“And all those people come here for the same reasons many of us enjoy living here: Music, food, spending time with friends, enjoying the outdoors,” says Frick, who last year was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. (Tourism was the prescribed theme of the project.)Ī staggering 25 million tourists come to Austin each year. One side of the three-block-long mural charts the reason why people visit Austin, the other what they do during their visit. The signature element of “Moments” is enigmatic panels, positioned at varying angles, coated with reflective signage paint and posted along the underpass walls.įrick, who has an engineering background, uses datasets to drive the compositions of her abstract artwork and so for “Data Tells a Story” she created colorful, drippy lines that undulate across a brilliant turquoise background, each a representation of Austin tourist statistics. “Data Tells a Story” is an overlay, of sorts, onto “Moments,” a 2003 piece by Carl Trominski. As the name suggests, TEMPO signifies temporary.įrick’s piece is due to be up until the end of August, a $50,000 commission from the city’s Art in Public Places program. The project is the first TEMPO Refresh, an initiative launched last year by the city’s Art in Public Places program which invited an artist to re-imagine an existing public artwork. “I think if a (public) place looks cared for, then people are more likely to respect it,” Frick tells me.įrick has garnered plenty of respect - and buzz - for her mural installation. Since the mural was installed in late September, Frick has periodically trimmed the weeds that pop through sidewalk cracks or grow in the low, narrow concrete median. “Data Tells a Story” stretches down each 500-foot-long side of the underpass, where the railroad passes over Lamar Boulevard just north of Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin.
When I meet up with Laurie Frick at “Data Tells a Story,” her vibrant mural installation along the Lamar Boulevard Underpass, she is carrying yard tools: a battery-powered leaf-blower, a pair of loppers.
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