ART IN THE LOOP Ross Sawyers’ “Blue Room,” 2006, is the first in a series of large-scale digital prints on vinyl mesh that will appear on the side of a parking garage on 13th Street between Grand and Walnut. The works will be on a 36-by-72-foot custom-designed steel frame.

Watch for a new public artwork this week on the south-facing side of the Town Pavilion parking garage downtown.

But unlike the Bartle Hall “Sky Stations” or the new ceiling mural at the Jackson County Courthouse, this one will change out every six to nine months.

The project, called the “Loop ARTWall,” looks like a billboard, but instead of advertising, it will feature artworks in the form of large-scale digital prints on vinyl mesh. The works will appear on a 36-by-72-foot custom-designed steel frame.

The first image is a photo by 2002 Kansas City Art Institute graduate Ross Sawyers. Titled “Blue Room,” it shows the exterior of a house poking into a wood-floored room with deep blue walls.

The Loop ARTWall represents a kind of downtown cousin to the “Project Wall” on the side of the Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace at 43rd and Main. Established in 1999, it, too, features a changing display of billboard-sized works intended to engage motorists and pedestrians.

The architectural invasion portrayed in Sawyers’ “Blue Room” resonates with all the construction that surrounds its downtown site. Although it’s not apparent from the picture, the house and the room are part of a dollhouse-sized model that Sawyers constructed.

The artist says he wants to push the viewer “to question the distinction between what is known to be present and what is believed to be seen.”

The Loop ARTWall is the second project of the nonprofit Art in the Loop Foundation. (The first was Dylan Mortimer and Davin Watne’s life-size aluminum figures of bus riders installed at the KCATA Transit Plaza in 2005.) Funding comes from a $500,000 five-year grant from an anonymous donor to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, who stipulated that commissions be restricted to faculty and alumni of the Kansas City Art Institute.

A selection panel of architects, art professionals, businesspeople and city workers has chosen Sawyers and five other artists to make works for the ARTWall. All are Kansas City Art Institute grads, and three of them — Marcus Cain, Ascot Smith and Allan Winkler — live in Kansas City.

The Town Pavilion Parking Garage is on 13th Street between Grand and Walnut.