The city has installed new temporary artwork by nine local and regional artists along the 10-mile Ann and Roy Butler Hike-and-Bike Trail. The artwork includes murals, sculptures and interactive installations.
The TEMPO on the Trail project began in 2017 as part of the Art in Public Places program. Artists submit a concept, and if chosen, receive money to create a piece.
"It showcases them as emerging artists and also really puts a light on them, in terms of the number of people coming to the trail," Mandi Thomas, chief marketing officer of the Trail Conservancy, said. "The exposure is crazy."
TEMPO received 113 applications — twice as many as last year. Nine works were selected: two murals, six sculptures and one light installation.
"We're limited on mural space on the trail because there's not a lot of walls to paint on," Thomas said.
TEMPO on the Trail is paid for with money from the hotel occupancy tax; the program had a budget of $250,000 this commission year. The Trail Conservancy pays artists $15,000 for murals, $20,000 for new media and $25,000 for sculptures. (Sculpture artists receive more money because the cost of materials and installation is higher.)
"The artists are really the owner of their budget," Thomas said. "Since they're emerging artists, we encourage them. They can scale up or scale down. This is your space, and this is your budget. Some artists will pay themselves more than others, and some of them are going over budget, because they want their art to be seen."
The installations will stay up for a year. You can find a map of them here.
"Our goal was [to] create these little surprises in a place very unexpected, but also at the same time, be true to what the trail is and how people use it," Thomas said. "It enriches the community space. It adds a little bit of joy to everyone's every day. Whether you're using the trail to bike or walk, there's always a little bit of joy around every corner."
Here's what this year's TEMPO artists said about their work in interviews with Art Beat.
Jamal Hussain
Jamal Hussain grew up in Miami and moved to Austin five years ago. His previous work was based on technology: He used screens to display content and projectors to create light that illuminated gallery spaces or the sides of buildings.
"As much as I love creating work on software and using technology, I very much disliked it because it kept me away from nature," Hussain said.
He began experimenting with traditional art materials, but says the essence of his work remains the same.
"Even when I was playing with technology, it was really about lights," Hussain said. "In the sense that all of our technology is using light to display content."
Hussain worked with acrylics for the first time for the paint's reflective abilities. The location of his piece — an open pavilion — allows sunlight to filter into the composition, manipulating the artwork. He said he noticed how the sun reflects off the waters of Lady Bird Lake and hopes to bring a similar vision to his piece.
"I'm really glad that our city has an initiative like this," Hussain said. "We're a growing tech city, but the roots of the city are also tied deeply into people having this strong connection to nature, particularly the lakes and the river systems."
Victoria Marquez
Victoria Marquez graduated from UT Austin in 2018 with bachelor's in fine arts. The Laredo native uses vivid imagery and contrasting colors that transport viewers into mystical worlds.
"I really like whimsical things, something that kind of makes you dream a little bit or makes you wonder," she said.
Marquez said her mural, located underneath an overpass, serves as a grounding escape for Austinites.
"[Nature] quiets my mind," she said. "Recentering happens a lot easier in nature. There's a lot of good imagery and smells. I like that grounding. I love this bridge, but I hear the cars, and it breaks me out of it. I'm like, 'Oh, the city's back.' I wanted to make the mural to go against the cars and bring you back in."
For her mural, Marquez created a collage on the wall of random doodles, drawing happy faces and little swirls. She anchored different elements of the piece on the doodles, painting an ear at the tip of a smiley face and so forth.
"I like murals because I feel like my paintings are little windows to little worlds," she said. "I love that this is a scene from one world and a scene from another, and these little realms that I did photography in."
Vy Ngo
Vy Ngo's work centers primarily on the experience of children of refugees and immigrants. Her parents left Vietnam during the war and landed in Pennsylvania, an identity that surrounded Ngo growing up.
"A very common motif in a lot of my work is boats," Ngo said. "Particularly because my parents were boat people. Boats also mean so much historically, not only in my own family's experience, but in all of history. Boats have been a symbol of migration, a symbol of exploration, safety and even religion. It's a very common symbol that can relate to so many different stories of the human experience."
