essay on public art

Public Art’s Benefits and Effects in the Community Essay

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Public art is any work of painting, sculpture, drawing or writing done by a creative mind in a public place. It is meant for the community or a wider society. Its significant purposes include telling a story- past, present, or even future. Public art, which always receives its funding from governments and NGOs, also has the responsibility to educate the society. This essay is going tackle its benefits and effects in the community (Cartiere, 2008).

There are several merits of public art in the community or even those found in the cities. For instance, sculptures and drawings create a feeling of consciousness and belonging (Coutts & Jokela, 2010). An example is the Liberty Statue that is associated with the US’s way of living. Public art also uplifts the name of a once forgotten neighborhood or society. In addition, drawings and sculptures teach the community especially on social and political issues.

An example is a painting depicting the dying of a mother hacked by a young man. This is meant to worry the conscience of a person who is admiring the piece of art. Furthermore, sculptures and writings in public educate the society on its past heroes and heroines in order to learn from them (Cartiere, 2008). Examples include the different Greek gods that represented a number of issues in the society of Greece. In addition, public art helps improve the beauty of the community through different types of paintings and murals.

There is also earning of foreign exchange when both local and domestic tourists come to view drawings and writings in the city and neighborhoods. In addition, sculptures and paintings enhance the environmental value of the city and make places of recreation look more humane. It also creates a domestic satisfaction and commercial pride of the city, therefore, attracting clients (Coutts & Jokela, 2010). Finally, public art creates jobs through employment of painters, sculptors and writers who ensure all the work of art is in place.

Public art like drawings and sculptures have an immense expression in terms of philosophy, population and culture. For instance, public art invokes the conscious and unconscious psychology of the society to help them reflect on social and political concerns (Davies, 2006). In addition, work of public art, for example, paintings reveal the world as it is and help the society in understanding life and existence. Furthermore, public art enables the community in expressing themselves to display inner emotions concerning feelings of love or hatred.

The population also influences the art they want in public. Either this can be through a sculpture or a painting, that expresses their preferences and tastes. In addition, it controls the thought process of the population and the way they perceive issues in the community.

It also communicates to the population and makes them a part of the government in making decisions affecting them (Coutts & Jokela, 2010). Furthermore, the ability of public art to achieve neutrality in representing both classes of the society is an effective way of expression.

Alternatively, public art affects the community in terms of culture in a number of ways. In terms of telling history, paintings, murals and drawings in the parks remind the society of its values and traditions. (Davies, 2006). Open art also glorifies a past when citizens see celebrated heroes and heroines in the form of sculptures and drawings. In addition, public art is known to express the hopes and fears of the community fostering a culture of understanding the society through work of art.

In conclusion, we can mention a few things. Public art as an entity belong to the citizens and should reflect their tastes and preferences. Here, we mean public arts like Liberty Statue in US and Eiffel Towers of Paris (Cartiere, 2008). There are also sculptures and historical drawings found in the old Rome that tell a history and pride of its people. Therefore, it is upon the governments and communities to preserve such art for coming generations.

Cartiere, C. (2008). The practice of public art . New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Coutts, G. & Jokela, T. (2010). Art, community and environment: educational perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago .

Davies, S. (2006). The philosophy of art . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

• Heroines' Analysis in Frankétienne's "Dézafi"
• The Dura Europos Synagogue
• Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera
• Reformation and Development of the Arts
• Comparing and contrasting the bronze doors of Bishop Bernward with Ghiberti's bronze doors at the Florence Baptistery
• Across Time and Space: Solving the Mysteries of the Ancient Cultures
• Impressionism History
• Arts Timeline between 1500 and 1950
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Bibliography

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Summary of Public Art

Whether a legally commissioned statue of a noted community leader in a town square or a slap dash stencil spray-painted guerrilla-style in the dark of midnight on a storefront, art frequently engages with audiences outside of galleries and museums. This art, meant for access by the world-at-large in public spaces, serves as a democratic way for an artist to express to the masses. Public Art thus becomes artwork for the populous, instigating through visuals, actions, ideas, and interventions, a participatory audience where none prior existed. While the public display of art objects is not a solely modern phenomenon, recent innovations in Public Art forms indicate critical redefinitions of concepts like community, collective identity, and social engagement.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Public Art's role serves multiple purposes, often simultaneously: to aesthetically beautify space, to educate, to commemorate important people and events, to act as a tool of political or social propaganda, to activate, to document daily life, and to represent a community's ethos.
• Public Art appears in multiple forms that can mimic or depart from more traditional presentations of art including sculptures/statues, site-specific installations, murals, architecture, graffiti, actions, interventions, land and environmental art, performance, and more. Yet its main common denominator is its potential to be experienced within a discerned democratic and free sphere, bypassing the narrow and niche audiences of institutions and galleries.
• Although Public Art's roots originated in officially sanctioned works to compel historical pride and connect communities through accessible culture, the 1970s saw an expansion of its usage as the ideas of public space as democratic canvas arose within the civil rights movements. Public Art's definition bloomed to encompass illegal Street Art , artist-initiated public interventions, urban renewal-based commissions, and personal expressions of contemporary artists beyond commercial or partisan limitations.
• As Public Art has evolved to not just represent but to also engage with the public sphere many contemporary pieces are being designed with the relationship between the work and its audience in mind. This relationship becomes part of the artwork's intended message, impacting both artist and viewer, laying ground for myriad possibilities in experience and interpretation. These practices inform a wide umbrella of modern artistic categories including New Genre Public Art, Relational Aesthetics , Dialogical Art, and Participatory Art.
• Critique and conflict continue to pepper the Public Art arena as the politics surrounding representation have become forefront within society. The rise of "cancel culture" has brought into question the validity and longevity of historical artworks that no longer resonate with contemporary thought just as artists tout the public space as one in which uncensored singular voices should perpetually have the right to flourish.

Artworks and Artists of Public Art

El Pueblo y sus Falsos Líderes (The People and their False Leaders)

Artist: José Clemente Orozco

The People and their False Leaders poses a mass of emaciated, bald, blind, and unclothed men (at the right) in opposition with a group of "leaders" (to the left), who appear plump and well fed, and are dressed in workers' overalls. While the gaunt figures are indistinguishable from one another, each of the leaders bears individualizing features. The mass of skeletal figures, with arms raised and fists clenched, attack the leaders, who recoil from the aggression. Several of the leaders hold tools and weapons (like saws and knives, symbolizing the use of force) as well as opened books, pointing to the pages (symbolizing the way that those in power use theory, recorded "history" and codified "knowledge" to strengthen and maintain their authority). Blood-red flames (which, for Orozco, symbolize energy and transformative force) lick up and outward from the attacking mass, threatening to consume the flammable books. The work exists in the Enrique Díaz de León Auditorium of the former rectory of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, where muralist José Clemente Orozco produced two murals during the late 1930s that deal with injustices suffered by the most vulnerable members of society, the hypocrisy of those in power, and the prevalence of violence in the country. Both murals demonstrate Orozco's Expressionist style and use of warm, bold colors. Although Orozco was well versed in theories of proportion and composition, he also believed that a true genius knows when to break those rules. Contemporary painter Roberto Rébora says, that "In Orozco a descriptive force cohabits in intimate relationship with geometry and technical drawing." Like most Mexican Muralism, this work offers a message in alignment with Socialist ideals, highlighting the injustice of abuse of power by the ruling class wielded against the common man, and the resultant suffering of the latter. Having lived through, and fought in, the Mexican Revolution, Orozco tended to express strong emotions, violence, and torment in his works. His decision to place this particular mural in a university auditorium was likely well-considered. Although much Mexican Muralism aimed to communicate to a largely illiterate audience, Orozco may have wished, for this commission, to communicate to the students, professors, and other intellectuals who would have attended lectures and other events in this space, that knowledge is power, and with great power comes great responsibility. In other words, the mural may have been intended as a reminder to this more literate and academically-minded audience that, as leaders in their local and national communities, they have a responsibility to ensure that their research and theories do not contribute to social injustice and the abuse of power. To this day, the auditorium continues to host academic lectures and events, and Orozco's murals speak to new generations.

Fresco - Rectory of the University of Guadalajara (Now the Art Museum of the University of Guadalajara (MUSA))

Old Pioneers

Artist: Peter Hurd

This mural, painted for the city of Big Spring's Post Office, depicts a scene of family frontier life, with a father, mother, and their children standing heroically in front of their modest home. Big Spring's Signal Mountain is visible in the background, making the mural relevant to its local audience. The family is surrounded by farming equipment and plump poultry, indicating that they are industrious people whose work ethic allows them to prosper from the land. At the bottom of the mural, Hurd included a line from a Walt Whitman poem, which reads: "O Pioneers, democracy rests finally upon us, and our visions sweep through eternity." This line reinforces the main message of the work, that the nation was built on the backs of hard-working rural Americans, who therefore deserve to be honored as heroes. The work, painted by artist Peter Hurd, is one of the many artworks that were sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Taking a cue from the Mexican Muralists, these pieces aimed to motivate and empower the American public in order to work towards progress and prosperity following the Great Depression. They presented the hard-working citizen focused on the importance of agricultural labor, and the core "American" values such as close-knit family units.

Tempera fresco - Former post office building in Big Spring, Texas (now the 118th District Courthouse)

Time Landscape

Artist: Alan Sonfist

In 1965, Alan Sonfist began planning this work, which wouldn't be installed (or rather, planted) for another thirteen years. The project involved planting a variety of plant species that had been indigenous to the New York City area in pre-colonial times, on a 25 by 40 foot rectangular plot of land belonging to the Department of Transportation, at the corner of La Guardia Place and West Houston Street in Manhattan. Sonfist explained, "As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings need to be remembered." As in many of his Land Art projects, Sonfist began Time Landscape by undertaking extensive research on New York's regional botany, geology, and history, and he designed the artwork to grow and evolve naturally, making Mother Nature a co-collaborator in his work. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation explains, "When it was first planted, Time Landscape portrayed the three stages of forest growth from grasses to saplings to grown trees. The southern part of the plot represented the youngest stage and now has birch trees and beaked hazelnut shrubs, with a layer of wildflowers beneath. The center features a small grove of beech trees (grown from saplings transplanted from Sonfist's favorite childhood park in the Bronx) and woodland with red cedar, black cherry, and witch hazel above groundcover of mugwort, Virginia creeper, aster, pokeweed, and milkweed. The northern area is mature woodland dominated by oaks, with scattered white ash and American elm trees. Among the numerous other species in this miniforest are oak, sassafras, sweetgum, and tulip trees, arrowwood and dogwood shrubs, bindweed and catbrier vines, and violets." Curator Todd Alden says of the work, "Neither a park nor a wilderness preserve, Sonfist's unusual hybrid combining both backward and forward-looking registrations radically re-conceived not only the idea of what a public monument might be (as a means of historical commemoration), but it also proposed nothing less than a re-formulated possibility frontier for art itself, including also man's historical (and future) relationship to nature." Moving into the second half of the twentieth century, many artists began to focus on the contemporary dilemmas associated with environmental destruction, a problem that was increasingly being seen as having potential to affect the global population. In response to growing ecological concerns, land artists opted to create site-specific works that would not only highlight the threat of these issues, but that also employed carefully selected sites and natural (often living) materials as opposed to merely installing unnatural man-made constructions into public spaces. Many of these artists, like Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smithson tended to execute Land Art projects in remote locations like deserts and dried-up lakes. On the other hand, Sonfist chose to bring Land Art to densely populated urban environments, highlighting the importance of preserving nature within city centers. He explains, "My feeling is that if we are going to live within a city, we have to create an understanding of the land. And that includes suburban dwellers as well. We have to come to a better understanding of who we are and how we exist on the planet."

