 in the studio here today at Davis Media Access and we're talking about two of my favorite things, art and maps. And we're gonna talk about how they came together in a new Davis art map. I'm Autumn Lab A Renaud. I'm your host today and I have three guests with me. Let me introduce them very quickly. On the end we have Jen Cadue who is a graduate student in the UC Davis Department of Design. We have Mark Hoshowski who is a longtime Davis resident and the reason the map came into being. And then finally we have Rachel Hartso who is the city's arts and culture manager. So welcome to you all. Thank you, Autumn. Thanks. So Mark, let's start it with your parents. Tell us the story. Yeah, so basically my parents really got me, raised me to really do exploring. I love exploring and traveling and going different places. And it occurs to me that you can explore on a lot of different scales. I've traveled all over the world and you can explore even more locally. And so I brought my parents to Davis, about three years ago. And they're, my mother's 89, my father's 91 now. And I wanted to get them out walking and enjoying Davis and exploring Davis basically. And it was important for their physical and mental health to get out. So one of the, and part of the thing is Davis actually has, there's miles of green belts in this town. You may not appreciate it, but just around the perimeter of the town there's 12 miles of green belts. That's not including the ones in the interior. So compared to any other city size, it's an incredible resource. And so I started to tell my folks, let's go explore, let's go different places. And we started to do that, but then I realized that my mother needed to sit down every few hundred yards or so at her age. But I didn't know where the benches were. And I got into trouble, I would get out or part way and she said I needed to sit down and there was no place to sit down. So I wanted to continue exploring and going different places with them. And I figured the important thing was to know where the benches were. So I basically rode all the green belts and I mapped all the benches, which gave me a resource that I could take them anywhere in town and know that when mom's tired around the corner is the next bench. And we just push a little bit further and we can do that, she can sit down. Well, while doing that, I saw that there was a lot of other things along those green belts. There is, and throughout town, there's great historical buildings in town, there's semi-natural areas around town, and then there's all this art. And some of the art people don't fully appreciate. For example, we have giant dominoes in town, we have a flying saucer, and we have a wall of dinosaurs, just examples, okay? Those all make walks really interesting and things to explore. There's walks around, even downtown, not in the green belts, but there's a lot of art downtown. So you started mapping all the art you found. Right. I think we have a map that has your original pinpoints. We have that up on the monitor now, so we'll take a look at that. So this is where it started. Yeah, so I started to compile information from the city GIS data sets. They're computer mapping and things that I found and I just compiled it all together. I realized it was more than just, my idea was to create some three-fold brochures that could be available at senior housing. So that anyone coming in town to take grandma for a walk could just pick it up and go. But then I realized there were mothers that had children they want to take to the playgrounds and go out for exploration. And then there's visitors from out of town. And I thought, you know, this seems snowballed basically. And I figured how can I create something that would capture a lot of that and be a sort of explorers guide to Davis. And so I talked with the County Visitors Bureau, talked with the Davis Art Center, got in touch with Rachel and the city and looking for ways to improve this information to make it more accessible, to figure out ways to reproduce it and then to share it with other people. So you said it snowballed. What happened next? Well, so I started working with the city and Jennifer here to figure out how we could make more interesting cartographic maps, something that was more appealing than simply my initial version of it. I'm a scientist. I was fairly utilitarian. It's like, show me the dots. But I'm telling you, I'm not an artist. And so that's why we needed a little bit more artful play in here. I also created my first blog site, which actually has all this information. My original maps plus photographs of all the art. There's about 170, 180 different pieces in town. So that's available on this blog that I've created. So now the next stage is working with these guys and figuring out how we can produce a map and get it out to people. Do you want to give us a link for that blog real quickly? I don't think I have it. You can access the blog on the city's arts website, which will be up later. And we'll talk about that a little later. So then, how did you get involved with this, Jen? Through my academic advisor, you see Davis, Professor Tim McNeill. He's involved with the city in the Davis Pathfinder project, which is a great project that is in the works now that will be enhancing the wayfinding system for pedestrians and cyclists here in Davis. So he linked me up with them and they're looking for someone to take the cartography to the next step. And that's something I've been doing for a few years now, working for music festivals and doing the cartography for those. So through my research and my thesis work, this has really helped to enhance that because my studies are about art in the natural landscape and curating big art. And Davis is a place that has so much green space and so many people who love to enjoy it and people that are really involved in the arts community. So this is an exciting facet of my research to see cartography and public engagement with art in an urban landscape rather than a temporary festival landscape. Yeah. What has it taught you about Davis of being involved in this process? So much. I'm new to Davis. I moved here in August about a year ago and I've learned so much about the people, how much they're impassioned about the town that they live in and getting out, walking around, saying hello to everyone. It's a very friendly community. People love their green space and there's so much art here. It's changing all the time and it's very encouraged and supported. So one of my questions for you is when you have a map like this that is, we have a truck in the parking lot and I hope no one can hear that right now but I'll just own that. So Davis is a town and we'll touch on this with Rachel where art is constantly being added. How do you keep a resource like this current? Well, we're starting from now and we're going to projectively be adding to it, updating it every, who knows how often whatever resources are up to the city decide that. I think we have a visual now of what it looks like at this point and I believe they're gonna show some of the other images as we're talking. So this is how it's evolved from Mark's original data points to more of a visually and aesthetically appealing process and map. But I imagine that the updating it is gonna be challenging, especially with