The Arts Council New Orleans: Place + Civic Design department, in partnership with Broad Community Connections, is requesting proposals for BROAD+WATER, an artistic installation/sculpture project framed around our community challenge with water. The call is open to artists, artist teams, community groups working with designers, architects, landscape architects, or water management experts who are interested in creating an exterior public art installation expressing New Orleans’ relationship with water.  In recent years, city officials, advocates, and water experts from New Orleans and around the world—spearheaded by Waggoner & Ball Architects—have endeavored to create the city’s Urban Water Plan that will fundamentally reorder New Orleans’ relationship with water, an effort called Living with Water™.  The BROAD+WATER Request for Proposals is for an installation that will creatively contribute to the Living with Water™ conversation, animating the concepts of water management while deeply engaging the surrounding community.  This RFP is the second of two Arts Council of New Orleans requests around Living with Water™ in the city of New Orleans in 2015. 

The Arts Council New Orleans and Broad Community Connections, through support from the National Endowment for the Arts and City of New Orleans Percent for Art, will commission a public art installation that actively seeks to advance the general public’s understanding of New Orleans water infrastructure at a key node in the city.  In the late 19th-century, New Orleans’ Sewerage & Water Board created a model drainage system—centered on Broad Street—which operates to this day to keep the city dry.  While the system is an engineering marvel—systems in the Netherlands and around the world are based on drainage technologies developed in New Orleans—it is also based on antiquated concepts of water management that are inefficient, brittle, and non-resilient, and contribute to subsidence, local flooding, and other infrastructure issues in the city.  Similarly, the Lafitte Corridor has been a salient commercial and cultural artery throughout New Orleans’ history, first as the Carondelet Canal and Walk, whose turning basin gives the legendary Basin Street its name, and later as a rail corridor that took passengers into the city, past old Storyville to the Southern Railways terminal at Canal Street, but in recent decades had become a defunct and forgotten space in the city. Today, the Lafitte Corridor is being reimagined not only as a 3.1-mile linear Greenway that will anchor the revitalization of the corridor connecting the French Quarter and the Tremé to Bayou St. John and City Park, but also as a Blueway that will pioneer strategies for reordering how New Orleans lives with water, creating a functional, beautiful amenity that make the neighborhoods along the Greenway more resilient and more livable.

BROAD+WATER is deliberately located at the intersection of Broad Street and the Lafitte Greenway, and is therefore uniquely positioned to contribute to the New Orleans’ conversation about living with water.  Public art and design are essential components to conversations about water in and the around civic spaces in our community. The Arts Council and Broad Community Connections expect this project will serve to bring a concerted dialogue to the Broad Street Corridor and the Lafitte Greenway.

Click for full details:  LWW-Broadpluswater-031015

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