The installation features organic matter, such as thatched bamboo, wood and other materials collected from the trail itself. The artwork encompasses a garden that will evolve over the course of the year.
"My biggest purpose in my work is to create a space for there to be an opportunity for connections to be made," Ngo said. "To each other, to ourselves, to our community, and to nature."
Ngo plans to use some of the grant money to host local artists to perform by the installation throughout the year.
"I didn't want to create a public art piece that then would just sit there and then not have any actual intentional engagement other than people walking past it," Ngo said. "I think the element of community involvement and reflection creates a fuller experience. I always try to use part of my budget to feed back into the community, to pay other artists that can reflect on the work in a way."
TJ Lemanski
TJ Lemanski grew up in the Midwest but landed in Austin in 2011. He has cast sculptures out of concrete since 2020. Cenotaphs is the seventh installment in an 11-part series.
"I've got an ongoing series where I go around and collect parts of buildings that get torn down in this city that's constantly rebuilding, renewing and shedding its skin," Lemanski said. "I've tried to capture things, both precious landmark kinds of places and nonprecious things and make smaller wall works out of that."
For his TEMPO project, Lemanski collected dead tree branches, cast them in concrete and then burned the branches, leaving behind an impression of the limbs. The project took over 250 hours of work spread over the course of two months. Despite his 10 years of experience installing art sculptures in Austin, the artist said he stayed up past 4 a.m. working and woke up anxious ahead of the installation.
"My pieces are really heavy, so they have to be safe for the public," Lemanski said. "I've made these pieces before, and they've shifted as I've learned things and changed things. I had to design a new way to install them."
Lemanski found a renewed interest in nature after he joined an art-centered run club. He began sourcing material from trails and the Lower Colorado watershed.
"It's material taken directly from the trail and memorialized," he said. "It's important to me that the materials I use for this are not cut down. I'm not going around looking at tree branches like, 'Oh, that's an interesting branch,' and go cut it. Everything I find is already dead."
The term cenotaph has Greek origins and means empty tomb. Lemanski, inspired by the empty graves found at the Alamo and in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, named his project after these memorials. He said the purpose of his piece is to memorialize the branches that become burned out of the concrete blocks.
"It's sort of Frankenstein," Lemanski said. "I'm not trying to scientifically recreate the exact likeness of a tree. It's more the impression of it, both literal and figurative."
J.C. King
J.C. King has been incorporating instruments into his artwork since 2014. He stumbled upon the Aeolian harp — an ancient instrument that produces melodies when wind passes through its strings — in 2018 and became fascinated with its sound, function and connection to nature.
"It gives human hearing a perspective on the element of wind," King said. "When I first started thinking about working with this instrument, I had a vision of building constellations of these instruments in public space, in different locations."
The strong connection to nature motivated King to learn about indigenous communities in Texas. He reached out to the Coahuiltecan tribe and asked for their interpretations of his work. He took their guidance and injected it into his art, creating a sculpture of a blue heron atop the harps.
Over three months, the artist refined prototypes of the Aeolian harp. He tested each prototype to see how the environment would ultimately affect the instrument. King hopes to bring depth and conversation about indigenous communities to his artwork.
"I'd really like for people to leave with deeper questions about their relationship with nature, how nature is speaking to them, and their presence with nature," King said. "I'm just trying to generate a sense of presence, balance, mindfulness and thought when it comes to place."
Jasna Boudard
After observing the steady flow of runners and cyclists along Austin's public trails, artist Jasna Boudard set out to reframe that sense of motion— shifting from human activity toward the movement of wildlife that inhabit these natural spaces. The featured bird is a golden-cheeked warbler, whose nesting grounds can be found only in Central Texas.
"[I wanted to] draw more of a relationship for people to be conscious of who they're sharing this trail with, such as this particular bird or other wildlife that kind of goes unnoticed when people are just in their little daily bubble," Boudard said.
The panels are made from the same durable material used in children's playground equipment. Perforations across the surface serve a dual purpose: They allow wind to pass through while evoking the motion of a bird in flight. The bird's silhouette is rendered as a mirror, inviting viewers to see themselves reflected within the natural environment they often overlook.
