Art while you wait

Durham has come a long way from its “Amshack” days. City Councilman Howard Clement coined the phrase, combining “Amtrak” and “shack,” to describe the spare and uninviting passenger shelter that sat next to the railroad tracks on Pettigrew Street.

Now Durham has a true transit station, and Tuesday the city unveiled two new bus passenger shelters on the Bull City Connector route, complete with public art. Visual artist David Wilson’s shelter at Oldham Towers on East Main Street was unveiled in an official ceremony on the lawn of the towers. Wilson’s art takes images from historic Durham photographs and intersperses them with a map of downtown Durham.

To create his art, Wilson said he looked back into the history of transportation in Durham. “I did a lot of research to tie in the history,” Wilson said. His idea of public art is to make a connection with history, and when riders are waiting for the bus at the Oldham Towers site, they can perhaps learn something about Durham’s history, he said. Wilson’s art has images of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, the Durham Hosiery Mill Band and many downtown buildings.

Farther north on Main Street, artist Chris Vespermann’s tribute to blues icons Rev. Gary Davis, Sonny Terry and Blind Boy Fuller also opened for the public Tuesday.

In the next year, nine more shelters with public art will dot the Bull City Connector route, a free bus that connects Duke University with Golden Belt and other areas downtown. The shelters are part of Durham’s Public Art Program. In August 2010, the nonprofit group Durham Area Designers, which advocates for better public spaces, teamed with the Durham Arts Council and issued a call for artists to design shelters with art. The artists’ charge was to reflect in some way Durham’s history and culture.

A selection committee picked artists Wilson of Apex, Vespermann of Cary, Sharon Dowell of Charlotte and Al Frega of Durham to create the shelters. Future shelters will be at Ninth Street, Duke Street, Brightleaf Square, West Village, Five Points and Durham County Human Services Complex.

Lisa Hemingway, a resident of Oldham Towers who also is vice president of the building, had high praise for Wilson’s design. “I think it’s beautiful,” Hemingway said. Too often visitors vandalize bus shelters, but with the art work “hopefully people will think of it as the city giving back, that we have a chance to grow, that better days are coming,” she said.

Vespermann’s design takes three photos of Davis, Terry and Fuller, who made the Bull City a center for the blues, and gives them an op-art effect. Vespermann was inspired by the musicians, who not only had to contend with being African-American in the 20th century with its segregation laws, but also in the case with Davis and Fuller, dealt with blindness, he said. They did not have benefit of formal lessons or music theory, he said. “These gentlemen, never having access to that, were able to express themselves unbridled,” Vespermann said.

He is still working on the sun shade part of the courthouse shelter. It will have a Braille translation of a song that Davis, Terry and Fuller recorded together: “I’ve got fiery fingers/I’ve got fiery hands/And when I get up in heaven/Going to join that fiery band.” Vespermann calls the technique “painting Braille with light.” Vespermann is working on a shelter for Duke’s East Campus commemorating President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 speech there.

Dowell has two shelters in design – one for Brightleaf and one for Golden Belt. Some photographs of her concept were on view at the unveiling. The Brightleaf design takes advantage of the district’s architecture. The Golden Belt art will have images of the tobacco bags that were once manufactured there, along with the building’s wooden beams. “I like to work with architecture a lot,” Dowell said. “My art is about place.” Dowell added, “This is really fun to work on.”