For artist RYAN! Feddersen, community engagement isn’t a box to be checked—it’s a generative force at the core of her practice. Her expansive public art project, SMALL BUT MIGHTY, has been developed through time spent listening, drawing, laughing, and imagining alongside the people who live, learn, work, and travel along King County Metro’s forthcoming RapidRide I Line—a 17-mile corridor connecting Renton, Kent, and Auburn, anticipated to open in 2027.

Rather than treating engagement as a preliminary step, Feddersen approached it as a creative methodology capable of shaping not just ideas, but form, imagery, and meaning. 

“Community engagement is an interesting but often nebulous part of public art development,” Feddersen says. “There are all kinds of ways artists go about it—from being present at an informational booth, to leading participatory workshops, to collaborative artmaking that becomes a direct part of the project.”

In SMALL BUT MIGHTY, collaboration took shape through shared moments of everyday life, expressed through drawing, storytelling, and imagination. These moments reflect where people are going, what they care about, and how they move through the world. They ultimately coalesced into Exquisite Riders, a series of nine glass mosaics that will be embedded into prominent retaining walls along the I Line.

Drawing Together: From Play to Public Art

The project’s community engagement began at the King County Metro Roadeo, an annual obstacle-course competition that brings together Metro operators, staff, and families. Within this lively setting, Feddersen designed a collaborative drawing activity in which participants worked sequentially on a single figure, each person responding only to written prompts, without seeing what had been drawn before.

“I planned an art activity based on a Surrealist drawing exercise where multiple people work together in the creation of a single drawing,” she explains. “The premise was that community-made contributions could inspire elements of the future artwork.”

Participants were guided by three simple prompts:

• Draw a head: Think of an animal from your commute or neighborhood
• Draw a torso: What activity might you use the bus to access?
• Draw legs: Imagine a mode of movement to get from one place to another

The results were joyful, strange, and imaginative: giraffes and opossums, owls and flamingos, cats, bears, aliens, mermaids. The characters danced ballet, went grocery shopping, fished, commuted to work, rollerbladed, grabbed coffee—and even planned the occasional bank robbery.

“Participants demonstrated a lot of creativity,” Feddersen says. “The characters produced during the first session were so charming and elicited such excitement that they inspired an additional component of the work.”

Exquisite Riders: A Community’s Imagination, Made Permanent

Originally, these collaborative drawings were intended to inform Fellow Travelers, another element of SMALL BUT MIGHTY that will feature sandblasted silhouettes of anthropomorphic animals integrated into the sidewalk at eleven I Line stations. But the drawings sparked something more.

“They inspired an additional component of the work, Exquisite Riders, which will take the form of retaining-wall mosaics,” Feddersen explains.

Once this new direction was established, she expanded the engagement process by hosting drawing sessions at Kent Elementary, West Auburn Senior High School, and Kent Meridian High School to ensure the mosaics incorporated a wide range of voices along the corridor.

In the studio, Feddersen carefully broke down the submitted drawings into parts, reimagining and recombining them into new fantastical riders. In total, 27 community contributions are represented across the nine mosaics to be installed in Kent and Renton. Many additional drawings subtly shaped Fellow Travelers—from the animals depicted to the everyday activities suggested.

“While only a portion of the contributions will be represented directly in the final artwork,” she says, “I wanted a place to share these characters in their original form.”

A selection of the original community drawings is featured here, with a complete archive shared on the artist’s website.

Art That Travels With You

SMALL BUT MIGHTY is rooted in Plateau and Interior Salish storytelling traditions, reflecting Feddersen’s heritage as a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, where Animal People live complex lives that illustrate the interconnectedness between humans, animals, plants, and land.

Along the I Line, these stories will unfold through three interconnected bodies of work: 

• Fellow Travelers: Eleven ground-plane artworks appearing as shadows cast by station amenities, revealing Animal People waiting for the bus alongside us.
• Exquisite Riders: Nine opalescent glass mosaics, informed by community drawings, embedded in concrete retaining walls patterned with beadwork-inspired designs.
• Salmon Shoal: Five glass mosaic medallions in the patterned retaining walls at Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks Park, depicting salmonberry in its five colors and symbolizing interdependence between species and ecosystems.

Together, these works quietly transform everyday transit spaces into places of recognition, humor, and shared presence. 

“These artworks playfully suggest everyday relationships and shared experiences with our non-human kin,” Feddersen says. “Animals, plants, and humans alike inhabit and impact the world.”

When the I Line opens, riders won’t just be traveling between destinations—they’ll be moving through a landscape shaped by collective imagination, where community stories are quite literally built into the route.