Inside LA’s roaming public art exhibit, the Metro Art Bus

One of the joys of living in Los Angeles is that you can find performances and art exhibits just about everywhere, from public murals around town to improvised concerts along the L.A. River.

In that spirit, Metro’s Art Bus brings dozens of portraits to regular bus routes across L.A. County – and if you’re lucky, it might even be coming to your local route.

The artwork

When you’re about to board a Metro Art Bus, maybe you’ll see those very words in big lettering on the side windows, or maybe you’ll notice the portraits lining either side of the vehicle. Either way, you can tell right away that this isn’t a normal bus – after all, it has a wraparound on the outside that isn’t trying to sell you something.

But the art exhibit isn’t just on the outside — you’ll also find dozens of portraits inside where the ads would normally be. As long as the bus isn’t full to the brim and you don’t mind giving up your seat, you can walk around and see the different portraits.

The portraits also feature lots of different kinds of transportation, even including air travel. One such portrait is “Traveler” by the Colombian-American artist Carolyn Castaño. The work is a collage that incorporates signs many people might recognize from LAX alongside flowers and plants from Colombia and California, where Castaño lives now.

Carolyn Castaño's "Traveler," pictured right, pays tribute to L.A.'s international roots by incorporating flowers from Colombia and California into the work, along with an image of signage at LAX.

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Courtesy Metro Art (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority)

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Other portraits on the Metro Bus have different kinds of personal backstories woven in: The artist Edwin Ushiro’s “Better Together” is a portrait of him with his wife on a Metro bus. According to Zeller, that’s because the couple regularly took Metro to see each other when they started dating.

“He said that Metro was actually the lifeblood of their relationship, which is a really beautiful sentiment,” Zeller said. “We didn't put him up to saying that, but he said it really made a difference for them to be able to connect with one another.”

Edwin Ushiro's work "Better Together" is pictured directly to the left of the bus operator posing. The work depicts the artist and his wife, who regularly used Metro to meet with each other when they were dating.

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Courtesy Metro Art (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority)

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How to spot the buses

As with so many aspects of life in Los Angeles, from housing lotteries to jury duty, finding a Metro Art Bus is a matter of pure luck. There are four Metro Art Buses, but none of them follow fixed routes, and the lines they service change from day to day.

“They're all based out of different bus divisions in different parts of the county,” Zeller said. “They travel all over the place, so you will hopefully see them in different places.”

Zeller told LAist that Metro doesn’t currently have a tracking tool to tell riders where the art buses are, so the best way to increase your chances of seeing one in the wild is to go out and ride more buses.

“Think of it as a surprise,” Zeller said. “It'll just surprise you one day when you least expect it, if you're walking down the street or if you are waiting for your bus, and then lo and behold, that's the bus that picks you up.”

The only surefire way to spot them is to go to an event like CicLAvia where Metro brings them out. If you see one while it’s parked, you’ll have the added bonus of being able to pose for photos in the driver's seat.

How it came to be

The Metro Art Buses have been in operation since 2022, though since there are only four of them out of nearly 2,000 Metro buses overall, it’s understandable if you haven’t run into one in the wild yet.

Much of Metro Art’s offerings focus on train stations, but the majority of Metro’s riders take buses — about 75%, according to the agency’s data, and this project brings Metro’s art to these passengers.

Once Metro took on the project, Zeller said that it was only a matter of determining which portraits to include and figuring out how to superimpose them on the bus wraparound – especially since physical features like the bus windows limited the amount of exhibition space on the outside.

And with this project, Metro hopes it can bring public transportation and public art even closer together.

“It's for our riders. It's about our riders,” Zeller said. “It's for the person walking down the street, or even for people driving cars. It really is for everybody.”

To view all the portraits featured on the Metro Art Bus, see here.