Another downtown traffic box will get an artistic makeover later this month, and the Allied Arts Council invites you to watch.
On Wednesday, March 26 artist W. Justin Border will create St. Joseph’s second traffic box public art project, at the corner of 4th and Felix.
Border begins creating his design around 11 a.m.
The community is invited to watch as he brings a piece of artwork to life, and turns an ordinary street corner into a piece of art.
“The background of this design is created out of several sections of a stylized topographical map of St. Joseph,” Border said.
“The foreground is based off a diagram of a section of the Missouri River floodplains dating back to the 1930s. The blue denotes the river in its current channel. Although the design is fairly abstract, I wanted a strong sense of place for the work. I have always been fascinated with maps and the functions of maps. Topographical maps show the layout of the land in a flattened plane with contour lines representing elevation, forcing us to imagine the space in three dimensions. I aim for this piece to do sort of the same thing and spur the viewer’s imagination.”
Border is currently an Education Assistant at the Johnson County Museum in Shawnee, KS, and a Student Archive Science Trainee at the National Archives and Records Administration in Lenexa, KS. He currently attends the Graphic Design Certificate Program at the Kansas City Art Institute, with an expected graduation date of May 2014.
For more information on the selected artist or the traffic box piece, please visit