Two years and 400 unpaid hours later, a Metro Transit mural is in limbo

Delays with artist Jenie Gao’s project highlight problems with Madison’s public arts programs.

Artist and entrepreneur Jenie Gao spent months putting together a proposal for a public art project, an 8,000 square-foot mural for the Madison Metro Transit building at 1101 E. Washington Ave. focused on commuters. Gao interviewed City of Madison employees and 27 people who rely on Metro’s bus service for transportation, most of whom were BIPOC. The riders told Gao they saw their (often long) transit time as their own—a time to read, think, or watch the world go by. 

“The Time is Ours,” Gao’s proposed mural, would be painted to represent the four seasons in Madison: melting ice and crocuses for spring, sunflowers and cicadas for summer, milkweed pods and flying geese for fall, and snow and empty space for winter. The seasons were mixed with portraits of bus riders holding books, groceries, and gifts on aluminum panels “floating” off the wall.

Gao is an established and well-connected art professional in Madison. Their proposal for the Madison Metro project received a wave of public support. Madison Arts Commission (MAC)—a body that advises City of Madison leaders on arts issues, and distributes some of the City’s funding for arts grants—received dozens of pages of public comments in favor of the project. 

“Deservedly so because of the intentional, thoughtful way in which this piece has come together,” says Nick Pjevach, MAC chair. “If someone were to review the finalists, they would be like, Jenie’s piece is the piece that is most exciting.”

In October 2022, MAC voted to recommend Gao’s proposal and the Madison Common Council gave the final approval on November 1 of that year. 

That was then. Now, two years in, the project has been delayed for so long that Gao can’t begin installation until the summer of 2026. And it’s no longer clear what the mural will look like. One source of the delay is that in 2025 Metro Transit is re-siding the wall where the mural will be. As a result, Gao will have to redesign the project. 

What’s taking so long?

The delays on Gao’s project started from the beginning. The City began soliciting proposals for the project in April 2021, setting an initial deadline for May 7 of that year. Gao responded to the request for qualifications—basically, a stage in the City purchasing process that evaluates potential vendors—before the deadline. The deadline was postponed twice, then put out to bid a third time “because there wasn’t a strong response to the first call,” Madison Arts Program Administrator Karin Wolf says. Gao didn’t learn they were a finalist until April 2022.

Gao submitted their first request for a written contract on October 13, 2022, after MAC voted to recommend Gao’s proposal to the Common Council for approval. But Gao did not receive an initial draft of a contract from the City until May 2023, despite repeated communications with City staff asking about it. 

And the first draft “was in pretty poor shape,” Gao says. “It was clearly an amalgamation of different contracts. It was in different font sizes, different font faces, different punctuation styles throughout. [It was] just this Frankenstein’s monster of a contract and that it wasn’t a contract I was ready to sign.”

Wolf told Tone Madison in an email that after Gao’s proposal was selected by the Common Council, “staff requested [Gao’s] finalized design proposal and budget, as that is necessary to enter a contract for the project.” Gao fulfilled these requirements in April. But City staff asked Gao to update the design for a slight change in location for $3,000 while Gao was waiting to see an initial draft of the contract. Gao invoiced the city in December, but did not receive that payment until April 2023. The City expected Gao to “finalize the design proposal and budget,” including the location change, before issuing them a contract.

As contract negotiations dragged on, Gao pressed for clarity. They sent emails about every two weeks asking for updates, for months. They hired an attorney and scheduled meetings to expedite the negotiations, but the City canceled those meetings and did not send a revised contract until July 2023.

“That set the pace in terms of how long the negotiations for this contract even took,” Gao says. “I would say I took a couple of weeks to get back to them, they might get back to me a month, two months later.”

Wolf stated that “the City does not agree with [Gao’s] characterization of the contract negotiations.” She wrote that Gao responded to the initial contract with “an unusually high number of proposed changes, and questions she had regarding the terms, including the standard terms and conditions included in every City contract,” and queries that needed to be answered by multiple City agencies.

City Attorney Michael Haas says complaints about the City’s processes are not new. “We have developers, public works, contractors, small businesses that don’t especially care for the city processes, but there’s reasons for those processes to be in place,” Haas says.

“I don’t think this is really unusual, either that it takes some time or that a vendor or business has challenges or frustrations with or complaints about the city process,” Haas adds. “It’s tempting to always say, well, the City is a big, inefficient organization and moves slow. But I think people have to realize the City is all the individual staff members doing their jobs to balance multiple priorities, and not only the interests of the vendor or the business that they’re working with, but the City residents and taxpayers.”

