4th Avenue - Pt. 2

This is a piece of bicycle art that doubles as a bike stand on 4th avenue, right in front of Bison Witches. It is a creation of Bicas, who use broken and old bicycle parts to create art all over the city.

Tucson is a great city for biking. In fact, the Huffington Post has rated a Tucson bike lane as number one by user votes in their "Bike Lanes from Around the World" piece (vote!).

These shapely hunks of metal can be appreciated in many different ways. In fact, the many different ways to enjoy the art is one of the many things I enjoy about the art!

The art promotes bicycling. The merits of bicycling are fairly well known. Public health, the environment, and parking space are amongst the advantaged. In Tucson, you can add community to that list thanks to things like Bicas and the Tuesday Night Ride.

The art promotes recycling. The bike pieces are identifiably junk in their component parts, but their beautiful form as a whole highlights the potential for reusing old scrap, with an emphasis on crap.

The art is functional. Now, I can appreciate art from time to time. However, when it starts taking up my sidewalk space I might start to wonder if the artistic merit outweighs the mild inconvenience of avoiding it. That's not the case here! The art pictured above doubles as a fully functional bike rack, and the bike art trash cans keep the streets clean (while reminding you to recycle that bottle).

The art is nice to look at. You look at it. It looks nice. It reminds you of the beauty of simple machinery. It's reasonably symmetric and thought out.

It's made by Tusconans. You appreciate that they appreciate the community. It reminds you of the wonderful communities here.

Well, I could go on, but I don't want to spoil all the fun of finding new ways to look at the art of 4th avenue and Bicas.

4th Avenue - Pt. 1

This is a small sample of the Tucson Portrait Project. It is a collection of 4 photo mosaics that adorn the walls of the 4th avenue underpass. The project features roughly 7000 faces. The Arizona Daily Wildcat reports that the pictures were taken from a variety of locations and events from around the city.

I first saw the project driving through the underpass, though I'd heard about it long before it's inception. The 4"x4" tiles whizzed by as I made my way downtown, and I felt like I'd pretty much gotten what had been promised. There are lots of tiny pictures on a wall. The pictures are of people from Tucson. The project is in Tucson. Makes sense.

My perception of the project began to change as I stood on the raised median of the fourth avenue underpass, snapping pictures for this blog entry a scant 4 hours before the deadline. Mournful singing floated out from deep in the underpass on the cool night's wind. A shabby homeless guy with a beat-up guitar was singing to no one, to everyone. I finished taking photos and started walking back to my car with his voice in my ear. If I had driven through, the lonesome man would just have been a blurred shape in my peripheral along with the tiny photos.

It wasn't until I slowed my roll, applied my sneakers to the pavement, and sought out the richness of Tucson that it revealed itself to me.