Earth, indigenous trees, bushes and flowers - Greenwich Village, New York City

The Pont Neuf Wrapped

Artist: Christo and Jean-Claude

For the Point Neuf project, married couple Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (born in Bulgaria) and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (born in Morocco to French parents) enveloped Paris' oldest bridge in 430,000 square feet of sand-colored polyamide fabric. After a full decade of planning, the work of wrapping the bridge began on August 25, 1985 and was finished on September 22. Over three million viewers saw the work before it was removed on October 5. This work serves as an example of New Genre Public Art, and more specifically, of Site-Specific Art, in that the project was designed for one specific location, with the aim of working with and "metamorphosing" the existing structure and surrounding urban landscape. The artists' aim was not to conceal the bridge, but to transform it into a new sculptural form, revealing and highlighting the bridge's geometry, proportions, and angles. The color chosen for the fabric was intended to blend in with the color of the sandstone streets in Paris at sunset. Moreover, the in-person experience formed a crucial element of the work. As Christo explained, "Our work has to be experienced, lived, touched [...] People have to feel the air, see the work breathing, living, moving in the wind, changing colours every time of the day. Images, whether they are books, postcards, posters or films do not substitute. They are a souvenir, a record but they do not substitute the real experience." Writing about New Genre Public Art, art historian, critic, and curator Arlene Raven notes that "Often these works are temporary, leaving traces in the hearts and minds of all those affected by the process rather than merely leaving monuments in their midst." Similarly, curator and art historian Miwon Kwon identifies impermanence as an important element of much site-specific art, as evidenced by Christo and Jean-Claude's aversion to creating permanent artworks. As Christo explained, when it came to their work, "If you didn't see it, you missed it." The artist couple were famous for creating large-scale, outdoor, site-specific interventions, such as this one, from the 1960s until Jeanne-Claude's passing in 2009, frequently altering or "wrapping" pre-existing historical buildings and monuments. Christo passed away in 2020. The duo always refused sponsorship, funding their projects themselves (usually through the sales of preliminary drawings). Their projects often required the involvement of large teams of people (such as the nearly 300 workers involved in The Point Neuf Wrapped ), years of planning, and extensive public outreach and collaboration with local communities and governments. In this way, Christo and Jean Claude's work demonstrated more of a participatory ethos that intimately involved the local community, offering possibilities for urban citizens to refuse succumbing to the "blasé attitude" and the "crowd of strangers" that sociologists George Simmel and Ernest W. Burgess associated with metropolitan life, and instead forge new forms of community and discover "new possibilities of unity," as desired by Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams.

Polyamide fabric, secured by rope and steel chains - Pont Neuf, Paris

Artist: Richard Serra

One of the more controversial examples of site-specific art is Tilted Arc by American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra, comprised of a single, solid, slightly curved, slightly tilted, 120-foot-long, 12-foot-high plate of Cor-ten steel. The work was originally conceived for, and installed in, the Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, New York City, and was commissioned by the United States General Services Administration Art-in-Architecture program. The sculpture boldly bisected the plaza, and Serra's intent was for "The viewer [to become] aware of himself and of his movement through the plaza. As he moves, the sculpture changes. [...] Step by step, the perception not only of the sculpture but of the entire environment changes." However, local office workers viewed the work as an eyesore and an obstruction, as a "graffiti catcher" and an "iron curtain." An employee of the nearby U.S. Department of Education remarked that, "It has dampened our spirits every day. It has turned into a hulk of rusty steel and clearly, at least to us, it doesn't have any appeal [...] and for those of us at the plaza I would like to say, please do us a favor and take it away." Eventually, the displeased locals officially petitioned to have the sculpture removed. Serra responded by suing the government for thirty million dollars, saying that it had "deliberately induced" public hostility toward his work, and that removal of the work constituted a breach of contract and a violation of his constitutional rights (as it would negatively impact his sales and commissions as well as his artistic reputation). Serra argued that "To move the work is to destroy the work," and, as professor of Performance Studies Nick Kaye notes, this simple phrase serves as a "key definition" of site-specific art. In the end, the Federal District Court ruled against Serra in July of 1987, and the sculpture was cut into three parts and removed from the site in March 1989. However, as intellectual property lawyer Judith A. Bresler notes, the controversy surrounding Tilted Arc likely contributed to the 1990 enactment of the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), which provides "moral rights" to the artist so that they have rights to attribution and integrity when it comes to paintings, drawings, and sculpture, although a 2006 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals established that VARA does not protect location as a component of site-specific artwork. Artist, art historian, and art critic Suzi Gablik writes that "What the Tilted Arc controversy forces us to consider is whether art that is centered on notions of pure freedom and radical autonomy, and subsequently inserted into the public sphere without regard for the relationship it has to other people, to the community, or any consideration except the pursuit of art, can contribute to the common good. Merely to pose the question, however, indicates that what has most distinguished aesthetic philosophy in the modern paradigm is a desire for art that is absolutely free of the pretensions of doing the world any good." As cultural theorist Malcolm Miles explains, the controversy surrounding this work "demonstrated the bankruptcy of late modernist art in terms of social relatedness."

Cor-ten Steel

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Artist: Maya Lin

While many Modern and Contemporary artists continue to create traditional, figurative monuments and memorials, others employ newer styles, challenging preconceived notions of the "appropriate" visual language of memorialization. For example, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) honors service members of the U.S. armed forces who died or went missing in action in the Vietnam War. The design for the memorial draws from Lin's experience working with Land Art. The main portion of the memorial is the Memorial Wall (or Wall of Names), comprised of two 246 foot-long polished black granite walls, which meet at a 125˚ angle, and taper vertically downward toward the two ends. The walls are engraved with nearly 60,000 names of the servicemen being honored. The walls are sunken into the earth, representing a healing wound. Despite being the most visited of all memorials in Washington D. C., the VVM has sparked a great deal of controversy, with critics attacking the unconventionally abstracted design (which contrasts with most of the other classically-inspired figurative monuments and memorials on the National Mall), as well as what is seen as the "negative" (or at best, ambiguous) political stance on the Vietnam war suggested by the form of the VVM and the use of the color black. These criticisms have been catalyzed by the fact that Lin, a first-generation Asian-American woman, was selected to create this particular memorial. Professor of philosophy Charles L. Griswold undertakes a more thoughtful reading of the VVM. He writes that "The list of names both ends and begins at the center of the monument, suggesting that the monument is both open and closed: open physically, at a very wide angle, like a weak 'V' for 'victory'[...]; but closed in substance - the war is over. This simultaneous openness and closure becomes all the more interesting when we realize that the VVM iconically represents a book. The pages are covered with writing, and the book is open partway through. The closure just mentioned is the closure not of the book but of a chapter in it. The openness indicates that further chapters have yet to be written, and read." Griswold asserts that the VVM "is not a comforting memorial; it is perhaps because of this, rather than in spite of it, that it possesses remarkable therapeutic capacity." He attributes this to the particular form of ritual that many visitors to the VVM enact, explaining, "when people find on the VVM the name they've been looking for, they touch, even caress it, remembering. One sees this ritual repeated over and over. It is often followed by another, the tracing of the name on a piece of paper. The paper is then carefully folded up and taken home, and the marks of the dead left in stone thus become treasured signatures for the living." Artist Suzanne Lacy asserts that this sort of "experiential engagement" accounts "in large part for the work's success." The memorial further implicates the viewer and the surrounding area, as the highly polished black granite acts as a mirror, reflecting the living visitors to the site, as well as the Lincoln and Washington monuments further in the distance. Griswold notes that the VVM "is a memorial to the Vietnam veterans , not the Vietnam War," and asserts that it is patriotic without being heroic, and in this way it is "apolitical" and "fundamentally interrogative; it does not take a position as to the answer." However, it is precisely the VVM's ambiguity in content, and abstraction in form, that troubles many. In response to these criticisms, two figurative sculptural additions were later installed close to the Memorial Wall. The first of these was Frederick Hart's bronze statue The Three Servicemen that depicts three servicemen who are identifiable as European-American, African-American, and Latino-American, thereby acknowledging the ethnic diversity of those who fought. Hart's statue was meant to please those who prefer a more traditional and heroic approach to memorialization, but Lin was upset, calling the decision to install Hart's statue "a coup" which "had nothing to do with how many veterans liked or disliked my piece," and she asserted that she had not received a single critical letter from a veteran.

Black granite - National Mall, Washington DC

Domestic Violence Milk Carton

Artist: Peggy Diggs

American artist Peggy Diggs became concerned with the issue of domestic abuse in the United States, and after educating herself by reading extensively about the psychology and sociology of domestic violence, and by conducting interviews with rape counselors, police officers, and women's shelter workers, she decided to raise awareness of, and potentially aid victims of, domestic violence. Diggs then met with a Rhode Island woman serving a prison sentence for murdering her abuser, and the woman suggested that creating an artistic intervention at grocery stores may allow for more victims to see it, as, according to the woman, the supermarket had been the only place that her abusive husband allowed her to go to on her own. Diggs then created four different designs for milk cartons, and with the support of domestic violence coalitions in six states, as well as Creative Time (a nonprofit arts organization in New York City), she convinced the Tuscan Dairy Company to produce and distribute one-and-a-half million cartons with her designs throughout New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania in January and February of 1992. Each carton design featured the black silhouette of a grasping hand, the words: "When you argue at home, does it always get out of hand?" and the phone number for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Diggs states, "I love public art. [... It] is not limited. It's not isolated. It's not elitist. It doesn't exist in a corner of the culture somewhere." Her Domestic Milk Carton project demonstrated a strong participatory approach, in that it involved extensive consultation and collaboration with a variety of community members before and during its execution. In projects such as these, the concept of experience gains importance. American philosopher John Dewey understood experience as the result of the interaction (comprising participation and communication) of an organism and its environment. Likewise, German art historian Juliane Rebentisch defines experience as "a process between subject and object that transforms both," and recognizes that "differently situated subjects might [...] experience the same work differently." The project also exemplifies the social turn (or, as artist Suzanne Lacy puts it, the focus on social responsibility, to which aesthetic concerns become secondary) that characterizes much New Genre Public Art. In order to affect social change, Diggs centered her project upon a pressing social issue, and disseminated her artwork as part of everyday life, leading to an impact that would never have been possible were her artwork confined to a gallery or museum space. In the later part of the twentieth century, many artists began to challenge the commodity status of art by creating works that were dematerialized, participatory, dialogical, and multisensory.

1.5 million milk cartons

Artist: Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir

Despite the increasing prevalence of immaterial and participatory public artworks in recent decades, many artists continue to create sculptural works in order to beautify public space, and to serve an educational or instructive function. Icelandic sculptor Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, who has trained in England and Italy, was commissioned by the British and Icelandic governments to design two twin sculptures titled Voyages that would reside in both the port city of Hill, England, and the fishing village of Vik, Iceland. The pair of androgynous figures stand as instructive monuments to the historical relationship between the two locations, both peering out across the sea as if viewing one another. Thorarinsdottir explains that her aim in this project was to "symbolize the bond created by more than a thousand years of sea trading between Hull and Iceland" and to memorialize those who had lost their lives at sea. Thorarinsdottir notes that "Of all the art projects I have been involved with, [ Voyages ] has been by far the most special and meaningful." She explains, that throughout her artistic career, "What has inspired me the most is the environment, and people. Society. The larger picture." It is her hope that her sculptures can "connect individuals to each other and to the wider environment." The unveiling of the Voyages sculptures was a community event, for which poets Angela Leighton, Carol Rumens, Cliff Forshaw, and David Wheatley composed poems. Thorarinsdottir's sculptures can be found in cities across the world. They all share the same androgynous, anonymous appearance, with the rough finish of their surface calling to mind the Icelandic wilderness, which may seem austere and cold to some. However, she asserts "Using human figures makes it possible for people to relate to this work very directly, but at the same time the characteristics of the figure are reserved and anonymous - they don't force themselves on the viewer." Moreover, the idea of family forms the basis of her artistic practice as Thorarinsdottir creates the molds for her sculptures using her sons' bodies. Philosophy professor Peter Osborne asserts that Thorarinsdottir's works are "magical alchemical creations that she infuses with life, humanizes and sets forth to take their place in the landscape."

Bronze - Hull, England

Artist: Anish Kapoor

After winning a design competition, Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor created Cloud Gate (also referred to as The Bean due to its shape) to stand as the centerpiece of AT&T Plaza at Millennium Park in Chicago, Illinois. It sits at 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, and weighs about 110 tons. The work's seamless and highly-polished stainless steel exterior gives it a weightless quality, while also conjuring a fun-house mirror quality, reflecting and distorting the image of the visitors to the park, as well as the surrounding urban environment. In this way, the work integrates itself into the city, rather than acting as a visual imposition or physical obstruction. The work lends itself to interactivity, as its reflective nature makes it a popular photo-opportunity destination, and as its arched shape invites visitors to pass underneath it. The form of liquid mercury, as well as spirituality and Eastern theologies like Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism all informed Kapoor in making this piece. He envisioned the sculpture as a sort of gate between man and sky, reflecting the images of both in unison. Project manager Lou Cerny of MTH Industries explains that, "When the light is right, you can't see where the sculpture ends and the sky begins." Art critic Edward Lifson considers Cloud Gate to be among the greatest pieces of Public Art in the world, as it has become a popular tourist attraction and a symbol of Chicago. Its unveiling was honored by local jazz trumpeter Orbert Davis, who wrote "Fanfare for Cloud Gate" for the occasion. Not merely beautiful, this piece of Public Art inspires viewers to take a moment to remember the presence of nature all around and their unique relationship to it, even amidst the urban environment.

