Today we revealed the first winning design for this year’s annual City Art Bus competition. Now in its 7th year, the competition results in mural wraps on two public transit buses from Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) and JAUNT. These colorful murals then travel on local roadways for the next year, and reach upwards of 200,000 people.
The winning design for the JAUNT bus is Lindsay Heider Diamond’s “Things to Teach Our Children,” a colorful illustration of children from international backgrounds, with values such as Love, Purpose, Honesty, and Understanding inscribed.
Diamond has worked as a professional illustrator, graphic designer, art director and creative director on both coasts. For the last 10 years, she has taught art to children, created book covers and interiors for professional authors and incarcerated writers, continues a fine art practice and is now also working at writing and illustrating children's books.
We unveiled it at the Center at Belvedere, one of the locations where JAUNT service extends. We caught up with Lindsay about some of the ideas and intentions she brought to her design.
How did you develop your design?
As an illustrator, graphic designer and fine artist, I am constantly interested in ways I can express myself and explore the world around me. I also enjoy learning new mediums and tools. I created the initial illustration to better understand Adobe Illustrator and intuitively added the words, which to me are important values for us all, as a society and world, to learn and practice.
A friend of mine, who teaches ESL in Cville City Schools, commented on the design when I posted and inquired about getting a poster for their classroom. I printed posters of the initial design and have been donating a percentage of the proceeds to International Neighbors in Charlottesville, VA. International Neighbors is a 501(c)(3) volunteer organization that works to equip refugee neighbors with the network and skills needed to move from surviving to thriving In Charlottesville.
To me, International Neighbors are those values in action. At the same time I was printing the posters, I saw the CAT/JAUNT bus competition and thought that it would not only be a great challenge to me, to design something so large, but also an opportunity to extend the initial vision to the larger community.
What do you hope the bus inspires in our community?
The values on the bus are ones that I try to live my life by and much of the foundation of learning these values begins when we are young, but learning and practicing them can happen at any age. My hope is that people who see the bus take a word or two away each time they view it passing and contemplate how they live by those values in their own life and encourage those values in others around them. May the bus design be a reminder that we are all able to continue to learn and grow and that we have the opportunity to start practicing and teaching these values every moment we are alive. We are never too young or too old.
If you’d like to purchase a poster of the design, please visit: https://lindsayheiderdiamondart.com/news