Wake Forest is looking for artists to design downtown banners

The lamp posts along South White Street are getting new artwork, and the town is asking local artists to make it. The deadline is Friday, 30 October, and the brief is broader than most public art calls.

Wake Forest Downtown and the town’s Public Art Commission have issued a call for banner designs on the theme “Community in Motion.” The winning designs go up along South White Street from early January through late March 2027, according to the town’s announcement.

The brief, and how to read it

“Community in Motion” is about energy, creativity and connection. The call asks artists to think about how people, nature and ideas move together, and to aim for something that reads as vitality and forward movement.

That is a loose brief, which cuts both ways. It gives you room, and it gives the selection committee room too. Our read: the practical translation is that static, symmetrical, postcard-style compositions are unlikely to win this one. Movement is in the theme twice.

One thing to bear in mind that the brief does not spell out: a banner is not a painting. It hangs eight or ten feet up, it is seen for about two seconds by somebody driving past, and it sits in a row with other banners. Designs that work are usually bold, high-contrast and simple at a distance. Fine detail disappears.

Dates, money and the process

Submissions close Friday, 30 October. A committee drawn from the Public Art Commission and Wake Forest Downtown, Inc. selects the winners, and artists find out by Monday, 16 November.

Selected artists receive a $100 honorarium. That is worth being straight about: it is a token rather than a commission fee, and nobody is paying their studio rent on it. The real return here is a piece of your work hanging on the town’s main street for roughly three months, seen by everybody who drives, walks or parks downtown.

Banners go up in early January and come down in late March, with the possibility of further display at the discretion of the Downtown Development Director.

Submissions go through an online form the town has published, and the contact for questions is April Cannon, the Renaissance Centre’s arts coordinator, at acannon@wakeforestnc.gov.

Why the January slot is the interesting one

Look at the display window. January through March is the dead stretch of the downtown year: the Christmas lights are down, the festivals have not started, and the weather keeps people indoors. It is also exactly when a street benefits most from something to look at.

That timing suggests the commission is thinking about downtown as a place to be in winter rather than only in event season. It fits a wider pattern. The blocks around White Street have been filling in steadily, with The Planted Bean on South White and more arrivals mapped in our look at the 44 new businesses that opened here in 2026. A downtown with more reasons to visit in February is a downtown where those businesses survive their first winter.

Who should actually enter

Public art calls tend to draw the same small group of people who already know about them, which is a shame, because the entries that make a street feel local usually come from somewhere else.

If you are a working artist in town, this is straightforward. But the call says local artists without hedging it with a professional requirement, and a banner design is a format that suits people who would never enter a gallery show: illustrators, graphic designers, quilters and textile artists, photographers, sign painters, and secondary school students with a real drawing habit.

Our read: the barrier here is not skill, it is knowing the call exists. If you teach art in this town, or run a studio, or have a kid who draws constantly, the useful thing you can do between now and 30 October is tell somebody.

What banners are actually for

Municipal banner programmes get treated as decoration, and they are doing something more specific than that. A row of banners is the cheapest available way to make a street read as a place with an identity rather than a stretch of road with shops on it.

They also signal ownership. A street with generic seasonal banners printed by a supplier looks managed. A street with work by people who live there looks like it belongs to somebody. The difference costs the town very little and is obvious to anybody walking it.

Practical notes before you submit

A few things worth sorting out early rather than on the 29th.

Ask about dimensions and file format before you start making the final artwork. The announcement does not publish specifications, and banner proportions are unusual, typically tall and narrow rather than anything close to a standard canvas or screen ratio. Designing at the wrong aspect ratio and cropping afterwards rarely survives the crop.

Check what rights you are handing over. Public art calls vary widely on whether the town gets a one-time display licence or something broader, and it is a reasonable question to put to the arts coordinator before you enter rather than after you win.

And test your design small. Shrink it to thumbnail size on your phone and look at it from arm’s length. If you can still tell what it is, it will work on a lamp post. If it turns to mush, simplify it and try again.

The town has been running a busy autumn of public programming alongside this, from Good Neighbor Day at Joyner Park on 19 September through to the Halloween Boo Bash on 17 October. The banners are the quieter version of the same idea, and the one that lasts three months rather than three hours.