Another reason for the delay is that the attorney working on Gao’s contract on the City’s behalf had to go on medical leave during the process. Gao is sympathetic to the attorney’s need to take leave, but notes: “there’s an entire City Attorney’s office. It’s not like all the contracts for the City just stopped because one person went on medical leave.” Wolf says the attorney on leave specialized in arts contracts. “There are multiple attorneys, and they are each assigned to various departments, divisions, and projects based on their expertise,” Wolf says. “Sometimes we wait for a particular attorney to return to the office to proceed.”

“It just felt like my contract was low priority,” Gao says.

Haas says that after the project was pushed back to summer 2024, “there wasn’t a reason for us to then move that contract up in the queue.”

“To me, this does not need to be a bunch of finger-pointing back and forth,” Haas says. “Everybody in the process is doing their job. [Gao’s] advocating for [their] project. The City planning folks and engineering folks have to do their job. And then our office helps with the contracts, and that has to be all done in a certain order.”

While Gao did eventually reach an agreement with the City in March 2024, for 18 months they worked as an independent contractor without a contract. 

The wall

With Gao’s contract finalized, the mural was scheduled to be painted this summer. 

But then, “literally within days of having a fully executed contract,” Gao says, they received an email stating that City engineers had decided to re-side the wall where Gao’s mural was supposed to go. The work couldn’t be done this year, so it would have to be done in summer 2025, pushing back the mural’s installation to 2026.

“If this is an actual structural issue that they’ve discovered and they need to fix it, I would understand that,” Gao says. “But my subcontractors and I have done so many site visits and this is not the first time that the wall has been inspected. We’ve done those site visits with the City staff…This is not the first time anybody has looked at this wall in the last two years.”

Jon Evans, a project manager with the City’s engineering division, stated in an email to Tone Madison: “The condition of the siding came to our attention when we removed some to survey brick conditions” in a section of the building scheduled for restoration.

“Areas of rust were expanding and the condition on the backside of the siding was also failing— we estimated that the siding had no more than a 5 year life remaining,” Evans wrote. “We didn’t feel it was appropriate to paint a mural on top of this condition.  And definitely not appropriate to support the heavy aluminum cutouts from deteriorated siding.”

Now because of the re-siding, Gao has to redesign the project. 

“In an 18-month contracting process, at any point in time, they could have decided if the wall really needed to be re-sided,” Gao says. “Or frankly, if this were ever a concern, that probably should have happened before the public bid was ever even published.”

Wolf stated that the re-siding wouldn’t have been an issue if Gao had followed the terms of the original request for qualifications. The document, on page 10, stated that “the piece should be able to be removed for wall maintenance and repairs without damage to the piece or the building walls.” Still, MAC and the Common Council ultimately approved Gao’s proposal, which involves painting the mural directly onto the wall.

Wolf said MAC and the city moved forward with Gao’s proposal because of the community support for their project: “Staff worked hard to try to accommodate [Gao’s] proposal.” 

Gao disputes the City’s narrative, pointing out that if painting on the wall was going to be such an issue, the City could have chosen an artist with removable panels in their proposal or asked Gao to change their design. When the City decided the wall did need re-siding, Gao prepared a flow chart detailing how the project could move forward. One option included painting the mural on removable vinyl panels. Instead of going with that option, “City staff fought to keep my original solution, with a hand-painted mural directly on the surface of the wall,” Gao says.

“They wanted a solution that addressed the big, beige wall, [emphasis Gao’s] which they found unsightly. So I crafted a proposal that addressed the big, beige wall in the most impactful way,” Gao wrote in an email to Tone Madison. “While some City staff are now trying to shift the narrative to sound as if they did not want a mural painted directly on the wall, this contradicts the solution they want from me now.”

At what cost?

Gao and the other three finalists for the project received $2,000 in 2022 for their proposals. The City has paid $3,000 for the initial location update to their design, and after the re-siding was announced, the City agreed to pay Gao an additional $9,975 for the redesign. Gao says that was only “because I fought for it and the community joined me in those demands.” 

“This means the entire design and revision process happens without a contract [emphasis Gao’s], and usually without payment to artists,” Gao wrote in an email.

Gao says that City staff told them they would not receive an updated contract until the redesign has been completed and approved. So once again, Gao is working without a contract.

Wolf wrote that Gao is “operating under a purchase order, which is a type of contract, as they were paid an additional fee to redesign.”

“We can’t issue a more formal contract because we do not yet have the specifics about what we are buying and its cost,” Wolf added.

Although Gao has been paid for the redesign work, they haven’t been compensated for the almost 400 hours they put into the project in other capacities—negotiating the contract, going back and forth with the City, and most recently, dealing with the aftermath of the decision to re-side the Metro Transit building. 

