Artrain USA
Open-knowledge reference entry
Artrain is an organization devoted to promote art and culture. The organization used to operate a traveling art museum on a train, which is no longer in service. It consisted of three gallery cars, with two more cars in support, and traveled widely in the United States, operating in a different region every year. It was intended as a short-lived program but was active for over 30 years due to popular demand.
History
Artrain USA is believed to have been the longest-running special-display train in the United States (the Freedom Trains traveled more widely but were special-purpose exhibitions, first in the late 1940s, and then for the United States Bicentennial celebration in the late 1970s). Though it was intended as a short-lived, statewide program, the Michigan Artrain welcomed 191,000 visitors in 28 cities in the first year, 1971. Soon after, it expanded its focus to nationwide touring.
Artrain began in 1971 as a project of the "Michigan Council for the Arts", and initially toured Michigan, visiting small towns that did not have their own museums. Throughout the summer of 1971 Michigan Artrain toured across the state of Michigan with over 191,000 visitors in 28 Michigan communities visiting the train's vintage baggage car converted to a studio car where 2 resident artists that travelled with the train demonstrated and explained the many different types of art processes and mediums. Soon after, thanks to popular demand, a separate foundation was set up, and the tour area was broadened to the entire United States with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
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This entry incorporates text from “Artrain USA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.