Historic Germantown Nashville

Signal Box Art Contest
Call for Entries

Historic Germantown is launching Signal Box Art — a project to wrap our traffic light utility boxes with lively, colorful designs.

You’ll find a large silver or black box at street corners near any traffic light — let one of these boxes be your canvas! Let your creativity shine and inspire Germantown residents and visitors to our neighborhood by submitting your own design. 

Designs should relate to the culture of Nashville — music, history, architecture and/or the community of Germantown — interpret as you wish! The plan to cover the boxes is two-fold — to activate these gateway corners of our neighborhood as well as to discourage graffiti from sullying the boxes. We will choose up to six designs.

Signal Box Locations

Rules for submission:

  1. Submit your artwork by December 15, 2024

  2. The theme is the spirit of Nashville

  3. Artwork must be original 

  4. Artists must submit an entry form and upload either original digital artwork
    OR a photo of original flat art that can be scanned at a later date

Questions?

E-mail publicartinfo@historicgermantown.org

Size requirements:

Digital artwork must be at least 14,400 pixels wide X 18,000 pixels tall (300 dpi at the final size of around 4 X 5 feet). If your art is created in Illustrator as an eps (vector) image, then we can enlarge it from any size.

Flat art dimensions should be around 15 inches wide X 18 inches tall, appropriate for digital scanning (18 X 18 or 22 X 18 for enough to wrap around one corner).

Feel free to send more than one idea for consideration. Please find signal box sizes in this spec sheet.

Winners will be notified by the end of the year.

Note: the signal boxes have four sides — the larger ones with two sides approximately 4 feet wide X 5 feet tall and two sides 2.5 feet wide by 5 feet tall; the smaller ones 3 X 5 X 2. In the end, the wraps that we print from your artwork will have cutouts for handles, air vents and the like, although some box sides are smooth. You can create artwork for one panel to be repeated on 4 sides (cropped for the side panels) or make it a bit wider (18 inches or 22 inches wide) to wrap around one corner and repeat once.

The final artwork needs to be 300 dpi (or vector) at the final size to print clearly on the vinyl that will attach to the box — so if your original is painted or collaged or whatever (in real life) on a surface 15 X 18 inches, we will scan it at 1000 dpi to reach the proper resolution. If your proportions are different, we will crop the art to fit. 

Apply through the form below: