbles mysteriously from the sky, and on another, over by the Palace Theater, silhouetted heads ring the bottom, giving the audience on the street a figurative glimpse of the audience inside.

There is a range of motifs and styles on display around town. Springdale, a residential neighborhood in the northeast part of town, is dominated by Anne Salthouse's subdued pastoral scenes. Hubbard Heights, a neighborhood of older homes, looks as if Andy Warhol or Claes Oldenburg moved in.

The Hubbard Heights Garden Club fell in love with the idea of commissioning boxes to beautify the streets because, as one 87-year-old member explained, she and the others were getting to the age where they were "a little beyond digging."

The club hired Liz Squillace, 29, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who lives in Greenwich, to do 20 boxes. Among her works are the crayons, the Chinese takeout, the flames outside the firehouse, and another on Washington Boulevard that looks like a carton whose contents are spilling out. Stamped on the outside are warnings like "handle with care."

Looking back, civic boosters say they never set out to create public art on a grand scale. But in wrestling with what to do with the large boxes that had become graffiti magnets, they knew that hiding them was not possible.

Joseph Andrews, Stamford's traffic signal supervisor, said that special turning lanes and signal synchronization had made suburban traffic boxes more complex; the electronics need to be above ground, he said, for ventilation and other reasons. In New York and other cities, Mr. Andrews said, signal boxes are usually smaller and hang on poles, while the newfangled ones here in Stamford are equipped with sensors that count the cars and adjust accordingly.