Stainless steel - Millennium Park, Chicago, Illinois

Pussylluminati

Artist: MissMe

Montreal-based street artist MissMe creates her unsanctioned works (usually wheat paste posters and stickers) in public spaces in cities on all continents, with the aim of promoting female empowerment, challenging toxic masculinity, and supporting feminist and anti-racist activism. Many of her works use aggressive and/or graphic imagery, for instance of female genitalia, and of rage-filled women shouting obscenities, to elicit a shock response in her viewers. In other works, she creates portraits of strong women from history (often women of color), such as Helen Keller, Frida Kahlo, Maya Angelou, Billie Holiday, and Malala Yousafzai, in order to keep these minority leaders and their achievements alive in the public imagination. Pop culture writer Johannes Stahl notes the way in which graffiti artists employ methods that mirror those of political campaigns. He points out that although graffiti is generally thought to be a spontaneous activity, any successful action involves thorough planning of both the process, and the desired effect on the viewer. MissMe's work exemplifies this (drawing on her past career in advertising), for instance, in the way that she repeatedly paints or posts her "Pussylluminati" symbol (two hands touching at the thumbs and forefingers, with the representation of a vagina in the central space) in various locations, and promotes this symbol online as representing a sort of "gang" of empowered feminists. MissMe pushes her objectives further, by using social media platforms (primarily Instagram) to explain her political stance and the intent behind her works more in-depth, as well as to generate public discussion of the pressing socio-political issues she deals with in her art. She also manages to maintain her anonymity, wearing a mask when she appears in photographs and videos. She writes that, "The mask hides my face. But what it truly does is reveal myself. I argue that this mask frees me from my more heavy and bounding social and cultural identities." In the case of MissMe, "the medium is the message" (to borrow a quote from Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan). The illegal and public form of MissMe's art is just as, if not more, crucial than the content of the works. She explain that "one of the recurring criticisms I would get, since I've been a teenager, is that I 'take too much space,' that I'm too assertive [...] I've spent a lot of time trying to "fix" it. And so I made myself smaller, less present, less visible [...] Until I made myself so small that I nearly disappeared. [...] Now, I'm healing from all this bullshit. I see mean fake criticism for what it is: others' insecurities. [...] I take space. My space. And if you can't handle it, get the fuck out of it."

Sticker - Montreal

Beginnings of Public Art

Historical precedents.

Public Art has existed for thousands of years, across numerous cultures and societies, and has served a range of functions.

In ancient Greek and Roman culture , for example, sculpture played an important role in communication between the state and the people. Mass-produced statues of the Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar were placed in various public locations to function as propaganda, communicating particular attributes of the leader. This persistent sculptural presence brought to mind his position as a strong orator and diplomat with a pious divine nature, reaffirming his power in the minds of the citizens. These types of idealized monuments to great leaders have continued throughout later societies, as seen in sculptures of Napoleon Bonaparte and Joseph Stalin.

Wall paintings and frescoes have also been used since ancient times, appearing in cultures as far back as the Paleolithic era, as evidenced by the cave paintings at sites like Lascaux, France, and Altamira, Spain. Images and/or text were painted on walls in Egyptian tombs, Minoan palaces, Mayan structures, and the streets of Pompeii. The purpose of these murals included beautification, the communication of societal beliefs, and the documentation of everyday life. In the Middle Ages, religious frescos were commonly painted in churches in order to beautify the space while portraying narratives from the bible to educate illiterate and astonish churchgoers.

In some respects architecture has also long functioned as a form of Public Art, with buildings designed to communicate particular atmospheres or messages. This can be seen in religious architecture, which is always based upon symbolism. In many cultures, the circular form that composes certain rooms, or architectural features such as the dome, takes on a mystical significance, through its suggestion of the planets, sun, and moon, or eternity. The Pantheon in Rome elicits this idea. Christian and Catholic churches and cathedrals were generally based upon a cruciform plan, referencing the symbolic shape of the cross. Meanwhile, the square forms a foundation for design in many Hindu temples, as it is believed to express celestial harmony.

The Emergence of Modern Cities and the Public Sphere

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, and the resultant relocation of high numbers of people from rural areas to urban centers, the modern city took on new importance in the cultural and social spheres, and became a discerned space of existence with particular effects on the human psyche. Consequently, all Public Art located in modern cities comes into conversation with urban life and mentality.

American historian, sociologist, and philosopher Lewis Mumford wrote in 1937 that the city is "above all things, a theater [...] of social action," as well as a "social institution," "a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations," and "an aesthetic symbol of collective unity [which] fosters art and is art."

The notion of a public sphere, based upon accessibility, has become central to discourse regarding Public Art. As art historian Rosalyn Deutsche writes, "even the most ingenuous accounts of public art agree: public space is inextricably linked to democratic ideals. When, for instance, arts administrators and city officials formulate criteria for placing 'art in public places,' they routinely employ a vocabulary that invokes, albeit loosely, the tenets of both direct and representative democracy: Are the artworks for 'the people?' Do they encourage 'participation?' Do they serve their 'constituencies? [...] Do the works relinquish 'elitism?' Are they 'accessible?'"

Public Art as Pride: Community and Memory

French philosopher Maurice Halbswachs asserts that rather than functioning solely on an individual, isolated level, memory is codependent and co-constitutive, writing that, "It is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories ... It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection." This theory is exemplified by the way that many cultures create sites and rituals devoted to collective remembering, such as Christian pilgrimages, the "Day of the Dead" celebrations in Mexico, and the observance of memorial holidays like Veterans Day in the United States or Remembrance Day in Canada. Monuments and memorials thus serve as permanent, public, visual markers of memory as it occurs within the community.

For example, contemporary artist Jim Pomeroy understands Mount Rushmore as an important and mythical symbol within "an imagined American collective identity" and "American cultural consciousness." He writes that "In company with the Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty, Capitol Dome, Astrodome, Golden Gate Bridge, Contract Bridge, Goodyear Blimp, Hoover Dam, Martin Luther King, transistors, Chevrolets, Mickey Mouse, Washingtons crossing Delawares, Coke, Neil Armstrong, polio vaccine, Lauren Bacall, football, and pantyhose, it matrices a composite - a consensus fantasy that supplies kinship, as 'Americans,' with parameters, territories, lineage castes, roles, and history in palatable natural form."

Mexican Muralism: Public Art as Educator or Instigator

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, from about 1920 to 1950, a group of artists turned to the ancient (pre-Hispanic) medium of fresco and mural painting in order to create art in public spaces that would use visual language to reach the illiterate majority of the populace, and that would assist in strengthening national pride as the country rebuilt itself. The muralists were guided by a fundamental belief that art belongs to the public, and should not be made elitist through privatization. Three artists in particular became central figures in post-Revolution muralism in Mexico: Diego Rivera , José Clemente Orozco , and David Alfaro Siqueiros . Although the Mexican Muralists completed several government commissions, many of them also created works autonomously, painting their personal ideals, and at times generating controversy.

Rivera had been in Europe during the Revolution, and his art combined European Modernism and Cubism to communicate utopian ideals and the social benefits of the Revolution. Orozco and Siqueiros, on the other hand, had both fought in the Revolution, and thus produced somewhat more foreboding works. Orozco's art was influenced by European Expressionism and was highly critical of oppression by the ruling class, war and the resultant suffering of man, and the potential future threat of dependence on technology. Siqueiros experimented with new techniques and materials, nearing Futurism and Neorealism in style. Of the three, he produced works that were the most radical and Communist in content, and demonstrated a strong faith in technological and industrial advances.

Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros (the "big three") formed the Labor Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors in 1922. Their manifesto asserted that "art and politics are inseparable," and the document outlined their desire: "To socialize art [and] to destroy bourgeois individualism [as well as] to create beauty which should suggest struggle and serve to arouse it."

The muralism movement spread outside of Mexico, for instance with several American artists travelling to Mexico to view murals, and with each of the "big three" artists being commissioned to execute public murals in the United States. Artist and critic Charmion von Wiegand declared in 1934 that the Mexican muralists were "a more creative influence in American painting than the modernist French masters. [...] They have brought painting back to its vital function in society."

As culture writer Anna Purna Kambhampaty explains, "Enlivened by how Mexican artists created a national identity that was inclusive of the people's fight for freedom, American artists followed suit, with an interest in telling stories about the public fight for good," as seen in works like Charles White's public mural, Five Great American Negroes (1939-1940). Kambhampaty notes that "American artists also began to leverage art to agitate for social change," such as African-American artist Hale Woodruff, who apprenticed with Rivera. Woodruff depicted a group of white men cheering at the lynching of a black man in his linocut Giddap (1935), in order to educate audiences about the plight of oppressed peoples.

The WPA: Public Art During the Great Depression

Following the Great Depression, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration (WPA) (and the Federal Arts Project (FAP)) as part of his New Deal in order to support struggling artists through the funding of artistic projects, by providing artists with a sense of community, and by asserting art as a worthwhile vocation, rather than a mere leisure activity. Between 1934 and 1943, the WPA hired thousands of artists to create around 200,000 paintings, murals, and sculptures in municipal buildings, schools, and hospitals across the United States. The FAP continued these activities until the start of World War II, when funds and resources needed to be diverted to the war effort.

Another important aim of the FAP was to support the production of inspiring images that communicated core American values, and depicted scenes of technological progress, agricultural abundance, quaint small town life, and vibrant city living. Realistic styles (including Social Realism and Regionalism ) were preferred. In this way, the FAP aimed to position the arts as an integral part of everyday public life. Artists who worked for the WPA included painters Willem de Kooning , Stanton Macdonald-Wright , Stuart Davis , Jackson Pollock , and Arshile Gorky .

Many WPA artists looked south to the Mexican Muralism movement for inspiration, both in terms of technique, and how to deal with social and political subject matter in a nation recovering from devastation. American artist Jackson Pollock was heavily influenced by Orozco's murals (as evidenced by the striking similarities between Pollock's The Flame (1934-38) and Orozco's murals Prometheus (1930) and The Epic of American Civilization (1932) as well as by the time he spent at New York's Experimental Workshop, founded in 1936 by Siqueiros. The workshop was based on the philosophy that truly radical art requires the abandonment of old practices and the pioneering of completely new techniques, leading Pollock to his signature technique of creating "drip paintings." Charles Alston, one of the first African American supervisors hired by the WPA, met Diego Rivera while Rivera was painting the mural Man at the Crossroads at New York City's Rockefeller Center, and Alston later noted that he was "very much influenced" by Rivera's murals. American artist Romare Bearden asserts that African American artists were particularly drawn to the work of the Mexican muralists because of the way in which the Mexicans "used historical subjects to educate their illiterate and impoverished people on social issues."

Street Art: Public Art as Rebellion and Activism

Since the mid-1900s, the term "graffiti" (whose etymological origins tie it to "scribbling" or inscribing upon a wall or surface) has come to carry strong connotations of illegality and rebellion. Contemporary graffiti emerged in the late 1960s from the black and Latino neighborhoods and street gang cultures of New York City, alongside hip hop music, break dancing, and related "street" subculture. Street culture peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, and the invention of the spray can influenced a new technique of artistic expression that soon began showing up in cities around the world. Graffiti is a subcategory of Street Art , which, in recent decades, has come to demarcate any and all unsanctioned artistic interventions in public spaces.

Curator Ethel Seno proposes that "graffiti is an outcome of psychological, intellectual, social, and political needs of a subculture, and broadly speaking, it is a symbol of the dissent by a minority faced with multiple forms of First Amendment repression." Contemporary graffiti often serves as an indicator of the conditions for inner-city communities. Brazilian street artist Deninja says, "[Graffiti is] an art that is there in the street for those that don't have a culture, don't understand art but like it for what it is... for the beggars, poor children, prostitutes, lunatics and drunks of the streets."

