On a Saturday in mid-May, a group of nine local artists rode colorful bicycles they’d created down the streets of Brandon. Then they locked them up on the main drag as a semipermanent art installation that’s intended to provide a splash of color for the summer and promote alternative forms of transportation such as bikes, trikes and scooters.
These “Art Bikes,” as they’re known, were initially intended to be available for people to pick up and use as a bike share. But they’ll have to stay on the racks for now, according to Jeff Dardozzi, who helped lead the project. Finding insurance coverage that would allow the public to ride the bikes around town has been a challenge, he said, though he remains hopeful.
Dardozzi, an architect and builder, is executive director of ReBHS, a nonprofit that is looking for ways to renovate the historic Brandon High School building into a community arts hub. In 2024, the org received a $15,000 grant for the “Art Bikes” project from the Vermont Arts Council’s Animating Infrastructure program.
Because reusing, repairing and recycling is central to the project, the artists teamed up with Tim Mathewson, owner of Little City Cycles bike shop in Vergennes. He donated some bikes and helped the group with welding and getting the two-wheelers up and running. The artists, meanwhile, designed and painted the bikes.
There’s even a community tricycle, which was assembled by the local library’s Teen Advisory Group and Joe Schine, an arts educator in Middlebury. The teens worked with Schine to combine their artistic visions into a single working tricycle, aimed at making the project more accessible for those who might have trouble riding a bike.
This fall, the bikes will be auctioned off to commission another group of artists to create a new set of bikes.
“Hopefully it just is something that other communities start doing as well,” Dardozzi said. “It would be great to have an Art Bikes organization with cultural bikes littering the landscape.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Mobile Art”
This article appears in June 17 • 2026.