Art Bike

Old bicycles are rescued, made roadworthy, and decorated until each one has a personality and a name. Then the community owns them.

Modern Art

Start your own

At an art studio in Lancaster, PA, a group of neighbors gathered around a heap of salvaged bikes and asked one question of each: what is its personality? When they got to a silver road bike, somebody decided it was Lionel Richie. Nobody could explain why. They drew a picture of Lionel Richie, pasted it onto the frame, and that settled it. From then on that bike was The Lionel Richie, and everybody called it that.

Around the room there was yarn, colored duct tape, pipe cleaners, glue sticks, rhinestones, and puff balls from the craft store, and folks got to work. One bike ended up covered entirely in puff balls. One was wrapped in yarn and became Yarn It! There was the Golden Nugget, a kid's bike spray-painted gold end to end; the Ghost Bike, painted white with a basket of flowers on the front; the Nicole, named for the friend who donated it; and The Pretty Lady, pink and blue with a makeup mirror bolted on, which Libby Modern, who organized the event, cheerfully admits is a little dangerous.

She and her friend Joanna gathered the bikes from anyone who'd give them one, then worked with a local bike shop to make them actually ridable, which is the part artists can't do alone. Then they parked the fleet outside the studio and lent them to whoever wanted one, free.

The best of them carried something. The Letterman was a gray old bike with a seat that looked like a 1950s letterman's jacket, so they found a yearbook from the local high school and mounted it open on the handlebars so you could page through it. An older woman stopped one day, started turning the pages, and realized what she was looking at. “This was my class,” she said. “These are all my friends. I haven't seen them in years.” Modern told her to take the bike. She said she couldn't ride, but she could sit there and look through the pages.

Families made a habit of it. One neighbor brought his daughter over every day so the two of them could ride together. Plenty of folks got on who hadn't ridden since childhood, and some who had never ridden at all and decided today was the day.

There was a civic argument underneath all of it. Lancaster had no bike lanes, and the objection at city hall was that nobody bikes here. So the studio started running small parades, a modest version of a critical mass ride, to make biking visible, with group decoration sessions alongside, where kids brought their own bikes and were asked the same question the studio asks a salvaged frame: this is your friend, your trusted companion who gets you around, so what's its personality? Then everybody rode out together.

Lancaster has bike lanes now.

Sources

ArtBike at Modern Art — Modern Art, Lancaster, PA. Funded by Invoking the Pause, with build help from The Common Wheel.

Interview with Libby Modern, July 2026.

Start your own