Transportation Artists-in-Residence

Generating creative solutions to entrenched transportation problems

Posted: 25 March 2025

Subject: Transport/travel, Library of Creative Sustainability, Placemaking, Climate justice

Artists were placed on residencies in Departments of Transportation in two US states with the aim of generating creative solutions for entrenched transportation problems. These were the USA’s first artist residencies to occur at state departments of transportation and at any agency at the state level.

‘This kind of work is really relational, necessitating a lot of listening and grappling with the complex layers of what makes up a community in order to identify invisible barriers.’
Mary Welcome and Kelly Gregory, artists

Visit the project’s web page

Project description

Transportation Artists-in-Residence (TAIR) refers to a series of artist placements within the Washington and Minnesota State Departments of Transportation in the USA. The idea for the artist-in-residence scheme came from the Arts, Culture, and Transportation: A Creative Placemaking Field Scan report, produced by Transportation for America with ArtPlace America in 2017. The report identified state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) as a promising but untested venue for artistic intervention that could build on the more local examples the report covered. The idea was that by involving artists deeply within the work of these departments, they could help find innovative ways of working and solutions to entrenched problems.

Ben Stone, then Director of Arts and Culture at Smart Growth America (SGA), approached the commissioners of transportation departments with the idea for a pilot artist-in-residence programme, showing evidence from what similar past projects had achieved and links with the departments’ current priorities. The intent was to bring a creative approach to advancing shared goals of ‘improving safety, reducing congestion, promoting economic vitality, supporting multimodal transportation systems, and creating healthier communities’. While the project was not originally focused explicitly on sustainable travel, the organisers recognised this as a key issue and sustainability started to become a focus as the programme developed.

The DOTs acted as host organisations for the artists, while Smart Growth America and Transportation for America served as administrators of the funding and the overall programme, including providing staff and consulting assistance to the artists and the host agencies, which lacked existing experience in how to work with artists. Artists were recruited through an open call published on the SGA website and promoted via the transportation agencies. Once in post, the artists worked under contract to SGA but were embedded within the DOT. The idea was that SGA would run the call for artists and administer the partner and artist contracts as part of a three-year pilot after which the DOT would be responsible for future recruitment and management.

‘Culture change doesn’t happen overnight, and new processes and practices that shift culture must be given time, space, safety and resources – funding, support staff, and leadership commitment – to breathe, take root, and grow.’
Marian Liou, Director of Arts and Culture, Smart Growth America

Washington State Department of Transportation Artist Residency

In Washington, artists Mary Welcome and Kelly Gregory were recruited through an open call in January 2019 to work together on a year-long residency, which was subsequently extended. Gregory and Welcome began their residency without a specific project in mind. The aim was that they would develop ideas through their process of research and in discussion with colleagues at Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT).

The residency started with a series of rotations through WSDOT’s core divisions and regional offices to learn as much as possible about the inner workings of the organisation, including reading reports, interviewing over a hundred people, travelling along the transport infrastructure maintained by WSDOT and attending public hearings. Welcome and Gregory recorded 770 hours of work on this research, with the majority taking place on site. They used this research to identify key themes to focus on for the rest of the residency, but it was also about simply getting to know members of staff and ensuring they felt heard.

When this research period ended, Gregory and Welcome converted two empty offices in WSDOT’s headquarters building into a gallery and creative space filled with photographs they had taken during their rotations as well as anonymous quotes from staff members. The artists ran sessions with staff in this space to brainstorm new project ideas. By naming the rooms a creative space, the artists aimed to help staff members connect with their own creativity and find different ways of thinking through everyday issues.

‘But like people really loved just even meeting with them and having really insightful questions asked of them. And you know what it made them feel. You know, as public servants, we don’t always get made to feel like our work matters…And so I think just having these artists come in with really great questions and really digging in and showing interest in their work, people loved it.’
Anonymous WSDOT member of staff

An office space with a small table and two chairs. Behind, small photographs are taped to the walls.

Gregory and Welcome also produced creative outputs in response to issues that had come up during the research period and would help advance WSDOT’s work. These included:

The DOT Deck: a pack of cards with each card featuring a quote from an anonymous WSDOT staff member, intended to be used as a starting point for a conversation, brainstorming or icebreakers at meetings. This responded to a need expressed by staff members to find different ways of thinking and talking through transport-related issues, like getting people out of cars and into public transport.
A campaign of bumper stickers with slogans like ‘Ride the Damn Bus!’ and ‘Maintenance is Sexy’: These stickers were distributed across the agency and served as another icebreaker for Gregory and Welcome to meet more staff members. The stickers were popular and helped to demonstrate an understanding of overlooked issues. ‘Maintenance is Sexy’ was the most popular sticker, pointing to the underappreciated role of the organisation in simply maintaining existing infrastructure compared to the ‘sexier’ work of creating something new. Arguably, maintenance serves a more important role for most people.
The Maintenance Post: This publication was distributed across the state and sought to humanise the often-invisible work of maintenance, which will be complicated by climate change impacts like heatwaves and flooding.

