There’s a new art bus joining the growing collection of Chapel Hill Art + Transit’s painted vehicles. Titled “Rise Above Racial Injustices,” the work on this bus highlights the fight against social injustice and racism in the community.
Since 2018, Art + Transit has commissioned Triangle-based artists to create art for bus shelters around Chapel Hill and Carrboro. The Art + Transit’s goal is to “bring more artistic vibrancy to the daily commute and enliven unsuspecting spaces,” according to its mission statement.
Now, the group is expanding beyond stationary bus shelters to putting art on mobile canvases.
The latest art bus is a collaboration among local Black artist and arts educator Debi Drew, members of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP Youth Council, Chapel Hill Community Arts & Culture, the Orange County Arts Commission and the North Carolina Arts Council.
“Rise Above Racial Injustices” hit the streets of Orange County last week. The Town of Chapel Hill was able to secure grants to cover funding for the new art bus, Chapel Hill Transit Director Brian Litchfield said.
“One of the things we were interested in with this specific vehicle was finding an opportunity for students to share their perspective on race and equity,” Litchfield said. “We’ve looked at how this can help meet our goals related to inclusion and equity by involving artists and persons of color.”
NAACP Youth Council members Kennedy Lytle, Sol Ramirez and Anthony Swann collaborated closely with Drew, Public Art Coordinator Steve Wright and Marketing and Communications Coordinator Melissa Bartoletta to design the art for the bus.
The artists attended three workshop planning sessions in which the themes of self-concept, racist viewpoints and unity in diversity were discussed, Drew said in an email.
The bus depicts three circular portraits of the masked NAACP teens.
“They are prominently displayed because it was important to me from the beginning that they be seen and heard,” Drew said in an email.
Each portrait features statements from the three teens: Lytle’s is “my self worth negates racist remarks,” Ramirez’s is “rise above hate” and Swann’s is “show empathy for others.”
“I used photographs of the youth we took when we first met to create their large images on the bus and used their statements within their circular framed imagery,” Drew said in an email.
Additionally, the bus has a bold, printed pattern symbolic of an African mud cloth design with the words “Rise Above Racial Injustices” emblazoned across both sides.
“The design in the background helps ground the artwork against the black bus where they are definitely seen and heard,” Drew said in an email. “I am so proud of them.”
This work comes a year after Chapel Hill’s first art bus, Georges Le Chevallier’s “Orgullo Latino/Latinx Pride,” was unveiled in August 2020.
“Orgullo Latino/Latinx Pride” has painted words in English and Spanish to symbolize bridging the language barrier. The bus’s bright visual patterns pay tribute to the colorful buses of South and Central America.
“Being born from a Puerto Rican mother and having lived most of my childhood in Puerto Rico, I can personally understand the great pride we have towards the many Hispanic people making a constructive impact on our society,” Le Chevallier said in a statement on the Art + Transit website. “Today thousands of Hispanics now call the Triangle their home.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
