In conjunction with this year’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of Columbus, OH, the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) will serve as a venue for the city-wide “Finding Time: Columbus Public Art 2012” project.

Throughout the year, Finding Time will transform downtown Columbus into an open-air gallery in public spaces, plazas, parks, streets, and alleys in the downtown core and the riverfront. More than 50 international, national, and local artists will create 14 temporary public art projects.

By demonstrating the value of art in the public realm, this initiative aims to spur the ongoing integration of public art into the fabric of the city.

Artists Martin Keil (Odessa, Ukraine) and Henrik Meyer (Berlin, Germany)—who work together as Reinigungsgesellschaft, which translates from the German as “The Cleaning Society”— will partner with COTA on a project titled “ColumBUS” that will bring creative insight to the regional public transportation system, its role in the city’s future, and to exploration of concepts of public transportation in the Midwest.

Their system-wide “site” will include drivers, riders, management, buses, transit centers, and print pieces such as schedules and maps that are part of the everyday business of COTA.

Keil and Meyer are not strangers to Columbus: they first visited the city a decade ago through the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s Dresden sister-city exchange program and returned in 2009 for a residency at the Columbus College of Art and Design.

The artists working with COTA as a public art space, based in sister city Dresden, Germany, are in residence until March 17.

COTA spokesperson Beth Berkemer noted that the artists spent early March in the city, “absorbing everything they can about COTA, Columbus, culture, customers, etc. They will return to [their home in Dresden,] Germany with the information they collect to design their art project to incorporate into COTA, and will be returning in May to install it.”

The artists describe their work as an “artistic venture at the point of intersection between art and society.” Their works are research-based, often taking their form from an intensive period of investigation into a business or cultural institution.

They investigate the role of institutions in the larger cultural context, incorporating maps, signs, photographs, and films into their efforts.

The entire Finding Time project represents a public and private partnership among the Columbus Art Commission, the city of Columbus, Ohio State University, Capital Crossroads Special Improvement District, and others.

It will reflect the broad range of contemporary public art in multiple forms and media, incorporating everything from sculpture and murals to unexpected installations, sound works, and site-specific performances and installations in nontraditional sites.

The site-responsive artworks will explore the physical and philosophical measurement of time, generating questions on the notion of time, passing of time, use of time, measurement of time, the chronology of life, world time, and the notion of temporary and permanent.

Finding Time addresses three of the 10 core principles of the 2010 Downtown Columbus Strategic Plan: invest in arts and culture; develop parks and public spaces; and celebrate the urban experience that only exists downtown.