‘The job of maintaining transportation infrastructure, keeping people safe, and keeping goods moving 24 hours a day and 365 days of the year is no small feat. If everything is working well, nobody notices! The Maintenance Post humanizes the people-powered practice of stewarding our shared transportation network.’
Gregory and Welcome, artists

Although originally planned as a one-year residency, the placement was extended multiple times, with a further three years of activity partially funded by WSDOT. This came about through a mixture of growing understanding of the value of the artists’ role and the lack of time within the COVID-19 pandemic to get the full value out of the residency.

‘People felt heard. They felt understood. And they felt valued. If I could do anything differently, it would have been to set up a two-year program.’
Allison Camden, Deputy Assistant Secretary Multimodal Development and Delivery, WSDOT

Cards from the DOT Deck and some of the bumper stickers
The Maintenance Post

Minnesota Department of Transportation Artists-in-Residence

In Minnesota, two consecutive artist residencies were run as a pilot with two different artists focusing on distinctive areas of work.

Behavioural artist, Marcus Young (楊墨) was recruited as Community Vitality Fellow at Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) in 2019, just a month after Gregory and Welcome in Washington. He started his residency by listening to staff and their priorities, which demonstrated their own creative potential and a feeling that this was being underused. As a result of these conversations, Young focused on providing space for staff to be creative and gather together in new ways, allowing them to bring more humanity to their work on a new Statewide Multimodal Transportation Plan.

Young ran a series of ‘Creative Conversations’ with staff on topics ranging from equity to land acknowledgment to sustainability. He also hosted a 90-minute session entitled ‘I Dream of Wild…’ with MnDOT personnel during the Annual Managers’ Workshop, encouraging participants to ‘dream of wild’ goals for the plan and their future work. The session aimed to create collective visions for the future of transport in Minnesota, create opportunities for people to share vulnerabilities and listen to contrasting perspectives without conflict.

Like Gregory and Welcome, he repurposed a conference room as a temporary ‘Land Acknowledgment Confluence Room’, that aimed to provide a different environment for staff to gather, be creative and explore practices of land acknowledgment. Land acknowledgment refers to the practice of recognising indigenous land that American settlers colonised. Bringing this to the fore helped to emphasise the ways that transport and infrastructure projects are entangled with social, cultural and ethical issues that need to be understood and addressed. The room was originally proposed as a reversable installation, but its popularity meant it became a semi-permanent fixture, having been in place for over two years at the time of writing.

Young also sought to make better use of expertise from outside the organisation and hosted visioning sessions with a group of community members, which he called the ‘Council of Old and New Wisdom’. The idea was to gather a group whose stories, history and heritage are linked to the land and who therefore have lived experience that can help improve transportation planning.

Illustration of two people holding hands. A river and highway flow from the woman's heart.

‘If you create a space where we can gather and really work on things together, [you realise] that the potential of art is hidden not only everywhere, but within everyone.’
Marcus Young, Artist in residence, MnDOT

Following Young’s residency, Sarah Petersen was recruited in 2021 as Sustainability and Public Health Fellow, with a more explicit focus on environmental sustainability in the transport system. Petersen ran interactive ‘Tell Us How You Move Around’ workshops with external stakeholders about how to reduce car usage. These included creative methods like a ‘Move Around Map’ game, which provided a fun way to understand why people make certain transport choices and the barriers that constrain them. An activity producing personalised ‘safety attire’ that people might wear for certain daily activities allowed for deep discussions around the importance of safety in travel choices.

The workshops led to the creation of a ‘Tell Us How You Move Around’ kit that allows members of MnDOT staff to use similar methods at future public engagement work. Petersen used the themes that came up during the workshops to develop a ‘What If You Could’ poster campaign, designed by Noah Lawrence-Holder, which sought to highlight the co-benefits of sustainable travel choices for personal wellbeing.

The residencies have led to long-term change in the organisation with funding secured to hire artists through a subcontractor for three specific projects around public health, maintenance and electrification equity in the coming years.

‘The projects I was doing were iterative and meant to build on each other and were just fundamentally going to take more time. So, I think that was a good learning experience for everybody, to learn how to make room for those sorts of iterative processes.’
Sarah Petersen, artist

Sustainability issues

New ways to tackle issues: Practices employed by the artists helped to develop new methods of working for the organisations. Using creative approaches generated new ideas and strategies, and artist-run events and spaces allowed for conversation between different fields that improved understanding of work going on throughout the departments.

Relationship building: Artist activities helped to develop better relationships between community members and transportation departments, using creative methods to support communication channels that the departments could continue to build on after the residencies. Artists established new networks like the ‘Council of Old and New Wisdom’ that could continue providing alternative sources of information and provide a model for future initiatives.

Getting community input: Artist-run games and activities provided effective methods for members of the public to inform planning on issues including sustainable transport and reducing car use, and collecting viewpoints in open and non-intrusive ways. This allowed for plans to more closely respond to concerns raised by residents and ensures that these plans are developed in ways that improve fairness and equity. Getting members of the public to participate in more traditional ways of gathering information such as surveys can be difficult.

Effective communication: Learnings from artist workshops actively fed into new initiatives like the ‘Maintenance Post’ and ‘What If You Could’ poster campaign, which improved public understanding of work that the organisations were doing and encouraged behavioural change to more sustainable practices.

