Artists are being chosen and briefed to create works of art for the eight new Rea Vaya stations. The art must reflect the stations’ surroundings and also be a part of the whole bus rapid transit narrative.

BRIGHT, exhilarating colours – deep reds, sunny yellows, sky blues – are used to highlight the contemporary, stylish Rea Vaya stations.

Creating beautiful textures, intriguing images

Created by various artists, works of art are sandblasted on to the glass panels on either side of the stations. Now, with eight more stations being built for Rea Vaya's expansion, local artists are being commissioned to beautify these stations.

They must draw their inspiration from the City's unique people, architecture, colours, shapes, textures and diversity. Each piece of art must be specific to the station and its surroundings, and will illustrate stories for the community in that area.

Already, art on the stations depict trains passing through a landscape; the colours and shapes of the plates of fruit and vegetables laid out on pavements across the city; street children; fabrics; the skyline; and women selling things while walking through the streets.

Depicting local places of worship

Artists have been shortlisted and are being briefed by a consortium made up of The Trinity Session, Tukis and Urban Works, which manage and implement The BRT Station Public Art Project, as it is known.

Zunelle Cairns, the production assistant at The Trinity Session, says: "We are currently in the middle of briefing the shortlisted artists. [We] would like to finish interviewing all of them to make sure exactly who is going ahead and who [is] not."

Paying tribute to the workers who built Joburg

"The brief to the artists was to create a unique experience at each station, while simultaneously aiming for coherence, as each station forms part of a larger system connecting different parts of Johannesburg," says Lael Bethlehem, the chief executive officer of the JDA.

For the new stations, the brief will be the same it was for the stations already in use. Cairns says the broad theme or over-arching narrative is one of inter-connectedness between the stations as part of an overall system of travel or movement, as well as between the stations and their immediate environment and the people who live or work there.

The consortium has decided that every station should form part of a visually consistent, yet distinctly unique story from one station to the next.

"The artworks programme was not merely an attempt to beautify the stations, but to create something of worth embedded in the very structure of the stations that would engage and pay tribute to those who use [them] on a daily basis," says Bethlehem.

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