Although not all graffiti works feature explicit political content, Seno explains that "At its most apolitical, work done without permission in places that make others bear witness to the affront still embodies an intuitive rebellion against the assumption that the rules of property take precedence over the inherent rights of free use and self-expression."

Illegal Street Art may hold even greater potential to revive the notion of the "public sphere," in comparison to officially sanctioned "Public Art," due to a range of converging factors: accessibility, location, shock value, and anonymity.

New Genre Public Art

Since the 1960s, artists, art critics, and art historians have been operating with greater concern for art's place in the world beyond the gallery walls and have become increasingly preoccupied with the potential for art to link to the "broader social and political world," to aid in the "creative facilitation of dialogue and exchange," and to "challenge conventional perceptions [...] and systems of knowledge." Scholars refer to these Contemporary Art practices that directly take up these aims using an array of terms, including "New Genre Public Art" (Suzanne Lacy), " Relational Aesthetics " (Nicolas Bourriaud), "Dialogical Art" (Grant Kester), and "Participatory Art" (Claire Bishop). What links these practices is a focus on the relationship between artist and audience; indeed, this relationship itself (or, as Lacy puts it, "the space between artist and audience") often becomes the artwork (as opposed to a material art object). Additionally, curator Mary Jane Jacobs summarizes, New Genre Public Art "is not art for public spaces but art addressing public issues [...] It reconnects culture and society, and recognizes that art is made for audiences, not for institutions of art."

According to Lacy, New Genre Public Art describes work by artists who "have been working in a manner that resembles political and social activity but is distinguished by its aesthetic sensibility" and for whom "public strategies of engagement are an important part of [their] aesthetic language."

These practices, which encompass a range of media including installation, performance, and conceptual art, are rooted in the happenings of the 1960s and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s (when artists challenged the conventions and authority of galleries and museums, and refused art's commodity status), and are informed by more recent discourses of Marxism, feminism, and ecology.

For her 2013 piece "Between the Door and the Street" installation, Lacy gathered 400 women and a few men-all selected to represent a cross-section of ages, backgrounds, and perspectives-onto the stoops along Park Place, a residential block in Brooklyn, where they engaged in unscripted conversations about a variety of issues related to gender politics today. Thousands of members of the public came out to wander among the groups, listen to what they were saying, and form their own opinions.

Concepts and Styles

Public monuments and memorials.

Monuments and memorials are usually sculptural (sometimes architectural) artworks that are created for the purpose of commemorating or remembering a person, group of people, or historical event. They are often located on a site of importance, such as the site of an important battle or a tragic societal experience. They can mark unifying celebration as equally as facilitate the processing of communal grief. As Federico Bellentani, professor of semiotics and geography, explains, "monuments play an important role in the definition of a uniform national memory and identity..." Whether figurative or abstract, their form and content are always carefully designed to express a particular historical narrative.

An example of a figurative memorial is Shoes on the Danube Bank (2005) in Budapest, Hungary (by film director Can Togay and sculptor Gyula Pauer), which consists of sixty pairs of iron shoes, meant to represent the Hungarian Jews slaughtered by the Nazis during World War II. Meanwhile, architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold chose an abstract approach in creating the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany, which is comprised of 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae," of randomly varying heights, arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. According to Eisenman, the work is meant to disorient and discomfort the viewer, and to represent a "supposedly rational and ordered system" that "loses touch with human reason."

Monuments and memorials also provide opportunities for a nation to assert what kind of community they view themselves as (such as pacifist versus militarist). As Professor of philosophy Charles L. Griswold notes, "The word 'monument' derives from the Latin monere , which means not just 'to remind' but also 'to admonish,' 'warn,' 'advise,' 'instruct.'" In discussing the monuments and memorials found in the National Mall of Washington D.C. (including the Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and Washington Monument), Griswold writes that these structures "belong to a particular species of recollective architecture, a species whose symbolic and normative content is prominent. After all, war memorials by their very nature recall struggles to the death over values."

Due to their inherent political content, monuments and memorials are often controversial, particularly in places that have undergone significant political regime changes, as in the case of American monuments to Confederate heroes. Many of these Confederate monuments are seen as glorifying racist historical villains and their white supremacist ideologies, and are therefore being removed (as in the case of the Robert Edward Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia.) The World War II Memorial in Washington D. C. has also been harshly criticized, due to its lack of emotionality, and its "vainglorious" and "overbearing" focus on the glorification of national victory, with its massive granite columns and golden eagles. Architecture critic Inga Saffron criticized the monument as adopting a "pompous style [that was] also favored by Hitler and Mussolini."

Public Murals

Major muralism movements of the twentieth century, particularly post-Revolution Mexican muralism, and WPA-sponsored murals in the United States, were characterized by content that focused on developing national pride, asserting core national values, and championing technological progress in the wake of devastating events (the Mexican Revolution, and the Great Depression). These murals were not only intended to beautify public spaces, but also to communicate important messages to even the illiterate members of society. This meant that muralists often exaggerated and caricaturized their figures, and used easily recognizable symbols, to express their intended messages.

Mexican murals contained much political (usually Socialist) subject matter. As muralists were frequently commissionedin government buildings, palaces, schools, and other buildings with unique architectural features, the movement came to be characterized by allowing for compositions to be determined by the geometrical and physical particulars of a given space or surface.

Today, murals are widely used by artists, both commissioned and non-commissioned, to beautify space, remark on community, incite social change, and reflect a surrounding environment or community ethos.

Public Sculpture

When not seeking to commemorate or memorialize, public sculpture serves a range of purposes. Many artists aim merely to beautify and leave their mark on public spaces (such as Jeff Koons' Balloon Flower (Red) (1995-1999, New York City)). Others hope that their works will cause viewers to reconsider their relationship to their urban environment. For example, in Bridge Over Tree in New York's Brooklyn Bridge Park, Iranian-born, Minneapolis-based artist Siah Armajani aimed to create a sculptural installation that moved around a pre-existing tree, reminding viewers of the importance of our natural resources. Other artists create public sculptures that they want viewers to interact with, for instance, by making sculptures that can be climbed and enjoyed in phenomenological fashion.

Participatory Art

In these types of works, as curator Patricia Phillips writes, "Community involvement is the raw material of artistic practice," and the relationships amongst people are the artwork. Artist and arts writer Suzanne Lacy notes that contemporary artists working in public spaces must learn entirely new strategies: "how to collaborate, how to develop multilayered and specific audiences, how to cross over with other disciplines, how to choose sites that resonate with public meaning, and how to clarify visual and process symbolism for people who are not educated in art."

Art historian Claire Bishop states that in participatory practices "the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously conceived as a 'viewer' or 'beholder,' is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant."

Artists engaged in participatory/dialogical/relational practice find that public spaces are generally more conducive to the aims of their projects, particularly in terms of their social objectives. According to Bishop, the "social (re)turn" in art since the 1990s indicates "a shared set of desires to overturn the traditional relationship between the art object, the artist and the audience." Bishop notes that the importance placed upon communalism over individualism is a key aspect of participatory art projects. She writes that such projects view individualism "with suspicion, not least because the commercial art system and museum programming continue to revolve around lucrative single figures." Thus it would seem, as artist and critic Suzi Gablik asserts, that participatory art aims to react against neoliberalism, pushing for increased consideration for community, communalism, and public interest rather than individualism and privatization.

Site-Specific Work

Site-specific artworks can range from sculpture, Land/Earth Art , Environmental Art , and murals/graffiti, to participatory or performance projects. What makes a work site-specific is that its physical location (as well as social considerations such as the opinions, needs, and desires of the local community) is taken into account throughout the planning and execution stages of the work. In his discussion of site-specific art, Italian art critic Bruno Corà notes the close, dynamic " rapporto inscindibile " ("inseparable relationship") between artwork and site and proposes that site-specific art cannot be moved without losing a part of its significance.

Corà notes that site-specific artists draw inspiration from each site, taking into consideration the aesthetic qualities of the space, the sounds and odors present in the space, and the particular quality of light that falls within the space. In other words, all sensory aspects of a space play into the artist's final decision about what work will be placed in a site.

Earthworks or "Land Art," describes a movement that developed mainly in the United States, influenced by Conceptualism and Minimalism , as well as the environmental movement. Earthworks are usually site-specific, and use the land and natural (often living) materials, such as rocks, soil, trees, and other plants as medium. Many earth artists, like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer , select sites with damaged ecologies in order to suggest renewal and revitalization, and they tend to include time and the forces of nature as important considerations in their pieces, allowing for natural erosion, decay, or growth to occur and affect the work. Earth artists are also influenced by institutional critique , and by situating their works out-of-doors, within natural landscapes; they inherently challenge the dominance of museums and galleries, as well as the commodity status of art.

Street Art and Graffiti

The terms "graffiti" and "street art" are often used interchangeably, however the distinction between the two is based primarily upon aesthetic style and materials. Graffiti murals involve the use of spray paint, and are associated with a particular aesthetic, while Street art more generally refers to a range of aesthetic styles and the use of many materials including stencils, stickers, ceramic tiles, and more, with graffiti being one of its subcategories. The primary undercurrent that defines a work as Street art or graffiti, is its illegal and unsanctioned creation in public space.

Curator Ethel Seno asserts, "If we are to believe in the power of ideas, as we must, we must understand that it is not in the thoughts we keep to ourselves but only in sharing them that ideas attain their potential. This is the primary reason that public space offers such a fertile tableau for unsolicited artistic expression." The public-ness of graffiti can even elicit a participatory response on the part of the urban viewer. For instance, Ji Lee started The Bubble Project wherein he posts empty speech bubbles on top of advertisements, allowing passersby to write in their own comments, thoughts, and opinions.

Moreover, Street art can be done by anybody with the will to do it, as opposed to officially sanctioned Public Art, which usually involves certain artists who are selected or approached to do art works. There are street artists of all ages, races and ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and social classes, yet their voices become equal when transferred to the city walls. Furthermore, graffiti works are almost always done anonymously, with the use of a pseudonym, or 'tag,' which obscures the identity of the artist as well as their race, gender, age, etc.

Later Developments - After Public Art

A number of organizations support, commission, and fund Public Art projects in the United States and beyond. The National Endowment for the Arts (founded in 1965) recently renewed their commitment, in their 2018-2022 Strategic Plan , to "dedicate a portion of grantmaking funds to projects that integrate the arts into the fabric of community life," including permanent and temporary Public Art installations, and artist-facilitated public space design. A number of regional/state organizations operate with similar goals, such as the Public Art Fund, which was founded in 1977 with the aim of bringing Contemporary Art to the public spaces of New York City. However, with the political climate and governmental administrations constantly changing, such funds always exist with the potential for being deemed non-essential and getting cut.

Speaking of the "politics of representation," art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche writes that "the gallery and museum appear as the antitheses of public space," and many artists who work in public spaces share this sentiment, believing public space to offer a more open, uncensored, and accessible site of reception. In response to this criticism, more museums and galleries (such as the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh) are designating outdoor areas to include art to be seen by the public without paid entrance.

During the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 while most of the world's population were homebound, the Internet has emerged as a revolutionary new space for accessible engagement with art, as hundreds of institutions around the offered free virtual tours of their collections.

Nevertheless, Public Art continues to be the focus of criticism. For instance, art critic and curator Patricia Phillips has argued that Public Art, despite its idealistic origins, has come to do little more than merely occupy space and encourage mediocrity, and that the majority of Public Art has become overly bureaucratized (creating conflict between local communities and the general public). She notes that a common issue is that many "Public Art" projects are relegated to "negotiable" areas "that developers have 'left over' [...] after all of their available commercial and residential space has been rented or sold."

Phillips asserts that, as a result of such restrictions on where art can and should appear, many Public Art projects cater primarily to "profit-motivated market objectives" and mere beautification, rather than to a more profound interrogation of urban citizenship and space. For Phillips, a primary aim of Public Art should be to explore "the rich symbiotic topography of civic, social, and cultural forces," and, therefore, truly provocative Public Art often stands at odds with desires for such art to be inoffensive and unobtrusive. This explains the appeal of unsanctioned graffiti and Street Art interventions to artists who do not wish to be limited and censored in the act of creation.

Political theorist Chantal Mouffe asks "Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and advertising have become blurred and where artists and cultural workers have become a necessary part of capitalist production?"