Gao has also had to take on a bevy of other expenses, including: additional insurance for the project, attorney fees, and the opportunity costs of the ongoing delays. Gao hadn’t anticipated it would take so long to get a working contract, so they had scheduled to start the installation the summer of 2023 and booked subcontractors. When they had to cancel because of the contract issues, both Gao and their subcontractors lost time and money.

The project’s future is still uncertain. City staff told Gao the redesign should be the same scope at the same budget, which Gao noted is no longer feasible, due to inflation after a four-year delay. 

Wolf says that the City cannot compromise on the scope and budget of the project, because there’s an important principle at work. 

“This is not about Gao or this one project, it is about maintaining the trust of the citizens we serve,” Wolf wrote. “The City purchasing process cannot create the perception that taxpayers are overspending if a vendor/artist is awarded a contract with an appealing design or proposal that they ultimately don’t fulfill and then try to demand the City buy a different scale artwork at a higher price.”

But Gao didn’t arbitrarily change the proposal; they have to redesign the project because of unanticipated delays they blame on a lack of planning, communication, and clarity from the City.

As for the increased cost for Gao, Wolf wrote that “we anticipate that the new siding will result in some cost savings from their original proposal, and we expect that it may make up the difference.” 

Gao said they’re not looking at hypotheticals or possible savings on the project. “What savings?” they ask. “It’s still a mural made of the same materials on the same-sized wall.” They want to talk about the actual balance sheet of labor, materials, and opportunity costs. And looking at that sheet, Gao says that at this point they will be lucky to break even.

Nothing new

Gao lived and built their career as an artist in Madison, and served on MAC from 2015 to 2018. Their murals—dense with bursts of riotous color and rugged, naturalistic texture—have become familiar features of Madison’s cityscape, from the back of an east-side church to Working Draft Beer Company’s taproom to former gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke’s house.

Gao has also made a point of pushing for more public conversation about the business and policy sides of the arts—specifically, the tendency of large institutions to underpay artists, and the power imbalances that make that possible. 

In 2019, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) invited artists to submit proposals for a ticketed fundraising event called Chroma. Initially, MMoCA was not offering to pay the artists selected. On top of that, the museum was asking artists to pay application and installation fees. Gao worked with fellow artists Jamie Ho and Jennifer Bastian to organize a protest and open letter, calling for MMoCA to offer artists better terms. The letter framed the episode as only the latest in a long pattern of exploitation and insults: “At a museum like MMoCA, the art curator gets paid. The director gets paid. The assistants get paid. The event coordinators get paid. But the artists almost never get paid, even though it would be literally impossible to have an art museum without art.” 

More than 250 artists and community members signed the letter—a rare display of solidarity and public rabble-rousing in Madison’s scattered and conflict-averse arts world. In response, MMoCA waived the application fees and offered to pay the artists selected for Chroma. The event, scheduled for April 2020, was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Gao kept building their art practice and critiquing the choices public and private institutions make in working with artists. They moved to Vancouver in fall 2021 to pursue an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and today split their time between Vancouver and Madison. 

The mural is the first public art project the City of Madison is funding through its Percent for Art program. This program supplements the City’s other mechanisms for arts funding by setting aside 1% of the budget for certain City capital projects over $5 million. It was intended to fill the gap created when former Gov. Scott Walker killed Wisconsin’s state-level Percent for Art program in 2011. Madison’s Common Council and then-Mayor Paul Soglin created the program in 2017, setting it to take effect in fall 2019. The COVID pandemic’s disruptions in public arts funding—and its impact on construction costs—have slowed the impact of Percent for Art. 

Meanwhile, the City’s other main funding stream for arts programming is awkwardly linked with tourism dollars, and Wisconsin remains dead last in the U.S. for state-level public arts funding. 

“What we’re seeing is the long-term results of underfunding for the arts,” Gao says of the delays surrounding their commission.

This is not the first time a public art project in Madison has been significantly delayed. Shift, an art installation along the Highland Avenue underpass by UW-Madison graduate Julia Schilling, took seven years to complete. The two-story question mark lit with Edison bulbs hanging from a window facing Mifflin Street at the Madison Public Library Central location was delayed because of electrical safety standards. Bureaucratic hurdles come with the territory of public art, of course—complex government purchasing rules, coordination among any number of different agencies, and so on. The question is whether public-art programs set up artists to navigate those twists and turns successfully. 

Gao’s experience fits into a larger pattern that artists in Madison contend with as they try to develop their careers and get paid.  Meaningful opportunities are scarce in the first place, and what few exist are not well-paid—whether they’re with public or private institutions. The few people in local government tasked with advocating for the arts do so with limited resources and very little real political power.

