It's not unusual to have a cup of coffee in a museum cafe after looking at art. But how about looking at art on the street, at a bus stop, while you're having a cup of coffee?

A new public art program organized by Philadelphia's Print Center will make that possible beginning early next week.

Works by six artists will be displayed as posters in bus shelters and as billboards along the region's major highways and the city's principal thoroughfares. The images will even be printed on 300,000 disposable coffee cups to be randomly distributed at coffee shops, cafes, and convenience stores throughout the city.

This latest effort to put art in public places, called "Imprint," is the inspiration of Joan Wadleigh Curran, a local artist and a board member of the Print Center, a nonprofit that supports print-making and photography.

It is funded by a grant of $181,516 from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, which is underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

"Imprint attempts to create a sense of delight and surprise in the public sphere, and to make provocative statements about what art means in this context," Curran said yesterday.

The program involves six artists - Dotty Attie, John Coplans, Susan Fenton, Kerry James Marshall, Virgil Marti, and James Mills. Its six distinct components will become visible for varying periods between Sunday and Nov. 9, the closing date.

Six large billboards, one for each artist, are scheduled to go up Sunday and remain on view through September. Six smaller billboards will follow several weeks later and remain up through Oct. 21.

Thirty bus shelters - six in the city and 24 at key suburban locations such as along the Main Line and at shopping centers in King of Prussia, Oxford Valley, and Cherry Hill - will display art as posters beginning on Tuesday.

The city posters are to stay up through October, the suburban ones at least through September.

Beginning Sept. 8 for six consecutive weeks, Inquirer magazine will reproduce an image from the project as a full advertising page. An exhibition featuring all six artists will open at the Print Center at 1614 Latimer St. on Tuesday and continue through Nov. 9.

The six artists - three Philadelphians, two from New York, and one from Chicago - represent a variety of aesthetic interests and stylistic tactics, including straight photography, comic-book formats, text panels, and allusions to popular culture.

For the project, each artist has created a suite of closely related images that have been adapted to the requirements of each format - for instance, horizontal billboards or vertical bus-shelter posters.

Curran said all were selected with an eye to capturing and holding public attention in situations in which art presents itself unexpectedly.

"Artists want to reach everyone, but it's a very hard thing to do," she said. "These images are user-friendly, the opposite of elitist. They're also insistent. As with advertising, we hope they will seep into public consciousness and become part of memory."