Mouffe argues that public space will serve as the "battleground" of this struggle, and sees this in new "activist" art forms. This includes work that "more or less directly engages critically with political reality," like that of Barbara Kruger , Hans Haacke , and Santiago Sierra; "artworks exploring subject positions or identities defined by otherness, marginality, oppression or victimization."

Many artists also see Environmental Art as the key to the future of Public Art. American artist Patricia Johanson asserts that "Since the most critical issue in the years ahead is the preservation of life on earth, design should be approached for its ability to be life-supporting, rather than as an expression of the artist's angst , the pursuit of ideal relationships, a pilfering of art historical styles, or a quest for the new [...] Artists should have the courage to move away from work oriented to money and power and use their creativity to help solve critical problems in the 'real' world."

Useful Resources on Public Art

• My Art, My Life: An Autobiography Our Pick By Diego Rivera and Gladys March
• Diego Rivera. The Complete Murals Our Pick By Luis-Martín Lozano and Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera
• Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros Our Pick By Desmond Rochfort
• Orozco: The Life and Death of a Mexican Revolutionary By Raymond Caballero
• Siqueiros: Biography of a Revolutionary Artist Our Pick By D. Anthony White
• José Clemente Orozco: An Autobiography By Jose Clemente Orozco
• Dialogues in Public Art Our Pick By Tom Finkelpearl
• Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy Our Pick By Harriet Senie
• Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place By Claire Doherty
• Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape By Kirk Savage
• Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies Our Pick By Sanford Levinson
• Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond Our Pick By Jennifer A. Jordan
• How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State Our Pick By Mary K. Coffey
• Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship Our Pick By Claire Bishop
• Art, Space and the City Our Pick By Malcolm Miles
• Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art Our Pick By Suzanne Lacy
• One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity Our Pick By Miwon Kwon
• Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 By Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon
• Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West By Lucy R. Lippard
• Understanding Graffiti: Multidisciplinary Studies from Prehistory to the Present Our Pick By Troy R Lovata and Elizabeth Olton
• Art in the Streets Our Pick By Jeffrey Deitch
• Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy Our Pick By Rosalyn Deutsche / Social Text / 1992
• What is a City? By Lewis Mumford / Architectural Record / 1937
• The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography Our Pick By Charles L. Griswold and Stephen S. Griswold / Critical Inquiry / 1986
• Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space By Chantal Mouffe / Open / 2008
• What Happens When Site-Specific Art Outlasts Its Surroundings? By Zoë Lescaze / The New York Times Style Magazine / May 13, 2019
• Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Delights, Real and Imagined By Liza Foreman / New York Times / November 13, 2017
• Public Art Trip: New York City Our Pick The Art Assignment (PBS Digital Studios)
• How To Look at Public Art: A Six-Year-Old Explains KQED Art School
• How Public Art Challenges Public Space | Vardit Gross | TEDxWhiteCity Our Pick TEDx Talks
• Visions of Public Art: Social Design | Daan Roosegaarde World Economic Forum
• What Story DO America's Monuments Tell? | Alicia Scott | TEDxSavannah Our Pick TEDx Talks
• Why America is wrestling with Confederate monuments Our Pick PBS NewsHour
• Is graffiti art? Or vandalism? - Kelly Wall Our Pick TED-Ed
• Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Then & Now
• Why Murals? Our Pick The Art Assignment (PBS Digital Studios)
• With muralism, Mexico's rich tradition of public art extends well beyond its borders Our Pick PBS NewsHour
• Los Tres Grandes | Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 Our Pick Whitney Museum of American Art
• The Case for Land Art Our Pick The Art Assignment (PBS Digital Studios)

Content compiled and written by Alexandra Duncan

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Cooper

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Why Public Art Is Good for Cities

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, there’s a mural around every corner. Since 1984, local organization Mural Arts Philadelphia has created more than 3,600 murals on building exteriors across the city. According to its mission, the organization believes these striking works of public art have the power to “ transform public spaces and individual lives .”

“We always say that art ignites change,” says Jane Golden, the organization’s executive director. “There is something deeply catalytic about the work.”

Researchers agree: Studies show that public art has a host of benefits for communities. Its community-building powers can combat feelings of anxiety and social isolation . When locals participate in creating public art, these effects are amplified. A 2018 London-based survey found that 84% of respondents believed participating in public art projects benefited their well-being. 

Murals, in particular, are great for artistic placemaking and city marketing.

Public art also provides economic benefits, including new jobs and increased tourism. Murals, in particular, are great for artistic placemaking and city marketing. It ’s no surprise that art-focused bus and walking tours have grown popular in dozens of cities in recent years, from London, England, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Austin, Texas , where the city-led Art in Public Places program has been funding public art for more than 30 years. 

Elsewhere, public art is used to address practical problems like safety . For example, last year in Cincinnati, Ohio, nonprofit organization ArtWorks created a permanent, illuminated art installation to light a popular walking trail in the Avondale neighborhood. The installation has aesthetic benefits, but it has also improved the neighborhood’s walkability and residents’ safety after dark.

ArtWorks also provides economic benefits to Cincinnati residents. It creates jobs and fosters youth development through an apprenticeship program. Since its founding in 1996, the organization has employed more than 4,000 young people, ages 14–21, and 3,000 professional artists and creatives in art projects throughout the city. 

“Our apprentices are being mentored by professional artists on the job,” explains Sydney Fine, senior director of impact at ArtWorks. “So beyond being an arts nonprofit, we are also in many ways a career-readiness, positive youth development organization.”

​​Often, we look to public art as a way to address a challenge that a city is looking to solve.

However, one of the most meaningful effects of public art is that it creates what urban designer Mitchell Reardon calls “community fingerprints”—spaces that make people feel represented, foster community ties, and give people a sense of ownership and belonging in their neighborhoods.

As a senior planner at Vancouver-based urban planning and design consultancy Happy City , Reardon has seen how public art serves communities. “​​Often, we look to public art as a way to address a challenge that a city is looking to solve—say, a transportation issue or safe streets—while doing so in a way that is going to be meaningful for a broader cross section of people,” he explains. 

In the United States, public art depicting American communities carries on an artistic tradition that blossomed almost a century ago, when the Works Progress Administration, a Great Depression-era New Deal agency, began funding the visual arts. Through a program called the Federal Art Project , the Works Progress Administration employed more than 10,000 artists, who created a significant body of public art, including thousands of murals , between 1935 and 1943. 

According to Victoria Grieve, a historian of visual culture in America and author of The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture , supporters of the Federal Art Project shared a belief in “the relationship between the arts and the daily lives of the American people, and the educational, social, and economic benefits of widespread cultural access.” 

Many of the murals produced during the period represented this ethos and belonged to an emerging artistic tradition called “American Scene Painting,” a style of realism inspired by American history, mythology, and culture. Federal Art Project murals commissioned for airports, post offices, and public schools depicted the everyday lives and contributions of working-class Americans , American immigrants , and communities of color , meant to foster a shared “American” cultural identity.

While the representation of people of color in public art during the period was often problematic, and New Deal programs failed to meet many of civil rights leaders’ most pressing demands , the Federal Art Project still had some upsides for the nation’s marginalized communities. According to Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, author of Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era , the program created needed opportunities for interracial cultural exchange and allowed artists of color to exercise “cultural self-determination.” 

In other words, New Deal funding and increased attention to public art allowed more artists—Native American, Chicano, Black, and Asian American—than ever before to paint their communities into American art. Those artists’ creations also allowed underrepresented communities to see themselves, perhaps for the first time, on the walls of their cities. Today, Mural Arts Philadelphia and ArtWorks honor the spirit of this work. 

James Daniel Burns, a staff artist at Mural Arts Philadelphia, has experienced this firsthand. “Sometimes, [a mural] can propel the identity of a place into fruition,” he says.

Fine agrees. She says a mural of Cincinnati-based civil rights activist Louise Shropshire on the side of Avondale’s main recreation center has helped turn the location into a vibrant community hub. The mural was created in 2019 as part of a new quality-of-life plan for the neighborhood. “The main focus of the plan is increasing safety and wellness,” explains Fine. “And so, murals have been a part of that. Documenting the important historical figures that have come from a neighborhood and increasing that pride, which then further activates that neighborhood in that space,” she explains.

Both Mural Arts Philadelphia and ArtWorks take great care to ensure locals feel represented in the murals in their neighborhoods. The organizations partner with local community leaders, organizers, and activists to plan and implement new projects. In Cincinnati, this process takes an average of eight months. At Mural Arts Philadelphia, things move much faster. Most of its murals begin with an application filed by someone living in the community where a project will be implemented. They’re expected to rally a community around the proposed project before applying. After that, creating a mural takes only 4 to 8 weeks. ​​At the end of the process, Golden says people feel real ownership of the work.

The mural created a community of love, a community of care.

These collaborative planning processes also forge strong relationships within and between communities. Staff artist Burns says he has a trove of personal stories for each of the projects he has completed in Philadelphia, “rooted in the relationships with people who shape these projects.” ​​

Those relationships last long after the paint has dried. Golden says that Mural Arts Philadelphia also remains a fierce advocate for its art and the communities its projects foster after completion. A mural on South 30th Street in West Philadelphia is an excellent example. The mural depicts a person alone in a small raft on a turbulent sea—a metaphor for the feelings that locals who had contemplated suicide described to Burns, the lead artist on the project. 

The mural, completed in 2012, resulted from a two-year-long collaboration between Mural Arts, the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The project also engaged more than 1,200 community members. It was meant to shed light on youth suicide rates in Philadelphia, which were rising at the time, and provide a voice for survivors, attempters, and their families and friends. 

“The mural created a community of love, a community of care, where people kept coming together long after the mural was created and finished,” Golden says. “It was really inspiring.”

When Mural Arts got word that a new dorm would be built in front of the mural, obstructing the view of it from the street, Golden says her team organized with the community that had contributed to the project and others in West Philadelphia. They sent a strong message to the developer. “‘Look,’ we said, ‘this project is really important,’” Golden says. The group was able to secure a donation from the developers to create a new mural. The new project, which is still in its early stages, will bring the same collaborators together again to create a mural with a similar vision in a central location. 

By holding developers accountable and addressing practical problems, such as street safety, organizations like Mural Arts Philadelphia and ArtWorks create clear value for their communities through their work. The same is true of dozens of other public art organizations, including the Bay Area Mural Program in Oakland, California; the Portland Street Art Alliance in Portland, Oregon; and the Chicago Public Art Group in Chicago, Illinois. The work itself also fosters a sense of communal ownership over space, strengthens neighborhood ties, and allows folks to see themselves represented on the walls of their cities. The message it sends is clear: Public art is good for us and our cities. 

“I think a city that is vibrant and thriving has art right at the center,” Golden says.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 8:46 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2021, to correct the spelling of Sydney Fine ’s name.  Read our corrections policy here.

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Public Art Essay

I can say personally I love public art. It is such a way of open expression. Many people look to public art to find a connection when it comes to society and ways it connects one another. An amazing thing about public art is that you can be walking down the street and see crazy sculptures or murals, you do not always have to be in an art museum or gallery to see these pieces. Public art amazes me much more than gallery styled art, it is different and it takes a large amount of creativity.

In the reading for this week written by Erika Doss she speaks about the controversial pieces seen and also speaks of traditional public art and then the shift to modern public art.  Typical forms of public art are what we can normally find at any popular public area. Walking through the University of Oregon campus we can see some sculptures, I have seen many sculptures throughout the campus that would be described as public traditional art. When it comes to public art there will always be people who agree and who do not agree or even enjoy a piece. In the article it speaks about the sculpture of the FDR memorial in Washington D.C. Here it is shown that he has a disability and in a wheel chair. The controversy about this sculpture is that disability activists said that this piece was inadequate because it did not touch on all of the other aspects of FDR’s life.  One other piece spoken about was the piece in the Denver Airport. This piece proves the different types of public art that we can see in a modern day society(Doss 7).

Another example of public art is the installation in the Denver International Airport, a great place to express your art,”… to permanent public fixtures like Kinetic Light/Air Curtain, Antonette Rosato and Bill Maxwell’s mile-long installation of 5,280 minipropellers, backlit in blue neon, that spin wildly when trains pass by them at the Denver International Airport” (Doss 2).  This is an amazing piece of public art in a place that you wouldn’t really expect to see it.  This is such an unique place to put a installation, thousands of people a day take these trains to get in and out of the airport so it a great place to put an installation.

Many times we see public art in non traditional areas and ways. My favorite example of a public art is Banksy, who is a public English artist that has met headlands. He is known for is controversial art and the most amazing thing is keeping who he is a secret for all of these years. Many of his graffiti pieces have really expressed the political issues going on in the world. An example of one of his more famous pieces is the one he did in London of soldier painting peace. He presents art in a satirical way shows the expression of free speech and has touched on many political issues we see in the world today.

Public art drives communities together and is a way to reach out to people with the same views. Public art is always changing and that is important to understand. “Public art is artwork in the public realm, regardless of whether it is situated on public or private property, or whether it is acquired through public or private funding” (Doss 2). It is a wide variety of sculptures, murals, installations, and many more.  I think we will see many more unique public art pieces as the years go on. Public art reaches to a bigger crowd, a universal understanding of creativity.

Doss, E. (2006, October).  Public art controversy: Cultural expression and civic debate . Retrieved from http://www.americansforthearts.org/pdf/networks/pan/doss_controversy.pdf j

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Public Art: An Introduction

What exactly is "public art"? Public art differs from art produced for display in a museum, gallery, or other public place, and from art collected by individuals, in three major ways:

• It is commissioned by a very public process, in which the community has a clear and defined role in selecting the artist, the site, and the artwork
• Public money funds the creation of the art piece, especially in the case of percent-for-art ordinances. This arrangement means that the art has many audiences to please, not just the artist and the selection committee, and that there is a degree of accountability assumed about the artwork that artists do not encounter as much when creating work for private use or display.
• It is associated with a sense of longevity. Whereas a work of studio art or in a museum collection may be sold or removed at a predetermined time, a work of public art, is protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act and must go through an official process (called Deaccession) if it is to be sold or removed.. It also must be designed to rigorous standards, as it is often expected to last from 20-50 years, if not more, in an outdoor, fairly unprotected environment.

For general purposes, the term "public art" refers to the following kinds of artworks and media:

• Sculpture: in the round, bas relief, kinetic works (mobiles), electronic works, light works; figurative, abstract, statuary; formed from any material that provides the type of durability required for the project;
• Mosaics including engravings, carvings, frescoes;
• Fountains or water elements;
• Fine art crafts: clay, fiber (tapestries), textiles, wood, metal, plastics, stained glass;
• Mixed-media video and computer-generated works, collage, photography;
• Installations;
• Earthworks and environmental artworks;
• Decorative, ornamental, or functional elements designed by an artist;
• Murals, drawings, and paintings; and

Generally speaking, a work of art cannot be considered as "public art" if it is not one-of-a-kind or an original (in the case of a work of sculpture or painting) or it is reproduced in editions of over 200 (in the case of fine art prints and photographs). In general, reproductions, unlimited editions/mass productions, decorative, ornamental, and functional elements of architecture, directional elements such as super graphics, signage, and color coding, and landscape usually are NOT considered artworks unless done by an artist. (At top: Lucien Labaudt mural depicting San Francisco life, the Beach House, San Francisco, CA)

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What is public art?

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Public art is a reflection of how we see the world – the artist’s response to our time and place combined with our own sense of who we are.

Public art is not an art “form.” Its size can be huge or small. It can tower fifty feet high or call attention to the paving beneath your feet. Its shape can be abstract or realistic (or both), and it may be cast, carved, built, assembled, or painted. It can be site-specific or stand in contrast to its surroundings. What distinguishes public art is the unique association of how it is made, where it is, and what it means. Public art can express community values, enhance our environment, transform a landscape, heighten our awareness, or question our assumptions. Placed in public sites, this art is there for everyone, a form of collective community expression. Public art is a reflection of how we see the world – the artist’s response to our time and place combined with our own sense of who we are.

Who is the “public” for public art?

In a diverse society, all art cannot appeal to all people, nor should it be expected to do so. Art attracts attention; that is what it is supposed to do. Is it any wonder, then, that public art causes controversy? Varied popular opinion is inevitable, and it is a healthy sign that the public environment is acknowledged rather than ignored. To some degree, every public art project is an interactive process involving artists, architects, design professionals, community residents, civic leaders, politicians, approval agencies, funding agencies, and construction teams. The challenge of this communal process is to enhance rather than limit the artist’s involvement.

What is the “art” of public art?

As our society and its modes of expression evolve, so will our definitions of public art. Materials and methods change to reflect our contemporary culture. The process, guided by professional expertise and public involvement, should seek out the most imaginative and productive affinity between artist and community. Likewise, artists must bring to the work their artistic integrity, creativity, and skill. What is needed is a commitment to invention, boldness, and cooperation – not compromise.

Why public art?

Public art is a part of our public history, part of our evolving culture and our collective memory. It reflects and reveals our society and adds meaning to our cities. As artists respond to our times, they reflect their inner vision to the outside world, and they create a chronicle of our public experience.

Adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1992).

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The Nature of Public Art: Connecting People to People and People to Nature

Georgina avlonitis, cape town.  8 march 2018.

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Mankind may have left the savannah some million years ago, but the savannah never quite left us. It makes sense that since we co-evolved with nature, our need for it is hardwired into our brains and our genes. For millennia, the nature we’ve had access to has influenced everything from our food, to the prints and colours we use on our clothing; our crafts to our livelihoods; the beats and lyrics of our music to our varied cultures and traditions—both ancient and modern. It’s shaped who we are. Not to mention, there is a plethora of scientific research pointing to the fact that we need access to nature for our basic development, our physical health and our mental well-being. Perhaps our genetics have not yet caught up with the pace of our urban and technological developments—hence the number of societal ills and human health issues we see today.

As we push ourselves into being an ever atomised, urbanised species, it’s even more important that we have adequate access to nature, a relationship and connectedness with it, and urban green spaces that promote community. Public art speaks to both emotion and reason, in finding new ways to articulate the richness and diversity of the relationships between people and their physical and natural environment—providing a sense of place and connecting people to people, and people to nature.

Greenpop —a social and environmental NGO working across sub-Saharan Africa—was recently funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization-International Fund for the Promotion of Culture (UNESCO-IFPC) to undertake their dream of an art and environment project aptly coined, “ Conservation Conversation Corners “. Here, disused public corners in two African cities—Livingstone, Zambia and Johannesburg, South Africa—were transformed using public participation, mural art, public seating, sculpture and indigenous plants—into spaces of connection and of conversation around the incredible biodiversity that makes each city so unique and special. Three artists were selected for each leg of the project including South African up-cycler Heath Nash, Zambian sculptor Owen Shikabeta and Zambian painter Mwamba Chikwemba. All three artists were involved in the Livingstone leg—as well as South African installation artist Mbali Dhlamini (involved in the Johannesburg leg, in place of Heath Nash). The artworks and artists invited people into the space to break down barriers across countries, disciplines, people, and nature, turning these urban corners into functioning, colourful places of interaction—serving to physically, visually, and conceptually link the two African cities, while sparking conversation around our relationship with the natural world.

In cities, we enter territory that is re-interpreted by wildlife itself—Johannesburg has one of the largest man-made forests in the world and Livingstone is hummed to sleep by a nightly chorus of frogs and the roar of Victoria Falls. But how to engage people in this incredible nature? What gets people’s attention is a link into their immediate sense of self and a relevance that draws them in. They have to be able to say “ That is me, that is what I am about ”. Over the three weeks spent in each city, community members were encouraged to contribute to the creation of the artwork and numerous participatory workshops were held to draw out each artwork’s main theme.

Livingstone’s artwork: Trees for Bees, ( Zambia Tourism Board Offices, Livingstone Way )

In Livingstone, a bare corner adjacent to the Zambian tourism board was chosen as the site for the artwork. Here the artwork’s main theme of bees was synonymous with the wonderful collaboration involved in creating the space. Bees are matriarchal creatures and experts at creative collaboration, working together to make the miracle of honey. After numerous workshops, the theme came about owing to the areas dire deforestation issues and the use of beekeeping in Zambia as an alternative livelihood—where indigenous woodlands are sustainably managed as valuable fodder for bees, instead of being cut down for fuel and the informal charcoal industry. The artwork set out to highlight the inter-dependency between bees and forests and their role in food security. With 90 percent of the world’s nutrition coming from crops pollinated by bees—they’re essential to our very survival. Albert Einstein’s quote was boldly included in the art space: “ If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man .”

The artwork also had a clear feminist undercurrent, celebrating femininity and female power. Primary muralist of the project, Mwamba Chikwemba painted a powerful female figure as the focal point of the mural. “ She represents the queen bee, mother nature and can be taken as a representation, an emblem of all powerful women. Bees are a matriarchal society and my subject matter as an artist normally focuses on strong females and the symbolism of female African head wraps. Here I have depicted a honeycomb hive as a celebratory headwrap—her crowning glory and as a celebration of all powerful women… What was also interesting was the numerous people that walked past me standing on the painting scaffolding and being surprised that a Zambian woman was actually standing so high up, and painting such a big wall. Other women from the community then got involved .”

Reactions from the local community where positive and inspiring. Josephine Monde who was the very first woman employed in the same building by Livingstone Tourism in 1966, walked past the space and commented: “ You have really done a huge service to the people of Livingstone. I am proud to see a woman’s face up there on that wall. This has added beauty, not only to the building but to the whole of Livingstone. Tourism depends on the environment—without nature we have nothing. ”

Upcycling was a large part of the artistic process and involved numerous members of the community. Owen Shikabeta created a 3m tall upcycled tree sculpture from scrap metal from which Heath Nash hung numerous upcycled creations, which were co-created by local children and crafters alike. Livingstone crafter, Freeton Matonga arrived on site every day to get involved in the artwork and to learn from the project’s daily upcycling workshops.

Matonga said: “ The mural and the recycling are amazing because I can see the response from the people around here, how they are reacting to it.”  “ They are seeing that they can find some value of the materials [waste] that we are using. We cut down so many forests for the wood used in our local crafts. I hope we are going to have some kind of change of mindset…maybe trying to convert things like recycling to keeping the environment clean. We’ve got the challenge of taking care of our environment so if people see that this is quite a good thing then people will be interested, and they will be doing more things—more than what we’ve just done here. ”

Johannesburg’s artwork: Freedom by Nature ( Corner Commissioner Street and Berea Rd, Maboneng )

Johannesburg is one of the largest man-made forests in the world, gifted with magnificent birdlife and rich biodiversity, but it is also a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. In this city of bars, walls, and fences the artists set out to ask: “ Where do we truly feel free? ”

The main theme involved birds, and was depicted in eco-friendly paint across the 45m² mural. “ Birds are synonymous with freedom. As a woman in Jozi, you always feel like you need to keep eyes at the back of your head. We stay on our guards and alert at all times, whether walking or driving in the city, because of the crime here. How wonderful it would be to feel free and at peace. Nature has that. Nature gives us that. We need to access it and conserve it more in our towns and cities “, stated artist Mbali Dhlamini. Zambian artist Mwamba Chikwemba added that she could only relax properly when in nature. “ I realised, the only place I’ve truly been able to relax during my stay [in Johannesburg] is in fact on my visit to Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens. Being in nature, in a functioning and safe green space, makes you feel physically and mentally free “, she said.

Some members of the public commented that they felt the artwork in the space made it feel safer. “ For some reason, the colours and images on this wall make me feel so much safer, and I guess, well, more carefree when I walk down this street. This space has turned from grey and dusty to something just beautiful ”, remarked Gladness Phiri, a local Maboneng resident. And her comments ring true when looking at international urban ecology literature, which is replete with studies showing that birdsong and functioning public green spaces indeed help to reduce the crime rates in towns and cities.

Zambian artist, Owen Shikabeta created a powerful sculpture and public seating out of upcycled burglar bars. “ There seem to be burglar bars everywhere in this city. When hunting for scrap to upcycle for this artwork—I came across so many bars. I use what I find, and so I created a bench. Instead of bars separating us, I wanted to make something that would bring people together. When you sit on it, I wanted it to somehow feel as though you are sitting outside of a cage. Free as a bird. ” This was in addition to his life-size sculpture of a human, arms outstretched and free, which sits next to the bench.

Over the two weeks, the community of Maboneng and local artists made their way to the art piece to pick up a paintbrush, lending their voices and talent and leaving their mark. Maboneng student, Thando Nkosi commented: “ I study in the area and it has been truly remarkable walking past this wall and seeing randoms [sic] and young children helping to create this piece. It’s evolved every day. I see one of my favourite birds over there, although you don’t often hear it in this part of the city when that bird sings you know the rain is coming—it’s a comforting sound.”

