The North Carolina chapter of the American Planning Association has named Chapel Hill the 2025 Great Place for Public Art, recognizing the town’s Art + Transit program for transforming everyday commutes into artistic experiences.
The APA’s Great Places awards, which began in 2012, aim to recognize and celebrate outstanding public spaces across North Carolina. The awards span several different categories, including public art, healthy places and transportation.
“The winners always exhibit a lot of uniqueness, a lot of community engagement, a lot of placemaking,” Elizabeth Jernigan, APA awards committee co-chair, said.
The public art award in particular celebrates community-driven projects, and the committee selects a certain artistic element of a city to celebrate. The bus system in Chapel Hill earned the public art award this year for making public spaces more vibrant and engaging.
“This one was just really a great project because it took something that people might take for granted — that they might not recognize in their everyday life, regardless of how they’re using public transit — and it made that experience a lot more unique and special,” she said.
Launched in 2018, the Art + Transit program is a collaboration between Chapel Hill Transit and Community Arts & Culture.
“We have blank canvases just all over the transit department,” Emily Powell, community outreach manager for Chapel Hill Transit, said. “We have bus shelters. We have entire buses. We have the interior of buses, and this is space that can be filled with art and meaning, and it can help add some enjoyment to our customers’ day.”
Steve Wright, public art coordinator for Chapel Hill Community Arts & Culture, said the goal is to spread art as far across the transit bus shelter map as possible.
“It’s a public benefit in a way, right?” he said. “Like we want to share the public art as broadly and as fairly as possible.”
The program began with a hands-on approach. In the first year or two, artists would paint directly onto the surfaces of the bus shelters. This method soon evolved into a more durable and practical system.
Today, the program relies on digital design. Artists create and submit digital designs that are then printed on adhesive vinyl for installation. These durable wraps are kept in place for as long as possible — until they get dirty or need to be replaced due to damage or fading.
The program commissions one full bus wrap per fiscal year and frequently adds new installations to bus shelters and interior bus ceilings. Riders can check out the artwork at over 40 bus shelters across the Chapel Hill and Carrboro transit system.
The community focus remains central to the selection process. Artists from Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham, Raleigh, Cary and the greater Orange County area are invited to submit their work through an open call for submissions. Artists are compensated financially for their contributions.
“We love public art that is community-driven so it’s kind of developed by the community and for the community,” Jernigan said.
The primary goal of placing art on buses and shelters is to elevate the experience of public transit.
“A bus shelter, a bus ceiling — it’s infrastructure, you know?” Wright said. “So it could be bland and boring and unexciting, or you could sort of sit down and be pleasantly surprised, like, ‘Oh, cool. This isn’t just a gray section of ceiling, or it’s not a bunch of ads — it’s art.’”
Ultimately, the goal is that this moving gallery improves the rider’s daily routine. Powell said she hopes the art encourages riders to pause, reflect and see something new.