‘I believe everyone has the capacity to be a creative thinker, with their own realms of expertise and the capacity to produce novel and necessary solutions to the problems they encounter, and I really enjoy learning and co-creating with others for this reason: when people are validated for naming problems and have the agency to create solutions, unexpected and profoundly good outcomes can result.’
Sarah Petersen, artist

Lessons, tips and advice

Organisers stressed that it is not possible to take this exact approach and apply it to any transportation department. Every institution is different and an effective residency should be designed to respond to the specific needs of the context the artist will be working in.
The majority of the initial WSDOT and MnDOT residencies took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which drastically altered initial plans for engagement both within the agencies and with communities. Artists had to be flexible and radically change their plans in response to the circumstances.
Work on the project could be lonely for artists given that they were trying to do something different within the organisation and were the only person in the role at any one time. CAIR Lab suggested that developing a network of people doing similar work across the country would help combat isolation.
It was important for artists to be seen as proper members of DOT staff. Small steps like providing them with an internal email address made a difference. Once artists were perceived as ‘internal’ to the organisation by members of staff, more open conversations became possible.
Artists had to create a balance between being innovative enough in their work that existing staff clearly couldn’t have done it themselves, versus being so radical that the department would not be able to learn from the experience. This required careful research by artists to understand the full context they were working within.
Although artists and DOT staff recognised the value of the collaboration, it could be difficult to find appropriate evaluation methods to measure the full impact. Often, time for evaluating and communicating the work was limited, given competing priorities for staff.
To provide the stability required to embark on exploratory and experimental projects, it was important to clearly define the programme goals and roles for the artist and members of the staff from the start, and plan time for meetings and communication. Artists could sometimes be pigeonholed as ‘consultants’ who were there to tackle a particular problem, but their role was intended to be more open-ended and wide-ranging than that.
The organisers found that one year felt too short for these projects to fully deliver on their potential. It took time to develop trusted relationships between artists and DOT staff. Residencies tended to be funded by philanthropic organisations that granted money for year-long periods, so planning for the long-term means identifying more internal funding sources that could have greater longevity.

‘It became apparent that each residency developed in an organic way unique to the alchemies and energies among artist, administrator, agency, and intermediary.’
Marian Liou, Director of Arts and Culture Smart Growth America

Partners and stakeholders

Smart Growth America (SGA) is a non-profit organisation that helps create healthy, prosperous and resilient places for all people to live using research, advocacy and direct community support. Their areas of work include housing and land use, transportation and economic development. They instigated the concept for the residency, ran artist callouts and supported the participants throughout.
Transportation for America (T4A), a programme of Smart Growth America, is an organisation made up of local, regional and state leaders, which advocates for improved safety, affordability and convenience across the transportation system.
Minnesota and Washington State Departments of Transportation (MnDOT and WSDOT) are state level government departments responsible for maintaining and building transportation infrastructure and developing long-term transport strategy. They acted as the host organisations for the artist residencies and their members of staff were directly involved.
Kelly Gregory and Mary Welcome were artists in residence at WSDOT from 2019 to 2023 and applied for the role as a team. Welcome is a multidisciplinary cultural worker with a focus on working with under-represented rural communities, community engagement and addressing hyper-local issues of equity, cultural advocacy, inclusivity, visibility and imagination. Gregory is an architect focused on socially engaged work, collaboration and engagement.
Behavioural artist Marcus Young was Community Vitality Fellow from 2020-2022 at Minnesota Department of Transportation. Young makes participatory work at the intersection of art and social movement and brought previous experience as City Artist in City of St. Paul’s Public Works Department.
Artist, educator and organiser Sarah Petersen was Sustainability and Public Health Fellow from 2022-23 at MnDOT. Petersen brought experience as an artist through installation, performance and text-based work, alongside experience in sustainability roles for environmental education and advocacy organisations.
Cross-sector Artists in Residence Lab (CAIR Lab) is a non-profit organisation that collaborates with government staff, artists and communities to create artistically designed civic engagement tools. They specialise in building artist residencies in government programmes and were commissioned to write the report on the TAIR residencies.

‘I’m particularly interested in helping break down knowledge and communication barriers between different members of these systems. Analysing and integrating understandings across silos and divides, levelling power dynamics, increasing transparency and helping people to build trusting, ongoing relationships to strategize together and support transformational change.’
Sarah Petersen, artist

Funding

Transportation Artists in Residence was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kresge Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and ArtPlace America. Funding for the programme was administered by Transportation for America.

For the initial round of artist residencies ArtPlace America provided a $125,000 grant for the programme, including a $40,000 stipend split between the two artists to cover a 20-hour-per-week commitment over a year and $25,000 for a final project the artists and staff develop. For the second residency with Sarah Petersen there was $15,000 for a final project. Smart Growth America funded about $5,000 of the programme. Minnesota Department of Transportation provided some funding for their own residency scheme. Washington State Department of Transportation did not provide funding for the first year but did supply in-kind contributions like workspace and staff time. They later provided 50% of the funding towards the continuation of the scheme in the following year.