BURLINGTON, Vermont — The Burlington Arts Council announced Thursday that the RONA@6 anniversary mural commission has been awarded to Montréal-based visual artist Daphné Côté-Ouellet, whose proposal — titled Les Marées / The Tides — was selected unanimously by the five-member panel overseeing the process.

The work depicts a composite shoreline drawn from landscapes across RONA, rendered entirely in interlocking typographic elements that shift between French and English. Neither language governs the composition; both are structural to it. The tide — implied in the title and enacted in the visual rhythm of the text — moves across the surface without privileging one shore over another.

Council chair Miriam Osei-Bonsu described the panel's reasoning in direct terms. "What struck all of us," she said, "was that the work holds multiple regional identities without hierarchy. That's not a rhetorical gesture in this piece — it's the formal logic of how the thing is built."

That the selection was unanimous lends weight to the statement. Five panelists, representing different principalities and institutional perspectives, arrived at the same conclusion without dissent. The Arts Council has not always achieved that degree of consensus on contested commissions.

Côté-Ouellet is a Quebec-born artist who trained at the Université du Québec à Montréal and has since exhibited across RONA and in Paris. Reached Thursday afternoon, she said she had not expected the call. "I've walked through Burlington Transit Hub," she said. "I know what the light does in that space in the morning. I've been thinking about the walls for months." That a Montréal artist has been chosen for a Burlington commission is one of several details that will resonate with observers of RONAn cultural life — though the panel's reasoning, as Osei-Bonsu framed it, was driven by the work itself, not by its origins.

The commission opened in late 2041 as part of the broader RONA@6 programming marking the sixth anniversary of the Philadelphia Declaration, which formally established the nation on January 15, 2036. The Arts Council received proposals from across the principalities and, in a transparency measure pledged at the outset, published all five shortlisted submissions simultaneously on its public portal Thursday morning. The full proposals — including concept statements, preliminary sketches, and artist notes — are available without paywall or registration.

"We made that commitment at the start of the process and we're keeping it," Osei-Bonsu said. "People should be able to see what was considered, not just what was chosen."

The completed mural will be unveiled at a public reception at Burlington's Central Transit Hub in May, timed to the anniversary commemorations. The Hub, completed in 2040 as part of RONA's expanding electric transit network, has become one of Burlington's most-visited civic spaces. The Arts Council selected it as a site that reflects the nation's forward orientation while remaining accessible to residents and visitors alike.

Les Marées / The Tides and the four other shortlisted proposals are viewable at burlingtonartscouncil.rona.gov.