Podcast: How BART’s Art Program uplifts community, culture, and the economy – it's not just throwing murals on walls

BART's innovative Art Program is making a huge difference in the transit experience of our riders.  Since its inception in the 1960s, BART has prioritized bringing art and cultural experiences to stations. On our latest edition of “Hidden Tracks: Stories from BART,” BART Art Program Manager Jennifer Easton discusses the wide range of projects her one-woman department has undertaken – from murals and fashion shows to poetry contests and safety initiatives – and makes the case for the importance of weaving art and culture into the transit experience.  

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ROBERTSON: “Welcome to ‘Hidden Tracks: Stories from BART,’ I’m Michelle Robertson with BART Communications, and today I have the honor of being your host on this edition of Hidden Tracks. I'll be speaking with Jennifer Easton, BART's Art Program Manager. So, it's been a busy few years for Jennifer, who is the sole employee in the art program I'd like to point out. She has led a ton of projects that are hoping to make our stations more welcoming, safer, and let's face it, just nice places to be in while you're waiting for your train. In some ways, our stations are museums, not only for their architectural integrity, but also for many of the striking and historic artworks within and without. And we keep adding more. Jennifer, welcome to Hidden Track. 

EASTON: Thank you, Michelle. I'm so happy to be here. 

ROBERSTON: What prepared you for this role? 

EASTON: I wish I could say I graduated nuclear scientist or something really tricky and try to dovetail from there. But I did start, my degree is in art history and museum studies, so, that's the road I went down. And I had been doing curatorial work for a number of years.  I was a research assistant at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) in Los Angeles and then I realized that all my colleagues were moving to very small towns and other places to kind of build their careers. And I was actually really interested in staying in Los Angeles at the time and I had early in college done some work around public art, really early on and kind of dovetailed back into that in Los Angeles and it just kind of went from there. It was a burgeoning field at the time and what was interesting to me and what's always been interesting is I'm a generalist in a lot of ways, right? I love just like the layers that public art is. I have to know construction. I have to know community engagement. I have to know artists. I have to know all these different cool things that I get to, so every day, I mean, maybe it's my ADHD, you know, it's like I get attached to 88 different projects.

I mean at a certain point I moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, and I went to tech and I was doing tech marketing, so I learned marketing when that kind of went downhill. I went into nonprofit management and I was doing PR and marketing and that and fundraising. So, I've learned all these crazy skills and then I was ultimately running the public art program for the City of San Jose, which is a pretty big program. Then this opened up and it was like my dream job, because I'd always been a BART girl and have loved transit, have used transit, and I always felt like the early BART program had art in it, but it never really advanced very far. Grace Crunican, the GM at the time, who had come from Seattle, had seen how positive that program was to the success of their transit system and brought it. We had always had somebody kind of babysitting art projects or doing some of the art projects, some of my colleagues when I started here had been doing like that San Francisco extension, there's art there, but it never really been focal. So, when they decided to do this, I was like, let me please let me and that's how I came to do it. I mean, it's really it is a field for people really interested in like a lot of different things, which is kind of exactly where my brain goes. So, it’s fun!

ROBERTSON: I want to talk about a project that's currently underway at Fruitvale Station that I think is indicative of a lot of the work that you do. You're working with BART's longtime community partner, the Unity Council, to create a street gallery at the station. That's what they're calling it and the Unity Council describes the project as a transformation of the station into a living canvas that reflects the rich culture and diversity of the Fruitvale community. Tell us more about that. 

EASTON: So, I'll go back to Grace stating early one she wanted this art program and I think one of the things that she said to me early on and I will say our current GM, Robert Powers, is right on that page, too, is that our stations really need to be more reflective of our communities, and they need to be better partners with our communities, right? And it's not that just the person who drives in drops their car, comes back, drives away. But it's really like, how are we a better partner to our neighborhoods where we are? Because as we know, our history is not 100% grand in that, and I think we are still thinking about what does that look like? How can we be part of the, if it’s still people are still considering it healing or just like new direction, so how do we be part of that dialog? So, Unity Council, was a partner in the Oscar Grant mural and, that day, I think day two, I was called in and I was asked, can you work with Oscar Grant's family? They really want to do a mural at the Fruitvale Station to honor him. It's interesting because, then I was going out there and I had several people come up to me and, this is not too long after Oscar had been killed, and it's like, is this the station? 