“Art in general, in our community, is generally taken for granted,” says Pjevach. “Part of what this whole process with working with Jenie Gao has highlighted is [the City is] trying to figure out some amount of structure and process that didn’t previously exist because the City didn’t have a Percent for Art program prior.”

Pjevach says one factor is that “public art, in itself, is a complicated process.”

“How do you allow for public opinion?” Pjevach asks. “How do you engage the community in trying to pick work that speaks to the greater community at large, while also not having pieces be watered down by the process of ‘art by committee’?”

Another complicating factor, Pjevach says, is that Wolf’s job is housed within the City’s Planning Division. Wolf has never had a full-time staff—two other Planning staffers with arts backgrounds devote part of their work time to arts issues. They have the support of MAC, but the City does not have a full-fledged arts agency. This public art team has to work across multiple divisions and departments. 

“Trying to navigate some of that communication while also having it be a public, open process. where there’s the opportunity for the community at large to submit public comment… obviously makes it somewhat difficult as well,” Pjevach says.

He also concedes that some of the City’s processes around public art aren’t as fleshed-out as they need to be. For instance, Pjevach says, there wasn’t really a roadmap for dealing with the fact that Gao’s proposal diverged from the initial request for qualifications. While Pjevach agreed Gao’s was the strongest proposal, he asks, “what does it mean to pick and recommend a piece that does not fully fulfill the RFP as outlined? Which is an interesting question, right?” 

“At the end of the day, through the process, obviously we want to do right by the community, we want to do right by the location of the art and how it’s placed within the physical, built environment of the city, and then obviously, we want to do right by the artist,” Pjevach says. “And I think that, obviously, there are times where trying to navigate all of those things at once, it unfortunately, hasn’t been a perfect process.”

Is this normal?

Tone Madison reached out to public arts administrators outside of Madison for this story. While they said they could not comment specifically on Gao’s case, they could weigh in on best practices for public arts programs. Mary LaRoche, administrator for the Percent for Art program for the state of Minnesota, says: “We always do work under contract.”

“And then at the end of the meeting—ideally it’s our second meeting or third—the artist is chosen, a contract is created with them, and the project begins,” LaRoche says.

One thing that LaRoche emphasized is that “For the Minnesota Percent For Art program, we have transparency.” 

“I make sure everyone knows what is expected from the very beginning, both artists and host facilities, so everyone has the exact same information as everyone else,” LaRoche says. “Our expectations are crystal clear from the beginning.”

George Tzougros, executive director of the Wisconsin Arts Board, says he could see scenarios where contracting is delayed but “generally speaking, we’d like to see artists under contract so that they have all the protections that a contract would provide.”

Tzougros says that delays should be handled collaboratively, with “solid revised timelines… so that everybody is on the same page, as opposed to just sort of hanging around waiting for specifics.” And when a project is delayed multiple years, “you certainly should have at least the conversation about what might change, as far as scope or compensation,” he adds. 

“Because obviously, while you wait for a particular project to come online, you may be giving up other projects, trying to save space for creating the one that you’re already committed to,” Tzougros says. “There’s an opportunity cost there.”

When asked what the City is learning from this project, Wolf says: “We may have to shift to have more of a balance between contracting with experienced public artists who can design, deliver, and install on time and on budget—and who are able to be flexible when issues come up, because issues always come up—and those who need a little more help understanding how to create a realistic budget, how to work with a structural engineer, and how to translate their studio work into outdoor public space.”

But Gao is not an unseasoned artist: they have finished a lot of outdoor, public art projects of similar size and scope for entities with much fewer resources than the City. Like the project Gao co-led with another artist, Rhea Ewing, for the City of Middleton’s Operations Center through Dane Arts Mural Arts in 2020. It was the first public arts project the City of Middleton had undertaken, so Middleton’s Public Arts Committee raised funds to not only cover the cost of the project but also to pay Gao as a consultant on the process. The contrast between that experience and Gao’s experience working with the City of Madison is stark.

“I’m lucky to have a community that’s very supportive of me, because they know me, and they know my work,” Gao says. “But how is anybody who is less supported than I am, who has less robust support than I have, how are they supposed to do this if I’m getting treated this way?”

There are currently two requests for proposals under the City’s Percent for Art program—one for the Villager on Park parking structure and another for the Madison Public Market. Gao says they want to see the Metro Transit mural to completion out of the hope that it will be a learning experience for the City, so that other local artists can take advantage of the opportunities under the Percent for Art program. 

“I always like to hope for positive change and growth and learning and accountability,” Gao says. “Just because mistakes have happened before doesn’t mean people or institutions have to repeat those mistakes.”