To anyone who has seen an outdoor sculpture, mural or public work of art while passing through Waco and wondered if there are more: There is now a map for that, online and interactive.
Actually, two maps with both available on the website of arts nonprofit Creative Waco. One is a public art map that provides locations for almost 60 murals, sculptures and fountains. The other provides location and background information for the 28 works on the recently completed Sculpture Zoo in and outside Cameron Park.
Three Waco-area high school friends — Midway High School seniors Callum Longenecker and Laith Altarabishi and Waco High School junior Kathryn Brooks — created the public art map, not as a school project, but more as a challenge with community usefulness the end result.
After hearing his mother, Fiona Bond, executive director of Creative Waco, wishing for a way to connect Waco residents with the city’s public art, Longenecker decided to see if he and his friends could do it.
“I was amazed that no one had come up with a way to spread awareness of local art,” he said. “It was more of a need that needed filling.”
For Longenecker and Altarabishi, the appeal lay in creating a website that could be integrated into Creative Waco’s current site and interface with Google Maps. Brooks handled the project’s writing end, collecting information from artists and other sources where possible and doing her own research.
They started in August before classes began, and the two site designers, conversant in HTML and CSS, found the hardest part at the beginning.
“We started out being pretty ambitious, thinking of building one from scratch and writing code for all of it,” Longenecker said.
That proved “ridiculously tedious,” Altarabishi said. So they opted to adapt some existing interactive maps to work with Creative Waco’s website.
After hearing his mother, Fiona Bond, executive director of Creative Waco, wishing for a way to connect Waco residents with the city’s public art, Longenecker decided to see if he and his friends could do it.
“I was amazed that no one had come up with a way to spread awareness of local art,” he said. “It was more of a need that needed filling.”
For Longenecker and Altarabishi, the appeal lay in creating a website that could be integrated into Creative Waco’s current site and interface with Google Maps. Brooks handled the project’s writing end, collecting information from artists and other sources where possible and doing her own research.
They started in August before classes began, and the two site designers, conversant in HTML and CSS, found the hardest part at the beginning.
“We started out being pretty ambitious, thinking of building one from scratch and writing code for all of it,” Longenecker said.
That proved “ridiculously tedious,” Altarabishi said. So they opted to adapt some existing interactive maps to work with Creative Waco’s website.
“We found a plug-in that worked and after that, it was easy,” Altarabishi said.
Brooks, meanwhile, was researching and writing entries for each of the locations plotted on the map: 10 sculptures, 39 murals, three fountains and the six street art pieces French artist Blek le Rat painted during a Waco visit.
With years of school essays under her belt, the writing part was not hard, but finding information on some of the memorials and murals was, she said.
The public art site went live last week, as did the Sculpture Zoo one. The latter features a web page for each of the zoo sculptures with information on the artist, the artwork, the animal portrayed, a locator map and a video clip from the donors underwriting the sculpture.
Creative Waco marketing director Kennedy Sam said the interactive guide was a collaboration among Creative Waco, the city, the Cameron Park Zoo, donors and the artists with web design by Jeffrey Cannon.
The two art sites join an online guide and phone app to places reflecting Waco’s history, created and maintained by Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History and the Texas Collection.
Though pleased at how their interactive map came out, the students behind it are moving on. The two seniors will start studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall, Longenecker studying computer science with an eye to artificial intelligence, Altarabishi studying electrical engineering. Brooks has her senior year ahead and is aiming at studies in psychology.
—WACOTRIB
