LAMORINDA WEEKLY | It's a wrap!


The first wrap, installed on the corner of Lafayette Circle and Mt. Diablo Boulevard. Photo Pippa Fisher

Observant Lafayette residents might have noticed a few random acts of art around town lately. Utility boxes around the city are now being disguised with colorful wraps, designed by Lafayette students to help celebrate the city's 50th anniversary.

The eye-catching project started with an idea from the ad hoc 50th Anniversary Committee over a year ago, and it has taken a lot of work since then from several bodies to pull it all together.

Public Art Committee Member Erling Horn and PAC Chair Janice Peacock worked with Lafayette Partners in Education Executive Director Myrna Kimmelman, who provided a selection of elementary school art projects in a variety of mediums including pastels, watercolors, crayon and gouache as well as logos designed by high school students to the PAC for review and selection.

With funding from the city and a contract with Sequoia Signs and Graphics, Peacock set to work with local graphic designer Danielle Gogo-Gallagher to create the large-format image files - and lay out the images so that they would be visually pleasing from all angles, ensuring the image wrapped all the way around.

"For me," says Peacock, "The images on the utility boxes celebrate the world around us and feature plants, animals, houses, people, water, green hills, and even the stars and planets above us."

Horn says that marrying the kids' art to large vinyl panels was not easy, "But Janice and her consultant did a magnificent job," he says.

The art is being wrapped around city-owned traffic signal control cabinets with the logos being applied to the smaller control boxes.

The city works department cold-water cleaned the first set of boxes near the Bank of the West at the corner of Lafayette Circle and Mt. Diablo Boulevard and Sequoia Graphics applied the first set of vinyl wraps on May 2.

And there are more to come - nine boxes in total. Residents will spot them installed at various downtown locations on Mt. Diablo Boulevard over the next few days. Horn says the wraps should last about a year.

It has taken cooperation from many groups to make this happen. Horn says that Lafayette Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Jay Lifson provided help with vendor selection, adding, "We could not have pulled this off without the crucial help of Myrna Kimmelman at LPIE and Lafayette City Council funding."

And that's a wrap.