By Russell Nichols

Ten years ago, Broadway revealed a never-before-seen side of itself. 

Quirky murals moved on restaurant windows. A massive turntable spun outside Dimple Records. Animals popped up at a child’s gravesite. For a brief stretch, with the support of augmented reality, Sacramento’s corridor for commerce had been transformed into a public, interactive canvas.

“Broadway Augmented” ran for nearly two months in the fall of 2014. With a custom smartphone app, viewers could walk from Pancake Circus to the Old City Cemetery, where 11 artists created 16 site-specific virtual works using AR (which superimposes computer-generated images onto the real world).

The artists visited the street, engaged with the community and researched its history before choosing a site to respond to with their work, says Rachel Clarke, professor of new media art and animation and current chair of the Art Department at Sacramento State. “In participating,” she adds, “the public were engaging with landmarks, with the cultural heritage of the street, unique architectural features, iconic local business and social history that they may have forgotten or never noticed or known about before.”

To bring the project to life, Clarke and Shelly Willis, former Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission director, partnered with SMAC, the Greater Broadway Partnership District, and Sacramento State’s Art and Design departments. Historically confined behind walls, art hasn’t always been accessible to the masses. But this project showed that, with advancing technology, AR can make art more visible than ever. Ten years later, regional artists and businesses see AR as a delivery tool, projecting artwork beyond galleries into public and personal spaces.

Potential unblocked

Wallspace, for instance, is a community-driven platform that uses AR to make art more accessible. In February, it was named among the top 16 tech startups in the 2025 Kings Capitalize competition. Sacramento-based InterApp allows creators to transform printed materials into interactive graphics.

InterApp founder and CEO Will Brown calls the marriage of AR and art the “perfect union.” He saw its potential when Chilean artist Carolina Garcia (known as Apia) used his technology for an installation in South Florida.

“AR enables an artist to truly utilize mixed media and add emphasis, context and utility to any static art piece,” Brown says. “Unlocking an AR experience with an art piece draws users in and can immerse them in a visual [experience] that elevates the art to new heights.”

AR is not just business. For artists, like Jay Stargaard (a.k.a. Divine Flame Alchemist), it’s also personal. Inspired by nature, Stargaard, based in Colfax, has been painting and hand-crafting steel, copper and bronze sculptures for more than 20 years. But AR opened up a new portal of possibility. 

She first saw this technology in 2023 at the Reno Tahoe International Art Show via the work of San Francisco-based photographer and sculptor Liz Hickok, who creates immersive cityscapes with Jell-O.

After that, Stargaard realized the transcendent power of AR as a tool for people to more deeply experience her latest series: video shot through gemstones (like Topaz and Smoky Quartz) to create a kaleidoscopic effect layered on environmental paintings.

“It’s this ultra-lucid state,” she says, “and it’s actually how I see the paintings when they come in. I see these states and, for the first time, I’m able to translate something so personal and magical to other people.”

The paintings are for sale. Stargaard hasn’t decided how long the AR component will be active, but plans to provide the buyer with lifetime access to the experience. (One artist she knows sells AR access separately for an additional fee.) This September, Stargaard will be a featured artist at the same Reno event where she saw Hickok’s cityscapes. Her work will appear on attendee badges, each one a gateway into the AR experience.

“I don’t know if you can source how you felt when you witnessed the magic of AR, where all of a sudden, this painting is coming alive in front of you,” she says, adding, “I love that people have an opportunity to have this moment that inspires curiosity, to ask, ‘How is this possible?’”

The future of AR

As Stargaard creates transformative art to open hearts, Clarke also sees the possibility of AR as a method to engage with social, environmental and political issues. No permits needed. No red tape. Powerful works, she says, can be shown publicly to reveal buried truths without physically altering the landscape.

For example, Rebecca Krinke created Unknown/Known: Augmented Broadway for the project in 2014. With an AR overlay at the memorial of John Sutter, Krinke transformed the site into a digital monument to the “unknowns,” many being Chinese immigrants whose names and stories have been lost or erased.

“AR can ask questions,” Clarke says. “Who is remembered in America and who isn’t? Whose stories are told and whose are forgotten reveal hidden layers of history that need to be exposed.”

Ten years later, Clarke doesn’t know of any public AR projects in the works. A Crocker Art Museum spokesperson says the museum hasn’t had an AR-centric exhibition and has no plans for one. What’s the problem?

“Limitations I’ve experienced are that the field of XR is very corporatized,” she says. “AR platforms are bought and sold by media companies that swallow them up and discontinue the product.”

For this reason, Clarke worked with a developer to build her own custom app, Merging Spaces, to host AR exhibitions and projects. With the right pieces in place, she believes another event in the vein of Broadway Augmented could happen in the future.

“In order to make AR that is robust enough, it requires a lot of development work and a lot of planning and so on,” Clarke says. “I think it should happen and could happen with the right convergence of things.”

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19.