PIANOS HELP CELEBRATE FORT COLLINS’ 150TH BIRTHDAY
Pianos About Town, a program that reaches to juxtapose art and music around Fort Collins, is wrapping up its fourth season with myriad of new painted pianos that celebrate the city’s 150th birthday.
Local artists publicly paint the pianos in Old Town Square before the pianos are then rotated to multiple locations throughout the city. At this time, anyone is able to play the pianos at his or her leisure.
Steve Sanders, a Fort Collins artist, commemorates the 150th birthday by painting silhouettes of Horsetooth Reservoir and bicycles backed by a colorful Fort Collins sunset on his designated piano.
“I wanted to do something really bright and colorful…with a just a bunch of crazy colors creating the sunset,” Sanders said. “At the same time, Fort Collins was founded the year before the first bicycle was invented, so I thought it would be an interesting thing to go ahead and show a transition of bikes…from the first bicycle that was actually made out of wood, all the way up to modern day bikes.”
Sanders is excited about his work being displayed in Fort Collins and is impressed at the way Fort Collins moves the pianos “spontaneously.”
“[The program] doesn’t even have a map for it,” Sanders said. “They say part of the fun with it is actually kind of just exploring Fort Collins and they move [the pianos] different places at different times. That’s supposed to create a sense of spontaneity about it…It creates a spontaneous art scene and art community.”
Sanders was selected last May to paint a piano for Pianos About Town through a quite lengthy process.
“I have applied a couple of years and this year, actually, I got selected for the piano,” Sanders said. “You submit a sketch and then like an application and they review your portfolio and then they look over the sketch itself. You also do an artist’s statement explaining the piece. So you submit those about the end or middle of April every year and then they usually let you know about the end of May whether or not you’ve been selected for it.”
Various artists have painted ten pianos since May 2014. Sanders started painting the 11th piano on October 8th and will be finished by October 22nd.
Pianos About Town is organized by the Bohemian Foundation, Downtown
Development Authority’s Art in Action Program, and the City of Fort Collins’ Art in
Public Places Program.