Request for Qualifications (RFQ): Chestnut Street Gateway Mural, Chattanooga, Tennessee
Public Art Chattanooga is seeking qualifications from artists or artist teams for the commission and installation of a mural at 2001 Chestnut Street at West 20th Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Up to three finalists will be selected to develop concept proposals for this project. Each finalist will be paid a $500 stipend. The project budget for the selected commission is $25,000. The Chestnut Street Gateway Mural will provide a transformative and dynamic visual anchor to this important gateway.
This project is made possible with a generous grant from the Footprint Foundation.
Project Overview:
The site is located on the southwest perimeter of Chattanooga’s revitalized Southside neighborhood, and is adjacent to Finley Stadium and First Tennessee Pavilion, home to a variety of heavily attended public events including sports, a major fine art festival, and the Chattanooga Market, a weekly community farmer’s and craft market. Once a blighted and severely neglected industrial district, the Southside has experienced a rebirth through reinvestment and is being transformed into a thriving and urban neighborhood. Only blocks away, a 3.5-mile extension of the award-winning Tennessee Riverpark is under construction that will connect Chattanooga’s downtown to South Chattanooga and significantly increase pedestrian and bike traffic. Here, old and new neighbors embrace diversity, urban living, and the return of locally-owned businesses.
The junction of Chestnut and 20th Streets is rapidly becoming a key and visible gateway for the Southside and an important anchor point for Chattanooga. First Tennessee Pavilion and Finley Stadium are the first prominently visible landmarks when entering downtown Chattanooga from the South. They boast regular crowds and create a natural place for Chattanooga’s citizens to gather and to socialize. Over 6,000 people attend the Chattanooga Market (the region’s largest producer-only arts and crafts and farmer’s market) each week, while various other cultural events are hosted here throughout the year drawing equally large crowds. Similarly, the 21,688 seat capacity Finley Stadium is well attended for college and high school sporting events. In recent years, new businesses have quickly begun to flank the surrounding blocks and include a Jump Park, a brewery, and a boutique bowling alley set to open in 2015.
Since 2005, public art has played an important role in the revitalization efforts throughout the city of Chattanooga. Some of these public art initiatives include: a city-wide Biennial Sculpture Exhibition, Art on Main, and the Main Terrain, a new urban park and public art installation that was funded in part from a Creative Placemaking Our Town Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011. Like these projects, the Chestnut Street Gateway Mural will reinforce the critical role public art plays in lending a sense of place to a neighborhood, and will contribute to future neighborhood beautification and economic development efforts.
Deadline: January 30, 2015
For full RFQ, please click this link below:
http://www.chattanooga.gov/images/citymedia/generalservices/Chesnut_Street_Gateway_Mural.pdf