"We've had to design this piece a few times," Boudard said. "There's a lot of materials that would work in certain settings. But once it's outdoors, it just reacts really differently. You have to be a lot more conscious of the elements affecting the piece, and how it would deteriorate over the course of the year that it lives outside."
The project took five months to create and changes due to tariffs forced the artist back to the drawing board several times. Despite unexpected budget constraints, Boudard said her execution didn't suffer. She hopes passersby will not view the work passively, but enter the piece and breathe in it.
"This represents nature and the wildlife that surrounds us," Boudard said. "For us to not just be in our little human mindset, but remember that we're connected to something so much bigger."
Seth Prestwood
With the intention of capturing the feeling of biking along Austin trails, Seth Prestwood painted a mural that depicts armadillos, bats and paddleboarders set against a sunset-hued color scheme. Stacked rocks, cacti and cowboys on horseback, meanwhile, are painted in black and white.
"After all these years, I still find something new every time that I'm on the trail," Prestwood said. "Things just kind of popped up. Even as I was painting, I would find things that weren't in the original design that ended up being in the final product."
The artist enlisted a friend to help clean up the wall, which he says wasn't initially in great shape. The pair completed the installation in a week.
"The reason why the figures are kind of just silhouetted and ambiguous is I wanted people to be able to put themselves in that scenario and see themselves rowing, kayaking and running. I even put myself in there reading with my dog next to me."
This is Prestwood's first mural in Austin.
"There's four different skyscapes in there," he said, "and I wanted those to be the real eye-catcher, and everything else is white around it."
Steef Crombach and Priscilla Lustig
Dutch visual artist Steef Crombach and painter Priscilla Lustig envisioned Cazimi as a place for Austinites to orient themselves, literally and physically. The piece, at International Shores, spans 65 by 65 feet. The fabric sculpture is mounted on poles, casting shade from the sweltering Texas sun onto those beneath it, with shadows shifting at different points in the day.
"We named it Cazimi, which means 'in the heart of the sun,'" Lustig said. "We're [also] in the heart of Texas, the heart of the heat."
The duo, who are friends outside work, combined their skillsets for this piece. Lustig's paintings are geometric, highlighting the sharp contrasts between different colors, whereas Crombach's interests lie in traditional quilting techniques.
"People often have these hesitations of [working with friends or family]," Lustig said. "It can get hard, and that's something that we're both cognizant of. We definitely make moments to check in with each other and be like, 'Hey, how can I better show up in this way?'"
The artists have previously worked together. Crombach says they schedule work meetings and hangouts, making sure to differentiate between the two. They never run into issues creatively, she said.
"When it comes to creative decisions, it's almost like we were already thinking of the same thing, and we're just kind of filling each other in," Crombach said. "Naturally, it starts coming along without us having huge creative meetings."
enFold Collective
Licensed architect Dana McKinney White and designer Megan Echols started enFold Collective because they felt people who looked like them were not well represented in the traditional practice of architecture and urban planning.
They began thinking about design at different scales, whether that be public art, urban planning or design. Sunclipse, suspended 20 feet in the air at the Pfluger Bridge Circle, is inspired by the Austin sunset. The piece is named after a term coined by architect Buckminster Fuller, who felt the terms "sunrise" and "sunset" centered too much on the Earth.
"It's a really important time of day for Austin, especially during the hotter times of year, which is most of the year," Echols said. "Sunset is the period where everybody can finally feel relieved enough to come out, enjoy nature and go for a run."
The pair worked with a fabricator on the metalwork and assembled the fabric — composed of a nylon material similar to a tent — themselves.
"It was quite nice that as we were installing it, we had hundreds of people stopping on the trail, asking us what we were making," White said. "Before it was complete, we could start to see that it actually had the sort of resonance that we were looking for."
Echols said that one evening, as the sun began to sink into the horizon, two little girls began playing underneath the installation.
"They just start spinning while the wind is blowing, the pieces flowing all around, and they're just laughing and giggling," she said. "And I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is so beautiful.'"
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