Park City Municipal Corporation and Rocky Mountain Power are conduits to bringing new meaning to Box Art.
The two have continues its partnership with the EmPOWERment Public Art Utility Box Project this week, and are in the process of wrapping locally generated art on select electrical utility boxes throughout the community, said Jenny Diersen, Park City Municipal Corporation’s special events manager and city staff liaison to the Park City Public Art Advisory Board.
“Earlier this year, we sent out a call for art proposals, and we had more than 102 submissions, which was great to see,” she said. “The board scored all the pieces, and we averaged the scores to select the finalists.”
There were 43 finalists, all of whom are local residents, Diersen said.
“Sixteen of the pieces this time around are done by local youths,” she said. “That’s not always the case in these types of community art projects. So this is a great way to engage with local artists who live here.”
The board then decided which work would be applied to which box, Diersen said.
“We tried to make sense in that selection,” she said. “For instance, there were some pieces of art that were geared to historic homes, and we knew they would probably go best on a couple of boxes in Old Town. And there are a couple of drawings that were specifically Park City Mountain Resort, so we matched those up with boxes by the resort.”
Other than those two examples, there was no “method to the madness,” Diersen said with a laugh.
“We just wanted to spread the art around the city,” she said.
The week’s installations mark phase two of the EmPOWERment Public Art Utility Box Project that was launched in 2018, according to Diersen.
The first phase involved wrapping nine pieces of art on nine utility boxes, and by the time phase two is complete, the total will reach 52, she said.
“We had a local resident who told us about the project, because she had seen it in other resort towns and communities,” Diersen said. “And since Park City has some aggressive sustainability goals, we saw this as a great opportunity to partner with Rocky Mountain Power.”
All the boxes that have been and are being wrapped are properties of Rocky Mountain Power, Diersen said.
“We have a clear agreement with (them) in how to wrap the boxes,” she said. “We have to make sure the Rocky Mountain Power signage is seen, but they have given us a lot of leeway to make sure the art can really shine through.”
The main goals for the EmPOWERment project include:
- Beautifying the public utility infrastructure around Park City
- Engaging the community by soliciting art from locally based artists
- Engaging the community in City Council’s critical priorities and lenses
- Integrating the theme of the project with the scale and physical space of the utility boxes
“The theme we had was an overall Park City theme,” Diersen said. “And once the city acquired the artwork that was submitted and approved, we did a large-scale scan of each piece.”
The scans were sent to a printer who created wraps, which Diersen likens to giant stickers, that are then installed onto the boxes.
“This is a favorite project of the board and a bunch of local residents,” Diersen said. “It’s fun to see all of these pieces of art pop up around the community, whether it’s Quinn’s Junction, Deer Valley, Upper Deer Valley or Thaynes Canyon. Hopefully we’ll do more in the future.”