Around the corner, a piece of Beltline art

Making it temporary would keep it fresh: “People are already talking about next year,” he said.

The strategy worked. Some of the most exciting creations — on view through October — come from artists whose names you might not recognize. Organizers chose 35 proposals from a pool of 177, and then raised money for additional performances and events.

The charm of such temporary public art, which allows artists and organizers to harness the element of surprise, increases a viewer’s sense of wonder: What’s around the next corner and how will it interact with the landscape?

Of course, that also leaves the work at the mercy of weather, time and vandalism (at least six of the pieces have been damaged and repaired since the show opened in May, Yalouris said).

Three pieces stand out for the distinctive ways they make you stop and marvel.

“Beltline Takes Flight,” Katie Hall

Hall, 29, got started in mosaics in middle school, when she discovered that gluing tiles to her bedroom furniture was an inexpensive way to make sculptures.

After getting her bachelor’s of fine arts degree from Georgia State University in ceramics, she started her own custom-tile business.

News of the Beltline show got her dreaming of possibilities. One of the first ideas she had was of how a neglected old train tunnel could be reborn with mosaics. She imagined transforming it with tiny bits of colored glass the way Antoni Gaudi remade so much of Barcelona. With that in mind, she began sketching out designs on “40 million napkins.”

On her second tour of possible sites, Hall found the tunnel of her dreams. A tiny railroad underpass below Lucille Street in the Westview neighborhood, with its “reverse teardrop shape,” was the one she bid for and won.

“I felt sort of amazed it worked out,” she said on a recent tour of her installation. Wild organic shapes, pieced together from bits of stained glass, stretch up the side of the bridge toward the street, punctuated here and there by birds in flight. With its deep greens and blues, and built-in sense of motion, the mosaic adds a dreamy beauty to a lush expanse of green weeds.

Aside from clearing out the trash and weeds that blocked access to the site — and pressure-washing the surface so the tiles could stick — Hall said the hardest part of the project was putting down her tools.

“I would love to do the entire bridge,” she said. “I did not want to stop. In my mind, the whole thing is done. I would like to do more or even finish, go all the way up to the top.”

“Cultivated Chaos,” J.D. Koth

GSU senior J.D. Koth calls his fanciful shelter, built of crepe myrtle branches, rope and grass, a “hut.” With its sturdy wooden swing, sweet porthole views and decidedly comforting roundness, it might be the world’s first “twigloo.”

Well, second actually.

Though it’s Koth’s first official piece of public art, “Cultivated Chaos” is actually the 24-year-old’s second branched dome. (The first, a prototype done for sculpture class, still sits behind GSU’s Edgewood Avenue sculpture building. Backed up against a chain-link fence, it shelters nesting mockingbirds and tired students.)

The design was born from his desire to improve upon a rough-hewn swing he’d constructed from a raft-style platform topped with sod, suspended from heavy branches by thick rope.

“I had to decide what was going to make the swing into art,” he said. Something made him think of baskets and the allure of “a place ... where you can hang out with friends, where you’re in another world.”

One basket-making video and piles of yard waste later, he was weaving branches into a hut.

Swings are “an invitation to play,” Koth said, and he sees his hut as a place where “adults can go back to that place from childhood.” Part tree fort, part church, “Cultivated Chaos” offers views of the city skyline to the west and a patch of trees, illuminated by the rising sun in the morning, to the east.

“Poetic Pathway,” Lisa Tuttle

Lisa Tuttle’s resume of exhibitions, awards and high-profile arts jobs is nearly as long as the Beltline. In her 30 years here, the multimedia artist, educator and arts administrator has left her creative fingerprints all over town, from the heights of the city’s arts hierarchy — High Museum, Arts Festival of Atlanta, Fulton County Arts Council — to some of its humblest neighborhoods (Mechanicsville’s Dunbar Neighborhood Center).

“Poetic Pathway,” her collaboration with six local poets, marks the third time Tuttle, a self-described “closet writer,” has paired words and images for temporary works outdoors.

This time, she asked her team to write something about Atlanta. It could be about a person or place, real or imagined. She let the poems steep in her brain until she was ready to root around in her “deep, deep archive of images” — old magazines, photographs, ephemera — to see what combination of pictures rose up, summoned by the words.

Tuttle’s elegant series of illustrated poems are printed on 24-by-24-inch squares of waterproof vinyl and propped up on posts that make them feel a little like walking through a book.

Ten in all, the pieces dot the Beltline at just the right moments, when your eye is hungry for something deeper. Some are rooted in local history (like Alice Lovelace’s “West End”) or people (Jerry Cullum’s “Ghost of a Real Estate”). Robin Bernat’s “Secret Garden” casts a dreamy spell, which Tuttle’s deep reds and misty images anchor and enhance.

The word-and-picture collaborations may not be what you first think of when you imagine public art, but as a cornerstone of the Beltline’s visual journey, they feel right at home.