The people didn't really have a sense of the place. There were a lot of people visiting to kind of as part of their healing process, as part of their like learning about it. And so the notion of creating that mural became really important and I thought it was really, kudos to BART for stepping into that space, because I know this has happened in other transit agencies and I wouldn't say this always happens where they go in collaboration with the family. I mean, it's always a tense relationship, understandably. So, the Unity Council, because they are representatives of that neighborhood, very strong representatives of the Fruitvale, they came on as a partner to make sure that everybody felt comfortable. Well, not comfortable, but to make sure everybody was in dialog about, just that they were in support of the family, the mural being there at the station and helping to be in that dialog about how this could be very successful.

So, I really appreciated their voice at the table during that process. But as we were talking and as we were doing that project, the Unity Council and I were talking about these other columns, and they have new housing that they've been building there. So, really kind of start to make that feel more like their vision of the Fruitvale got put on hold. Everybody got busy and then post COVID a lot of neighborhoods have been, challenged, right? Safety, security, businesses closing, things like that and Fruitvale is one of our busiest stations. So, the conversation came back again, and the Unity Council said, we'll raise the money. I supported them on with some funds. But, as a percentage, hardly anything, just to get the project up and running and then they've hired already four amazing artists, including the artists who painted the Oscar Grant mural, Refa One, and we're painting the columns, and it just makes the station come alive because it came from a place of love for the community ,expression of the community and they see it just as like a gateway to all the other beauty that's in the Fruitvale. So, they're seeing the beauty of a place where other people might say, oh, this or that, but they're all in on making the Fruitvale a place for their community. So, it just that just felt like a win for BART as far as what Grace had laid out to me early on and what the community wants to see from BART as a partner. 

ROBERSTON: This is a big question. Why does BART have an art program? And we've had one forever, like you said. Why did the founders make sure we had an art program, which was novel at the time? A lot of agencies didn't have art in the station. Why did they want us to have one and why do we need to continue funding this program, especially as we're in this fiscal crisis? 

EASTON: It's a great and big question. The early stations were, their early thinking about the stations; if you look at them, the system was not designed by one architect. It was designed by many, many architects and I think the notion was to have that sense of uniqueness, that the system was not monolithic, that you had different experiences in different places.

I will say it was a little hodgepodge at first. A rumor I heard from the artist who's since passed away, who did the relief carvings in like Richmond and Lake Merritt and many other stations. He said, yeah, one of the guys came to this concrete conferences I was at in San Francisco and said, you need to work on our BART system? He said, okay. 

ROBERTSON: A concrete conference?

EASTON: Right? However, there was an early arts committee with some very important art critics, curators, and artists on it who were, that's who were grabbing those early artists and looking at the diversity. I mean, they made sure they were from Contra Costa, Alameda, and San Francisco counties. And I think it was really, again, there was no plan to have art in all the stations, but they did want to have these moments, as we still say surprise and delight. They did want, art was really starting to be seen. Public art was starting to come into its own. It was still more that what is now called plop art. The grand sculpture by important artists in a plaza.

ROBERSTON: Did you say plop art?

EASTON: Drop it in one place to drop a big sculpture in a place. Plop it down. 

ROBERSTON: I love that. Why don't love that? Because it's very thoughtless. 

EASTON: Well, sometimes it I mean, there are some places, like the Alexander Calder in Chicago that that become iconic, but for the most part, yes, it typically is really about the artist and not the place. But integrative art was happening and if you look back to like Paris and New York and some of these old systems, you see beautiful tile work, so you see these things you appreciate. And so, it was as we've gone along, I think we're just getting kind of following that breadcrumb trail. But as we've been talking about hopefully, it's kind of starting to make sense of why it makes sense to keep it going.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of hard decisions that will have to be made relative to the fiscal cliff, right? Where does the money come from? I will say that even though my program was authorized at 2% of construction costs, it has never worked on that. We've never implemented that. We are finding, like the key projects where it work and finding like what's the budget we can work within to make an impact.

