The Urban Conga has unveiled A Cappella, an interactive public artwork located within the new Jacksonville Riverfront Music Garden along the St. Johns River. Designed as a tribute to Jacksonville’s long musical legacy, the installation transforms song lyrics, local memory, and public participation into a spatial experience where visitors can gather, reflect, and create new lyrical expressions.
Rather than treating music as something to be heard from a distance, A Cappella invites people to enter a landscape of words, rhythm, color, and movement. The project celebrates Jacksonville as a city shaped by many voices across generations, turning its musical heritage into an open-ended public space for play, storytelling, and shared discovery.
A Public Artwork Shaped Like a Living Symphony
Located within a musical note embedded in the landscape, the installation takes inspiration from the structure of a symphony. Its flowing form is divided into four sections, each connected to a different movement and emotional theme: motivation, home, love, and freedom. Together, these sections create a sequence of experiences that present Jacksonville as a living symphony composed of many eras, genres, and personal stories.
Each section offers its own atmosphere while remaining part of a larger narrative. This approach gives the work both clarity and flexibility, allowing visitors to move through the installation as if they were moving through a song.
Lyrics Become a Tool for Participation
The heart of A Cappella lies in its use of lyrics gathered from Jacksonville artists. Developed through extensive community engagement, the project draws from 84 songs by more than 60 local musicians, spanning from the 1920s through the 2020s. Residents helped identify songs and phrases that reflect the city’s character, making the installation a genuine community archive rather than a top-down cultural gesture.
Selected lyrics were broken down into individual words and short verses that visitors can rearrange into new compositions. This simple act of remixing allows different artists, genres, and decades to meet in unexpected ways. The result is an interactive system where the public can discover connections between past and present while adding their own voice to Jacksonville’s evolving creative identity.
Light, Reflection, and Seating as Social Infrastructure
The physical design expands the idea of play through material and atmosphere. Dichroic and reflective panels shift with the sun, creating changing effects of light, color, shadow, and reflection throughout the day. These surfaces make the artwork feel alive, responding to weather, movement, and the presence of people in the space.
Integrated seating areas turn A Cappella into more than a visual object. Visitors can pause, talk, observe, or compose new lyrical fragments together. A central circular bench acts as a communal focal point, explaining the relationship between the four sections of the artwork and the four movements of a symphony. In practical terms, it gives people a reason to stay, which is apparently still one of the hardest things for public space to accomplish.
Jacksonville’s Musical Legacy as an Open-Ended Future
A Cappella succeeds because it does not freeze Jacksonville’s musical history into nostalgia. Instead, it treats that history as material for future creation. The installation is also designed to accommodate new artists over time, allowing the work to grow as the city’s music scene continues to evolve.
By combining public art, urban design, furniture, landscape, and participatory storytelling, The Urban Conga creates a project that honors local culture while keeping it active. A Cappella is not only a tribute to Jacksonville’s past voices, but also a platform for new expressions, proving that public art can still be generous, social, and surprisingly useful when it remembers that people are meant to touch, sit, play, and participate.
| Technical Sheet | |
|---|---|
| Project Title | A Cappella |
| Client | City of Jacksonville and Jacksonville Downtown Investment Authority |
| Designer / Creator | The Urban Conga |
| Firm Leads | Ryan Swanson and Maeghann Coleman |
| Location | Riverfront Music Garden, 300 Water St, Jacksonville, FL 32202 |
| Year Installed | May 2026 |
| Project Size | 437 sq ft |
| Project Type | Interactive public art installation |
| Context | Jacksonville Riverfront Music Garden, adjacent to the Jacksonville Symphony |
| Core Themes | Music, play, storytelling, community participation, public space |
| Source Material | 84 songs by more than 60 Jacksonville artists from the 1920s to the 2020s |
| Website | www.theurbanconga.com |