Chinatown Barnes Dance

Washington, DC

2016

The Chinatown Barnes Dance Public Art Project is a new public artwork designed to enhance the crosswalk at 7th and H Streets Northwest Washington, DC. Each year in Washington DC, the Chinese New Year is celebrated for fifteen days in Chinatown with a parade, Dragon Dance, musical and dance performances, special food, and numerous other cultural rituals and traditions. The Dragon Dance that celebrates and ushers in the New Lunar Year gets top billing in the diagonal crosswalks of the intersection. The long curves, colorful scales, and expressive heads of the dragon lead the pedestrians from one corner across to the other. The twelve lunar zodiac symbols in the gaps between the perpendicular crosswalk bands forever reenact the race across the wild river that determined their sequence in the lunar calendar and allowed them to become zodiac signs forever. This two-dimensional piece was installed using a preformed thermoplastic to the high-visibility crosswalk.