So, we've been, I mean we the royal we, has been actually doing that since the beginning and it's never changed, and I think there are ways to do this efficiently. There's ways to do it boldly and broadly. New York, L.A., they have good sized programs. They deliver lots of amazing projects. We have never been that. So, how do we blend all those things together to create a result, you know what I mean instead of being formulaic?

ROBERTSON: Safety. I want to push this subject a little more. One of my profound experiences with art and safety has been in 19th Street Station, which is my home station. You were heavily involved in this modernization project. There were so many different pieces to it. We opened up the concourse. We tore down all these pillars and walls and opened up the line of sight. So now when I enter the station, I can see directly across it. So, there's no one lurking in dark corners. We replace the lighting with LED lights, more sustainable but also brighter. I especially want to point out that there are these incredible light boxes. Is that what they're called? They're almost like murals, but they're illuminated light box murals made by three local artists, and they're put in the stairwells. So, when I'm walking down the stairs to go catch my train to San Francisco, there's this lit up thing and again, it's less creepy because sometimes stairwells can be creepy as a woman. It's not only bright and adding light to the space, but it's so much fun. There's the Saunders Daisy, it's a bright yellow daisy, and it just perks me up. 

EASTON: Yeah, when we did that project, when it was planned it was before COVID and the platforms were so crowded, particularly at rush hours, and people weren't using the stairs and in a number of stations. So, this is all part of the station modernization program that has since kind of been been modified. I won't say put on hold, but it's been modified and how we go about it, and I'm glad we got 19th Street done and Powell Street because they were two critical stations.

A lot of the station we were having to look at how do we get extra stairwell capacity in there for emergency egress and things like that. I came upon it and it was like glass in stairwells. However, it has been fine. People are not using them as bathrooms and people are being I mean we were careful how we installed them, how we created them. There's room for the mops to move around bikes, whatever. The glass can withstand certain things. But people are using the stairwells more. They are willing to do it, like you say. How do you create a sense of better sense of comfort in a place through the artwork?

We also have light boxes on the concourse level with changeable art and another thing I will be working on shortly is changing that out with either a local artist or local arts organization, or potentially images from our fashion show, because they're so fun to just bring that out. So, it's another way to kind of create that special uniqueness to a place with artwork. Then the whole theme of the artwork is, of the station is really about Uptown Oakland as being an arts district and the city wanting that as a kind of a thing. First Fridays, music venues, all that sort of stuff as more people are moving into the new apartments, making this a place where people want to be where, where it's exciting and as we're dealing with, the backlash against COVID and just like new workforce, the work-live relationships, things like that. I think we're really, that station is just like people come in, they're like, wow, it really does feel like a place that I feel pretty darn good about moving through and being in, you know? And it doesn't mean it's like perfect. It's not. People still like are people. They're still peeling some of the letters off of my project. But I just have to figure that out. It doesn't mean, it hasn't stopped us from being human and there's humans on the street. We're humans. Humans do human stuff. But I think just having us all feel like we want to be in the space makes us feel like generally safer in the space, because we're all kind of part of it. We're all using it. We're all engaging in it on our own volition and because it feels like a better space.

ROBERTSON: Those light boxes I haven't seen, like graffiti on them. They didn't get broken, no one’s smashed. I think we have a culture in America of not necessarily respecting our public spaces and if you're going into this dark box of a station that looks crappy, it makes you want to defile things because it already looks bad. But when you have art there, I don't think people are prone to like, messing with stuff.

EASTON: Right, that was, which New York mayor, I think it was Giuliani, who did that with the New York subway. Right, and if a train got tagged, it came off the line and BART does that too. If a train gets tagged right, it gets brought off the line. 

