Pianos About Town

Pianos About Town brings local art and spontaneous music to the streets of Fort Collins. The program started in 2010 as a collaboration among Bohemian Foundation, the Downtown Development Authority, and the City of Fort Collins Art in Public Places Program.

Scattered among 20 locations across town in the summer, and six locations in the winter, the completed pianos offer surprise interruptions of color and music across Fort Collins. The whimsical pianos beckon to passersby and invite them to make and listen to music together.

The mural design, Wisdom, features a depiction of the Milky Way, with a portal a free-floating astronaut peers through at the iconic shot of the tree-lined CSU Oval. All of human-kind’s collective knowledge has culminated in sending us into the vast emptiness of space to explore beyond our world. But maybe we are starting to realize that some of the answers we seek aren’t out there after all. Maybe, in fact, they have been here all along.

The back of the mural features the close-up face of an owl, in whose giant eye we see that peering astronaut framed by the void of space behind. The owl, as a universally recognized symbol of wisdom, is essentially gazing at the CSU Oval, allowing the astronaut to see one symbolic answer to those profound questions.