Rachel on the job because there's a lot happening on the art scene. She has some creative ideas that we were talking about how we might be able to engage people in doing that. Right. Let me come to you then because Rachel and I have worked together on the Arts Alliance of Davis and there's a website that's sort of nascent. It's coming soon. Very close. Very close to being done and there's a group that meets regularly that's gonna be plugging in content. But where do you fall in this mix? How did Mark end up connecting with you and where does this fall in the city's overall arts strategy? So what I am tasked with at the city right now is kind of doing this assessment of our overall arts resources, whether it's public arts or capacity to support programming or our ability to help emerging arts organizations grow and provide the support to them that they really need to get going here. And so when our colleague at the Visitors Bureau contacted me and said, hey, I have this thing. I think you might be interested in it. And it was like a goldmine of data because it would take us so long to go out and collect that. So the map, we had already been wanting to make a map and working on kind of looking at different iterations of maps and collecting and analyzing lots of maps from other cities to see what would work well and graphically what we liked and just how to update our resources and really thinking at the same time about how this will fit in with sort of a more enhanced way that we would like to have people in the community interact and engage with art and with each other. That's really one of our big goals. As you know, we went through this big strategic planning process earlier in the year with the Arts Alliance, which you were part of. And really one of the things that we kept coming back to is how do we create better human connections in the community and how do we use the art to support and enhance that. And so whether it's getting people to go out together to go look at art in the community, using our green belts and pathways to promote activity which then promotes these kind of random interactions between people that create opportunities to get to know your neighbors or opportunities to get to know your broader community neighbors who might live in a different neighborhood or a different part of the city or who might be visiting and how do we, as residents here, how do we share our experience of our community with people who are here temporarily or just momentarily. And so it's really, so I'm excited to be able to roll the map out and we have a new GIS technician at the city and so we're also looking at, to kind of respond to your earlier question, we're looking at ways that we might use this map to continually, the map is like the print version but we would also anticipate having an electronic program of app of some sort that the community would use where they could be anticipating updating things as they see them or hopefully documenting the art and the ways that people are engaging with the art. So I hope, and there is a new, just a mapping program that we're kind of just rolling out and testing out on the art's website for the city right now that anybody can go and if they see something they can upload a picture of it. So it's not just about official public art or even official pieces that people have commissioned but it's about ways that people in the community are creatively expressing themselves so it might be that you have something fabulous in your home that's shared with the public. Sometimes you see a beautiful garden and a smart work there. I do want to, one thing that I forgot to mention, do you want to give credit to the fact that there actually have been three different maps of art in town that I tapped into. None of them were as complete. None of them actually matched each other but the university has a map of art, the downtown business association. What was that down, the city had a map and then there was a third map that I found. So there was actually other contribution from other people. I just sort of consolidated it and added to it. I just wanted to make sure that people understood. It wasn't, I didn't start from scratch. How much time did you spend on this though? Somebody asked me that the other day and I don't know, I wasn't keeping track but probably 80, 100 hours I guess. It's more of just fun going out and exploring, mapping, photographing. I was just learning a lot of skills doing it. Getting fresh air and enjoying art helping out your parents and other folks. Helping my parents, yeah, there you go. Rachel, let's talk about the website a little bit more. I know it's not quite live but do you want to give the URL so people can just begin to get used to that? Sure, sure. I'm happy to give the URL. So it is artsalliancedavis.org. And we literally are just almost gonna be rolling it out within the next month, I would say. So it is meant to be a portal to arts resources in the community and really it's an open book right now. It's anybody who wants to be a part of that we have welcomed in and we have really strategically gone out and tried to invite people so that we have a real range of diversity represented there amongst arts organizations and non-arts organizations, people affiliated with the community, people affiliated with the university, people that represent different interests in the community. And from our perspective, I submitted information for Davis Media Access and I can go there and I can see our mission and some photos and representation of what we do. We're actually almost out of time. I told you this would go fast. So the best way for people to get to the map is how? So currently the map is in a draft format. So it is not publicly available yet but when it is available it will be on the city website which is cityofdavis.org. Cityofdavis.org slash arts is the arts page and that's where all arts things are kept and housed and can be accessed. But when it is released, we'll do a big blitz about it and have both print copies of it as well as electronic versions. And then I wanna really say that our goal is to go back to Mark's original plan and have these printouts that are available in different sections of town so that people, if they want to, can pick up a hand version, a print version and take a walk with it because that was really his original goal and that's important for us to respect and honor that. So sensitive to the audiences that the older people are not necessarily gonna use a smartphone, they're not gonna use a website but they will pick up a brochure that's right there at their senior housing or somebody at the bike shop will be just coming into town, renting a bike and wanna grab a map. Yeah, I think for visitors it's great. Different audiences is what we wanna tap into. Well, I wanna thank you all for your work on this. I'm excited to see it and we'll have this great new resource and I also can't wait to see what future art arises and gets added to it. So thanks for coming in today. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for tuning in to Davis Media Access, Davis Community Television here in the studio. You can find out more about all our programming and resources online at davismedia.org. We're also on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Find us there.