So, we want to put our best foot forward for folks. We have a really zero tolerance policy for graffiti. We try and get rid of it as fast as possible because we've brought on more cleaners. We're thinking about our spaces, making sure they look as good as we can. However, that's just part and parcel of it, right? So, if you start with a bar that's bringing light levels up, all that sort of stuff, that's that part of the magic.

ROBERTSON: What BART stations would you consider destinations?

EASTON: Well, I mean, now, Fruitvale. So, that's an interesting question because for me, it's both the physical station, but also where the station is. I also think of it as an extension of the neighborhood. So, I love the Fruitvale neighborhood. There's so many great restaurants and it's just fun. 16th and 24th, I think are really fun stations for different reasons. Do you want to talk about?

ROBERTSON: I want to talk about 16th and 24th Street very briefly. Jennifer, or actually customer services got an email from a woman saying her mother is this famous public artist who created the tilescapes is what we're calling them, mosaics in 16th and 24th Street. And you don’t necessarily notice them because I used to live there, and I just moved through the station, but there's, like, these beautiful, honestly, murals on the concourse and on the platform. They were created by this woman, Janet Bennett. I want to point out, Janet has never really been recognized. She was tying these, you know, right before the station open. She was an OG BART artist. Meanwhile, there's these William Mitchell concrete reliefs at the station that are in every must-see historic art in the Bay Area. So, we got in touch with Janet Bennett, who is in her 90s and living in New York City and we got to have this amazing conversation with her and bring her story to light. She was interviewed on the news after we spoke to her. And my favorite part of that interview, god I love Janet, we got to get in touch with her. She said, I'm open to work if you're hiring, let me know. Somebody reached out, so we'll have to follow up and see if she actually did that. 

But that's just another great example of how communications and the art program work together, because there's stories to tell about these stations and about the art in these stations and about what, people consider Janet's work decoration, but it is so not that. 

EASTON: No, I mean, it really definitely had a consciousness behind it in the design. What we also learned is she created the mosaics at LAX, which were also very critical to changing those long hallways to make them more….

ROBERTSON: These are in the tunnels. The famous tunnels at LAX, and it was misattributed. 

EASTON: Same thing. Misattributed. Her boss took credit because she did not. She had to move on to another job after she designed them, and the same year I think she moved on to a different job after. No, she was here through the end, I would take that back. Remember because there's a picture of her with them being installed and she worked with Heath Tiles another woman-owned business, Bay Area business. So, that's a really interesting discussion about how many of our artists also work with local artisans, right? Or local fabricators. So again, they're often seeking out the local, the bespoke, the custom and I often will connect them to local fabricators instead of ones from out of the area because we want to try and keep these dollars local as well. So, another kind of layer of that economic dialog too. 

ROBERTSON: So, I don't think most of us know what goes into getting a public art project done. I certainly don't. I'm like, oh, they're like throwing it up there and it's the thing and wow, that was fast. I recently sat on a selection panel for an artist for BART police's new headquarters, which are going to be right in the heart of downtown Oakland at the 20th Street exit of 19th Street Station, like in front of the Paramount, yes, the Paramount. I mixed that up with the Fox sometimes and across from this gorgeous patina building where the coffee shop Tierra Mia is currently located. The old I Magnin, the department store, Yes. It’s a police station. We opened this conversation talking about Oscar Grant and talking about policing and how we're re-envisioning safety, that's been such a key piece of this conversation and BART police headquarters is going to be right there and on this panel, we are having all these conversations about what it means for this police department to be headquartered right there in this historic neighborhood with the history it has, and how do we make it a part of this place? And, you know, make it not just this dark, bureaucratic building, but a beautiful contribution to the space where if something does happen to you, you feel welcome to walk in there. So, this panel was so eye opening, and it just takes so much expertise and work and collaboration. Walk us through the process of ushering a public art project, into existence through the lens of our new, forthcoming headquarters for BART police.