Urban nature and public art can help to break down barriers both mental and physical, sparking imaginations, catalyzing placemaking, forging new connections, and bringing people together. Through Greenpop’s project, these Conservation Conversation Corners give thanks to the magnificent biodiversity in Johannesburg and Livingstone and hope to spark conversations around its importance in people’s daily lives.

Georgina Avlonitis Cape Town

On The Nature of Cities

Photo credits: All photos courtesy of Greenpop Foundation’s Georgina Avlonitis & Mischke Bosse.

This project was made possible by: UNESCO-IFPC, Propertuity, Art Africa, B-Earth paint, Krost and Vogel.

Greenpop website: http://greenpop.org/ Twitter: @Greenpop Facebook: @GreenpopTreevolution Instagram: @greenpopsa

About the Writer: Georgina Avlonitis

After finishing up her Master’s degree in urban ecology from the University of Cape Town in 2009, Georgina worked on biodiversity informatics and ecosystem based adaptation at ICLEI’s Cities Biodiversity Center. She then joined the Greenpop team. When she is not heading up Greenpop programmes across Southern Africa, you can find Georgina walking the soles off of her shoes or cooking up a Greek storm in the kitchen.

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Public Art: A Critical Approach

In this dissertation, I provide a philosophical analysis of public art. I focus on its “publicness,” and draw implications at the level of public art’s ontology, appreciation, and value. I uphold the view that an artwork is public when received within a public sphere rather than within artworld institutions. I further argue that, as a consequence of the peculiar nature of its reception, public art possesses an essential value that is distinctively non-aesthetic: to promote political participation and to encourage tolerance. By examining how public art and its value(s) relate to the public domain in the context of pluralistic democracies, this dissertation also contributes to a fuller understanding of an important aspect of our social world.

Related Papers

Antonio Norsworthy

Art of nearly any style or medium can evoke at once a deeply personal, subjective experience, yet also unite disparate and diverse sentiment within individuals based on the common experiences, values, and ideology found within nearly any given cultural context. Due to the diversity inherent in human experience it would however be difficult to account for a representation of all individuals’ subjective taste and opinion within a singular definition of public; indeed, there are many publics. Yet I would contend it is the very nature of the subjective individual experiences of human emotion--however nuanced in the context of their intensity, duration, or origin--which allows a framework for a common perception of art. Thus, Hilde Hein, in her essay entitled What is Public Art? Time Place and Meaning, grossly misstates her characterization of public art as an “oxymoron” (Niell and Ridley 406).

Aleksandra Kaminska

Syllabus from a graduate seminar. Description: The central problematic of this course is the public domain as a zone of contestation, transformation, exchange, and participation. We will begin by examining the relationship between public art and the elusive concepts of " the public " and the public sphere. We will consider the role of public art as a prism through which to understand wider cultural, societal, and political issues and trends. Public implies more than moving outside the gallery, and entails new forms of interaction between artists, audiences, and communities. Some themes we will address include art in virtual and physical space; site-specificity, and expanded notions of site; monumentality and ephemerality; performance, intervention, and activism; and interactive strategies such as dialogue, relationality, and participation. The semester is organized broadly into three parts: examining conceptions of the public(s), interrogating ideas of place and site, and considering select curatorial and artistic strategies. The course will engage with examples of artistic projects, exhibitions, and events, and include screenings of documentaries as well as guest speakers. Students will contribute to a class blog and develop a curatorial proposal as a final project.

Urban regeneration: a challenge for public art

Antoni Remesar

Public Art. An Ethical Approach Public art is under question. Taking art out of the galleries and into the public domain is not necessarily a straightforward step. Public Art: Towards a Theoretical Framework In other forums in those which is intended to analyse the force of the public art concept, appear always two problems that, generally, they distort the environment and hinder a discussion in depth about of the topic. The first issue makes reference to the fact of defending that all art is public art, weakening thus the possible development of the concept and including it in the swampy dimension of the art definition. The second, bounded in good measure to the first, makes reference to the rejection of the "public art" term and to the recovery of the concept "art for public spaces".

Open Philosophy

Mark Kingwell

Cameron Cartiere

Dr Holly Arden

Arts discourse abounds with references and concessions to the public – that disorderedly mass of individuals who may stumble across the threshold of the public museum. Likewise, the public is invoked in conjunction with public engagement with art, or with public galleries, public funding, public art and so on. In spite of the institutional and critical focus on art’s public dimensions intensifying since the 1990s (from Suzanne Lacy’s ‘new genre public art’ to Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’, Grant Kester’s writings on ‘dialogical art’ and Claire Bishop’s on participation) it seems an oversight that the relationship between art and the public as such has not been considered in any significant critical depth. At the same time, much of this critical discourse has appeared within a politico-economic climate of neo-liberal capitalism, which has devastatingly (re)fashioned the public in its own image. This article argues that it is precisely this potential dimension of the public that a number of contemporary artists are testing or seeking to redeem. It contends that the public’s definitive excess, the impossibility of pinning it down, is also its potent political and democratic potential. I focus on participatory works by the former collaborative duo Komar and Melamid, and by Stuart Ringholt, arguing that each work contributes to unique understandings of the public with respect to contemporary art.

Nil Ilkbasaran

Art as the Property of Citizens is a proposal that addresses the following question: how can we conceive of participatory art in its socially engaged ten- dencies and contingencies? It reads the relation of art and citizenship in two ways: art as a process that becomes ‘owned’ by citizens and art as creativity defined as an inherent ‘quality’ of citizens. Art, in the praxis of socially en- gaged participatory works, is an experiment with a new constellation of the social that can exist within the parameters of daily life and can empower its participants to produce solutions to issues of concern. Aesthetics is in the process of creating new constellations in relations and new configurations in exchange systems that could initiate a type of social transformation.

The Everyday Practice of Public Art

Art & the Public Sphere

Pascal Gielen

Philosophy & social criticism

This article contributes to studies in democratic theory and civic engagement by critically reflecting on the role of contemporary art for the transformation of the public sphere. It begins with a short assessment of the role of art during the Enlightenment, when the communicative function and the public role of art were most clearly articulated. It refers in particular to the analogies between aesthetic and political judgement in order to understand the emancipatory role of artistic production within a philosophical project centred on reason’s capacity to liberate itself from the dogmatism of authority and from the errors of superstition, both elements considered crucial to the development of a functioning public sphere. The article then discusses the historical transformation of art following a number of philosophical and sociological critiques to a similar project of the Enlightenment and assesses the attempt of historical avant-gardes to appropriate this critique yet maintain art’s emancipatory function in society. Having examined some problems raised by these attempts, the article turns to the analogies with contemporary artistic production. It examines the role of contemporary visual art in the public sphere and shows how the anti-rationalist theories articulated to reflect on contemporary works of art, and the works themselves, both fail to develop art’s emancipatory role in society. Without rethinking artistic experience in a way that places emphasis on reason’s capacity for critical and constructive selfunderstanding and without reconsidering art theory in a way that brings back the emphasis on the emancipatory role of rational communication, contemporary art, far from contributing to the revitalization of the public sphere, will contribute to its decline.

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Public Art 101

Public art is often site-specific, meaning it is created in response to the place and community in which it resides. Though an asset to the community, the development and management of public art can be a complex process. Learn here what public art is, why it is important to a community, how it is developed and created, and view a case study that showcases the positive impact public art can have on a community.

WHAT IS PUBLIC ART?

Simply put public art is art in public spaces. The term “public art” may conjure images of historic bronze statues of a soldier on horseback in a park. Today, public art can take a wide range of forms, sizes, and scales—and can be temporary or permanent. It often interprets the history of the place, its people, and perhaps addresses a social or environmental issue. Public art can include murals, sculpture, memorials, integrated architectural or landscape architectural work, community art, digital new media, and even performances and festivals!

To see examples of public artworks, visit the  Public Art Network Year in Review Online Database  to search through a curated set of projects selected by professionals in the field.

WHY IS PUBLIC ART IMPORTANT TO COMMUNITIES?

Public art instills meaning—a greater sense of identity and understandings of where we live, work, and visit—creating memorable experiences for all. It humanizes the built environment, provides an intersection between past, present, and future, and can help communities thrive.

Public art has been found to provide a positive impact on communities by supporting economic growth and sustainability, attachment and cultural identity, artists as contributors, social cohesion and cultural understanding, and public health and belonging. “ Why Public Art Matters (2018) ” outlines talking points, examples, data and more on role public art can play in community.

Finding public art in your area or places you visit can easily be found by searching online. Many public art programs have created smartphone apps or online digital maps and databases of their collection. Many collections can be searched by city and state on websites including Public Art Archive and CultureNow. Public art programs and local arts agencies can be found in our Arts Services Directory .

HOW IS PUBLIC ART DEVELOPED AND CREATED?

Public art is typically developed and managed by a municipal agency such as a local arts agency or private entity such as a nonprofit arts organization. Public art may also be artist-driven, self-funded, and created outside of an institutional framework. Public art projects, especially when publicly funded, are typically part of development or construction projects that are part of a larger urban development or cultural plan.

Public agencies that may implement public art include City Planning, Parks and Recreation, and Economic Development departments. The commissioning entity distributes a request for proposals or a request for qualifications for a designated project and selects an artist or team of artists to implement the proposed work. Frequently, the selected artist(s) works with a design team of interdisciplinary professionals including public art administrators, planners, architects, landscape architects, and engineers. The most successful public art projects involve both the artist and the community at the onset of the project.

Check out these frequently asked questions to better understand the public art process:

• HOW CAN I GET PUBLIC ART APPROVED FOR MY COMMUNITY? WHERE DO I START? The design for a proposed public artwork is typically approved by city’s art commission or art council. Appointed members to an arts commission may include: artists, visual art and public art professionals, designers, landscape architects, and planners. Following the art commission approval of the proposed public art design, the permit to build the public art work typically goes through a city’s building and zoning/permitting department. If the public artwork is temporary, the project is often categorized as an event and goes through a city’s event permitting department.
• HOW ARE ARTISTS IDENTIFIED AND SELECTED TO CREATE A PUBLIC ARTWORK? Public art programs commissioning public art projects either directly contact an artist(s) or use an open or limited competition process. The most common is an open competition Call for Artists giving artists the information they need to apply to be considered for a project. Call for artists can be one of two types: Request for Qualifications (RFQ) or Request for Proposals (RFP). For more on public art funding, check out our Public Art Network FAQs .  

CASE STUDY: A MONUMENT TO MAGGIE | RICHMOND, VA

In 2017, the city of Richmond, Virginia unveiled a monument to civil rights activist, entrepreneur and African American woman Maggie L. Walker. Known for its Monument Avenue which includes larger-than-life sculptures of Confederate soldiers such as General Robert E. Lee, efforts by community and political leaders led to the installation of the life-like statue of Walker, created by artist Toby Mendez, to help tell another part of the city’s history. After nearly 20 years, the public artwork was unveiled on July 17, 2017, in the Jackson Ward district where Walker’s house and most of her businesses were located. This video documents the development, installation, and celebration of “A Monument to Maggie”.

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Essay'd

Detroit art, research, and services, tag archives: public art, 169 amy fisher price.

Born New York City, NY, 1980 / BFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago / Lives in Detroit

W hen you’re playing bass in a Bikini Kill cover band in high school, you need the right outfits to complete the sound. Amy Fisher Price didn’t know where to buy matching leopard-skin fits for the band, so she made them herself. Since that punk rock origin story, the sewing machine has never been far from her side. It’s an attitude and ethos that runs throughout her work to this day.

166 Scott Berels

Born Royal Oak, MI, 1983 / BFA Wayne State University / Lives in Detroit

E ncountering Scott Berels’ work feels like a meditation on the nature of nature, a practice whose foremost concern is observation, drawing inspiration from the physical world to contemplate the phenomenon of being. Approaching 40, the painter and sculptor has already devoted half of his life to visual art, creating for his own enjoyment while also undertaking commissions for large-scale public sculptures. In each stage of his career, he has skillfully investigated materiality and the rituals of creation. But Berels doesn’t simply pause to marvel when considering nature’s ontology, he also probes its linguistic consistency to understand the messages it conveys. Through repetition and tessellations, patterns and geometric forms, the artist engages what he calls “an ancestral language,” the grammar of the ineffable that speaks through stone formations, a grove of trees, or “the brush of a plant’s frond over dry soil.”

