A June 24 “meet and greet” with the four artist finalists for the Madison LakeWay project resembled, in the words of one artist, a “speed date.”

But even with a five-minute speaking limitation, they managed to outline four different approaches to how they’d design a piece of public art for the LakeWay project, which aims to beautify the Lake Monona waterfront and reconnect Madisonians with their water.

The four finalists are Vancouver-based Jill Anholt; Madrid-based street artist SpY; United Kingdom-based Harriet Lumby and Alan Hayes of This Is Loop; and duo Jin Choi and Thomas Shine, who together make work under Choi + Shine.

Anholt says she’s connected communities to their waterfronts before. She pointed to her “multidisciplinary” work “Sap Supra,” an overhead canopy along a waterfront in Eugene, Oregon, along with another waterfront installation in Toronto and an overhead kinetic sculpture in the Kansas City airport.

Spanish artist SpY, who operates anonymously under the moniker and grew out of the graffiti movement in the 1980s, has a playful practice of ironic interventions. “Orb,” installed in Cairo in 2022, reflects the viewer through a curved sphere of mirrors. In such cities as Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Madrid, Spain, SpY has installed glowing bright red spheres.

Harriet Lumby, part of artist collaboration This Is Loop, emphasized her studio’s installations driven by light, sound, tech and data. Lumby highlighted “Geist,” an interactive hexagon of light and sound driven by scientific data of neutrino interactions.

Architect duo Choi + Shine emphasize community empowerment in such projects as “Land of Giants,” a large-scale project that turned transmission pylons into human figures (John Oliver pointed to it in an episode about the electric grid). Elsewhere, including along the waterfront in Barcelona, they’ve designed detailed lace structures.

Peter Tan, retired emeritus chief design officer at Strang, an architecture and planning firm, sits on LakeWay’s design committee. Ahead of the artist presentations, he described how urban design is all about “the solid and the void” — the solid of a building or structure, and the void of an open space. “Placemaking and urban design is all about creating space,” he said, “meaningful space where people can flourish.”

What will the finalists come up with? They're getting familiar with Madison as they prepare to develop concepts. For the artists, Wednesday’s meet-and-greet followed a whirlwind tour led by city arts administrator Karin Wolf: highlights of the isthmus and UW-Madison campus, a boat ride, and discussion of Ho-Chunk heritage while visiting the Harry Whitehorse International Wood Sculpture Festival in Monona.

The artists have until Sept. 14 to develop a “napkin sketch,” and when designs are released, there will be a community survey to inform the ad hoc committee’s selection. The final artist will be chosen on criteria that include artistic merit, alignment with the LakeWay Master Plan, a design that is “aesthetically pleasing in all four seasons,” along with feasibility, a reasonable budget, and opportunities for community engagement.

Artists have few requirements, but a few limitations. The site can’t support designs that actually use water, and installations can’t be located in the median between paths and the road. If the project involves light, artists will need to abide by the city’s dark sky law.

Otherwise, the sky’s the limit. “The board has been pretty clear,” says Wolf, “that they wanted to be as open as possible, because we can't even pretend to have the creativity that they have in their little pinkies.”

The art will be included in SkyLine, phase one of the LakeWay project to transform downtown Madison’s lakeshore. The selected artist could be paid up to $750,000. But while the art is included in LakeWay’s first phase, the budget for it is not. “As soon as we hit our phase one dollars,” says Lakeway CEO Jayme Powers, “then we’ll raise money for the art.”

Powers says there’s more than $5 million out in funding asks for the first phase of LakeWay, and they need $1.6 million more in donations. In total, phase one LakeWay construction would cost $12 million; of that, the city and county have committed $9 million, leaving Lakeway to raise $3 million. So far, they’ve raised $1.4 million.

None of the finalists are from Madison — though Brenda Baker, chair of the ad hoc selection committee, says some Madison artists did apply. In total, there were 79 applications, and “competition was fierce.” These four designers, she says, rose to the top. She adds that “We’d love to have some Madison artists,” and there will be more art opportunities in future phases.