EASTON: No project is rote.  I think that's the whole point of thinking about each project uniquely, in its place, in its community and its function. So, that's where you start is like, what's the basis? What's the building? What’s the built environment. In this case it is to your point, it's an existing building that started out as a bank. It's a very 1980s building. Let's be honest. It's not the world's most attractive building and in our conversations, in our initial conversations and this is what's so funny about my job as I sit next to the person who does environmental clearance for BART and he was doing environmental clearance on this building, and he so he had been doing outreach to some of what we would call, communities of interest. He reached out to the Uptown Downtown Association and they're like, it was a Kaiser building up until recently. We bought it, the building from Kaiser. Their concern was the street presence of the building. When we were in conversation with the police department early on in the project, is this like they don't have a ton of money for this building, right? So again, it's like, what can the art do? It was really critical that we cannot drop something that feels like Fort Knox in the middle of downtown Oakland and expect to be welcome.

ROBERTSON: But you also have to balance that. It is a police station.

EASTON: It is a police station, right. So you have to harden the building and do all those fun things.

ROBERTSON: But what role does art play, it has so many different things it does?

EASTON: “So that's why we want to bring artists on early and so that's one of the things we try and do really often. So, when we are kind of formulating what the project is, it’s like when can when does the artist come in?  I have some projects, I will be honest that I've brought the artists in and say, great, we're going to bring them early. They’re sitting on the shelf as we speak because BART brings projects to a certain point and depending on the finances or whatever, it could go on the shelf for a while. I mean, I was here six years before my first project finished. You know, my first construction project finished.

ROBERTSON: What was that project? 

EASTON: I think it was El Cerrito del Norte, the new mosaics at El Cerrito del Norte, maybe five, but I think the six and then came Powell and the 19th, right? But those all were in process. They had just started when I started here. So, six years later. But this one, it was really critical because it is a design build project. Progressive design, even more aggressive that the artist is part of the design team. So, her voice, Vicki Scurry, she's going to be in that process when they're considering hardening, when they're considering reinforcing the parking lot. So, how do we do it? 

She came and spent, she's from Seattle, she came and spent a week here after she was selected, by our committee of police officers, community members, artists, you know, arts advisors, yourself, the project manager to really get a bunch of different voices in there, to really think about how do we make this something that reflects what I heard from the community as far as making this a place that doesn't feel, like doesn't add to a negative sense of this group, it adds to a positive sense of history? And everybody knows it has to function, there has to be a way in for the police to park their cars or whatever. There has to be secured parking. We understand that there's also a new cafe opening across the street, so I think there's an expectation. It's like, oh great, more employees here. So how do we build on that positive stuff.

The police have been really great about this. Like, no, we don't want to have shields and badges and pledges and that. We want it to reflect our values, but we want to be a good community partner and the police, you remember they were saying that at the meeting is that they want to be a place that the community actually feels like is part of their community.

ROBERTSON: All right. Jennifer, this was such a lovely conversation. Do you have any final thoughts? 

EASTON: We didn't talk a lot about the collection and what it means to maintain a collection and it is like maintaining buildings, right? BART has, for better or worse, a lot of times been hands off with the artwork because there hasn't been somebody in my position to kind of shepherd that along. So, it's just like, how do we bring recognition internally as an organization? And then because I've had people interview me, it's like, oh, this collection's amazing, and why don't you do a map? Because I really need to get out there and get some stuff cleaned, you know what I mean? So, it's just like, as a party of one. I'm so fortunate I now have somebody who's assisting me for a period of time. She's at San Francisco State in a graduate program, and she's really excited about collection management.

So, she's helping me be that part of my brain to kind of get the collection into our inventory system and things like that. But it is a critical, part of doing that putting it out there is making sure it looks great for years to come and that it generationally kind of continues on, and then it starts to be part of those layers of the story, of the history of BART, and that we save it and talking about our historic preservation, now that we're 50 years old, we have to have some of those conversations. How are we part of that conversation? And just like continuing to respect our system and make the spaces as amazing as possible and have the best system possible, 

ROBERTSON: Jennifer, we're so lucky to have at BART. I am so lucky. Talk about surprise and delight, you surprise and delight me every day. Thank you for joining us for Hidden Tracks: stories from BART. You can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, and of course on our website at BART.gov/podcasts. Now get out there and check out some BART art, please.”