163 Tony Rave

Born Detroit, MI, 1986/ Lives in Detroit, MI

It starts with a pig. A monolithic, mutilated mural of a pig, its intestines seeping out and wrapping around its neck. Cartoonish innards of the pig’s exposed underbelly appear referential to a confederate flag. A navy X shape with hearts instead of stars lay atop waves of red and white. Its insides are likened to a flaccid flag blowing in the wind. Drops of blood seep from its underbelly. The pig appears to be cut from its neck to the pelvic area of its hind legs.

160 Ijania Cortez

Born Detroit, 1990, Lives in Detroit

I n Transcendence: A Portrait of Corey Teamer , a 2018 mural by Ijania Cortez at Brush and Baltimore, the eponymous figure rotates to face the viewer through three successive images. Each image is slightly larger and at a slightly higher elevation, and this, combined with the glowing orange, Rothko-esque background, reinforces the ascendant trajectory implied by the title. 

159 Juan Martinez

Born Bogota, Colombia, 1976 / Lives in Detroit 

I n San Clara Del Cobre, Mexico, where a nineteen-year-old Juan Martinez went to trade school, and where copper working goes back to the pre-Columbian era, they do things the hard way. Standing in a close circle around a hot ingot, typically manufactured from recycled scrap, the copper-workers beat, in turn, to flatten the ingot to the desired thickness before creating the beautiful utilitarian objects for which the city is known. It is punishing labor, but there is a magic in the rhythmic blows, the cascading sparks, and the gradual transformation of the metal. 

149 W C Bevan

Born Medina, Ohio, 1986; Studies at Memphis College of Art; Lives in Detroit

H obo hieroglyphs and graffiti conversations of indeterminate age flashing by on successive railroad cars. Buildings, streetscapes, and the signature architectural details of long-past designers. The sun, rising in the east and setting in the west. Past histories, big and small, hinted at by countless physical marks or archived records. Every W C Bevan mural begins with one foot in its local environment and the other in the artist’s eclectic but highly coherent worldview. 

145 Bakpak Durden

Born Detroit, 1991/ Lives in Detroit

“WE EXIST / THE FUTURE IS FLUID,” declared a billboard installed on Detroit’s east side in Spring 2020. In the bold design, styled to look like a neon sign at night, the words curled around the prominent central focus: the word “WE,” huge and proud in pink. 

Designed by Bakpak Durden, the billboard was both a work of art and a promotion for a project that the artist co-curated: a citywide exhibition of five billboard artworks by queer and gender-nonconforming artists. (An accompanying gallery show would have included work by five more artists, but was canceled due to COVID19.) The centrality of the first person plural in We Exist points to something fundamental about Durden, a self-taught artist who identifies as transgender: their painstaking image-making is but one part of a broader effort to raise up the queer community they are a part of.

143 Halima Afi Cassells

Born Detroit, 1981 / BA, Howard University / Lives in Detroit

M ultimedia artist Halima Cassells relates her artistic trajectory to the birth of her three daughters – Nele, Nia-Rah, and Nzinga. This is a perfect illustration of Cassells’s belief that creativity is a practice that is inextricably intertwined with life. Homeschooled by “hippie” parents on the East Side of Detroit before heading to Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse and Cass Tech, Cassells identifies a visit to Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project ( Essay’d #109 ) as a disorienting, but ultimately life-changing event. “It was the first time I saw art living and breathing,” she says.

139 Dorota and Steve Coy

Dorota Coy, Born Lubin, Poland, 1978 / BA University of Vermont / Lives in Detroit

Steve Coy, Born Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1978 / BFA, University of Michigan, MFA University of Hawaii / Lives in Detroit

L ike many outside of Detroit, I first encountered the work of Dorota and Steve Coy through the film Detropia in 2012. Looking up at the glowing, gold-gas-masked Executives of the Hygienic Dress League Corporation (HDL) I never imagined that in 2020 I’d be emailing with Dorota to reschedule an interview when the opening of their exhibition The Five Realms at Wasserman Projects  – along with all other social events in the city and across the world – was postponed due to a global pandemic.

As I clear my calendar, I wonder how many respirators are currently among HDL’s holdings, and whether that number affects the corporation’s value. There’s plenty of time for a deep dive on the internet to find out while I’m waiting for public life to resume.

What I discover is that Steve and Dorota Coy are not the Hygienic Dress League.

125 Peter Daniel Bernal

Born Houston, TX, 1978 / BFA, Kansas City Art Institute / Lives in Detroit

B orn in Texas to a family of laborers, Peter Daniel Bernal says that he has always thought in color. But if it is color that first drew Bernal to painting, it is through dimension that he has shaped a place for himself. As Bernal paints, his brushstrokes build and blend to create depths and massed textures that he slowly, iteratively reshapes and repaints. His figures, often draped over each other in acts of care, violence, or some combination of the two, rise from the canvas. Through the vivid, evocative imagery he creates during this assiduous process of layering and scraping away, Bernal centers his practice in the intersection of his own identity and the broader politics of cultural heritage and masculinity.

120 Vito J. Valdez

Born Wyandotte, MI, 1952 / Studies at the College for Creative Studies / Lives in Detroit, MI

A rt, for Vito Valdez, is about expressing something real – an idea, an emotion, an experience, or, even better, all of the above. Valdez’s visceral 1999 paintings Columbine and Kosovo , for example, combine dynamic brush strokes, intense colors, and fragmented references to the perpetrators and victims of violence to convey a sense of deep anger at the senseless massacres that occurred in these places. It is impossible to deconstruct the exact experiences that underlie these paintings, but perhaps they include the time Valdez spent working as a surgery technician while a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, or his childhood growing up in a tough environment where masculinity and violence were often interchangeable.

114 Charles McGee

Born Clemson, South Carolina, 1924 / Lives in Detroit

“T he creative mind continues always to test the parameters of conventional knowledge, forever in pursuit of new vistas. Trying to understand life, death, the totality of  existence, and the logic or order that governs our moral being is the forum from which all of my creative offerings extract meaning,” Charles McGee wrote in 1994. It is safe to say that he has lived this thought, since almost 25 years later, he is still pushing his limits as an artist. In so doing, he has changed the face of Detroit, the city he has lived in since childhood and where he has embraced intersecting careers as artist, curator, gallerist, teacher, author, and outspoken critic and champion of art in the city.

Continue reading →

109 Tyree Guyton

Born Detroit, MI, 1955 / DFA (ad honorem), College for Creative Studies / Lives in Detroit

I t’s all about YOU .

In his book Free Schools, Free Minds , Ron Miller describes two ways to imagine the relationship between radical education and social change: the first (exemplified by A.S. Neill) says that if you liberate the mind of the individual they will go on to change society, and the second (exemplified by Paulo Freire) says that you change individuals by working collectively on projects to change society. But in Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, it’s all about YOU – first discover who you really are, and then go on to change the world.

107 Osman Khan

Born Karachi, Pakistan, 1973 / BSc, Columbia University, NY; MFA, UCLA, California / Lives in Detroit

An eight-foot-tall black monolith stands, 2001 -like, outside an art museum in San Jose, California. To the naked eye it appears featureless, but when viewed using a phone camera, words magically appear on the screen. As one can imagine, it draws a crowd. It’s a piece from 2006, titled Seen-Fruits of our Labor , that illustrates many of the concerns of artist Osman Khan around that time, foremost among which was the need to look critically at the impact of the increasingly digitally-connected world through art. Continue reading →

94 Lois Teicher

Born Detroit, 1938 / BFA, College of Creative Studies; MFA, Eastern Michigan University / Lives in Dearborn, MI

L ois Teicher is one of the few women artists anywhere who has built a career around large-scale public sculpture. Even more unusual, she works squarely in a post-minimalist idiom of industrial materials and formal shapes. Most American women sculptors of Teicher’s generation are rightfully celebrated for incorporating the aesthetics of crafts into their sculpture, for introducing new materials, ornamentation, or a sense of working by hand. But Teicher chose a different path; her large-scale, site-specific sculptures look more like Ellsworth Kelly than Magdalena Abakanowicz. For Teicher, feminism gave the artist permission to overcome gender roles to fashion her own definition of what it means to be a sculptor. Over her long career, she has refined her ideas about shape and surface, posited new relationships of sculpture to its surroundings, and hardest of all, overcome the long odds of being a successful woman working in this manner. Finding satisfaction in learning to use industrial tools, as well as working with fabricators, engineers, and installers, she has developed a unique style for large-scale sculpture that emphasizes tension and a suggestion of movement that serves to deny her work’s complexity and weight.

68 Sydney G. James

Born Detroit, 1979 / BFA, College for Creative Studies / Lives in Detroit

“ I ’m not a street artist, but I can paint on anything,” asserts Sydney James, prolific muralist, painter, and illustrator. After graduating from College for Creative Studies in 2001, she forged ahead as designer, art director, and “ghost artist” (for television dramas), at first in Detroit and subsequently in Los Angeles. Reviewing the evolution of her practice up to that point, she recalls, “I was an illustrator, [but] when I took control of the stories, I became a fine artist.” This epiphany coincided with her timely move back to Detroit in late 2011, where she encountered a burgeoning art community and street art stirrings, fueled in part by the Grand River Creative Corridor and Murals in the Market initiatives.

57 Robert Sestok

Born Detroit, 1946/Studied College for Creative Studies, Detroit; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine; Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan/Lives in Detroit

R arely does one get to see a full bore display of an artist’s oeuvre, all at once and all in one place. Robert Sestok counts as the standout exception in the Motor City, where he has engineered, from purchase and design to sodding and installing, an open air anthology of his sculptural practice. His City Sculpture park, located at Alexandrine and the Lodge Freeway northbound service drive, features an array of some three dozen sculptures, each centered on concrete pads laid out in a grid. Encompassing four contiguous city lots, and furnished with Sestok-built benches to offer a respite and meditative break from strolling about, this expansive public-private sward—it is open seven days a week—is a welcome oasis within Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood. Continue reading →

41 Tylonn J. Sawyer

Born Detroit, 1976 / BFA, Eastern Michigan University / MFA, New York Academy of Art, Graduate School of Figurative Art / Lives in Detroit

V isibility, accessibility, ambitious scale, and industrious zeal are some of the constituent hallmarks of Tylonn Sawyer’s activist art and life. Such attributes are readily apparent in his very public, very large, Detroit-centric Whole Foods Mural of 2013. Drawing upon Marshall Fredericks’ iconic Spirit of Detroit sculpture, Sawyer reinvents Fredericks’ hero as a young, African-American lad with empty palms (freed of Fredericks’ fusty totems of god and family) who, while awaiting new symbols to cross his palms, glances over a colorful, agricultural grid on the left, and a tidy, green, aerial urban view on the right.  Continue reading →

39 Olayami Dabls

Born Canton, MS, 1948 / Studies in Mechanical Engineering and Art, Wayne State University / Lives in Detroit

O layami Dabls’ sprawling outdoor installation at Grand River and West Grand Boulevard verges on a world where America rushes by, cocooned in tons of rusting metal – in other words it overlooks Interstate 96. Dabls knows that world. He trained as a mechanical engineer, and worked as a draftsman for Chevrolet Motors. Then in 1975 he had a serious car accident that hospitalized him for three years. During that time he turned to painting (his minor in college) as an escape from the constant physical and psychic pain. He left the hospital and never looked back, taking stints with the original African-American museum, and various theater companies, before eventually founding a gallery with his wife. Around 1998 he moved to the present location, starting the African Bead Museum that carries his name, and transitioning from an artist/gallerist to an educator/storyteller. Continue reading →

30 Matt Corbin

Born Pittsburgh, 1945 / Studies in Industrial Design, College for Creative Studies, Detroit / Lives in Detroit

What does Matt Corbin’s performance piece GYMSHOELIFESTYLE , in which he periodically wore size 22 gym shoes to the high school class he taught, have in common with the found object assemblages he has been making for nearly four decades? Actually more than you might think. Continue reading →

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New public art turns new eyes to old injustices in Philadelphia

Katia Riddle

Ari Shapiro

New public art turns new eyes to old injustices in Phildadelphia

Artist Sonya Clark in front of 'The Descendants of Monticello' at Declaration House in Philadelphia. Steve Weinik/Photo by Steve Weinik. hide caption

A new public art exhibit in Philadelphia examines the Declaration of Independence through the eyes of the enslaved people of Monticello.