Lizamore & Associates acts as project managers for the SA Taxi Foundation Art Award and annually hosts the Top 30 Exhibition in April of each year. This award offers artists the opportunity to investigate the overlap between contemporary fine art and design. Entries consist of a visual artwork and an interpretation of said artwork converted into a taxi decal. The winning designs are applied to a fleet of ten public taxi's each.
While the commuter world of taxis seems far from the world of the contemporary art gallery, for some time SA Taxi’s shareholders have quietly been supporting emerging contemporary South African artists by acquiring their works. Through their SA Taxi Foundation, they have now got behind the wheel of the SA Taxi Foundation Art Award, which is an innovative new competition that aims to bridge the divide between high art, contemporary culture and the vast population of South Africans using our public transport daily.
As a moving public art project, the SA Taxi Foundation Art Award aims to not only provide support to emerging artists but to take art to the audiences of South Africa. While so many other worthy initiatives are trying to pull audiences into niche locations such as galleries and museums this project takes the art to where the audiences are.
