Artwork / 2024 / Rainbow Connection

These rainbow stripes were my response to hateful messages that were repeatedly scrawled, spray painted, and carved throughout 2023 on a pedestrian bridge near my home in Lambertville, New Jersey.

I watched for many months as others in my community tried to deal with the ongoing vandalism by sanding down the messages, and Trumpers kept coming back to carve their hate still deeper. That’s when it became clear to me that this silent conversation—a persistent cycle of the vandal hacking into the bridge and the community scouring the wood to remove the carving—might need a new voice. I hoped that by chiming in with oversized paper bandaids to help heal the wounds on the bridge I could shift the energy for the vandal, but, as this video shows, it didn’t.

Not wanting to end up in my own months-long cycle with the vandal and my bandaid response, I chose to change the energy around this bridge yet again, this time with rainbows, a decision which I explain in some detail in this blog post.

This project earned coverage on NJ.com and in the Bucks County Beacon, and, with the pressure which public interest produces, the park finally cleaned off the bridge.

“[This artistic intervention] was an honest attempt at visual conversation at a time when discourse is in short supply, and it was done with the wit, color and personality that characterizes all of [Seemel]’s work.”

- Tris McCall, NJarts.net, April 2024