UWT creates online guide to its public art

Discovering public art at the University of Washington Tacoma just got a whole lot easier. “Art on Campus” is a new website created by the downtown campus that gives a photo-based tour of some of the highlights of its public art collection, with a downloadable PDF guide to all 35 works.

The mobile-friendly site illustrates and describes eight of the most striking art works on the campus, including Dale Chihuly’s effervescent glass “Chinook Red Chandelier” inside a windowed section of the library; the granite suitcases of Brian Goldbloom’s “Terminus” and the large circular bronze “Maru” by Gerard Tsutakawa (both along the Prairie Line walking path), the Picasso drawing “Le Visage de la Paix” in the Snoqualmie Building and the various “ghost” signs on walls around the campus.

While the site is a good start on illuminating UWT public art for visitors, it has some limitations: There’s no map, and not all works have geographical descriptions. The PDF, though it does have a map, doesn’t have photo representations of all the art and is difficult to navigate on a mobile device.

Two other Tacoma online public art guides, meanwhile, continue to provide images and information about the rest of the city’s art: The Tacoma-Pierce County Public Art Tour is an interactive map with clickable markers that bring up descriptions, photos, directions, a street view and an add-to-itinerary function, while the Spaceworks Tacoma map describes the latest artworks and creative enterprises funded through the nonprofit program via both an interactive map and a photo grid of locations, again with directions, street view and itinerary.

This story was originally published August 3, 2015 at 12:53 PM with the headline "UWT creates online guide to its public art."