Public art

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Public art is defined not just by where it sits, but by how it comes to exist. A wheat field planted in downtown Manhattan. Seven thousand oak trees paired with basalt blocks in a German city. These are not the products of a single artist's private vision. They are the result of a public process, from the initial idea through funding, fabrication, and long-term maintenance.

  What separates a mural commissioned by a city government from graffiti painted on the same wall? The answer reveals a surprisingly strict set of conditions that public art must meet. And those conditions have real consequences. In the United States, public art is legally protected in ways that gallery or museum work is not. Controversial pieces have been destroyed by accident, removed by court order, or burned by the communities they were meant to honor.

  This is the story of a genre that touches everyone, whether or not they know it, and whose boundaries are still actively being negotiated.

• 2. What Makes Art Public

  ›

  Cher Krause Knight put the core challenge plainly: art's publicness rests in the quality and impact of its exchange with audiences. A piece can hang in a plaza and still fail to be truly public if it never creates that exchange.

  The genre's defining conditions are physical accessibility, placement in the public realm, community involvement, and a public process of procurement. That last requirement is the most significant dividing line. Street art and graffiti are excluded from the genre not because of where they appear, but because they lack official sanction. Though, as the source notes, the popularity of certain street artists has prompted many to reconsider that boundary.

  Curator and art historian Mary Jane Jacob offered a simpler way to think about it: public art brings art closer to life. According to Knight, at its most public, art extends opportunities for community engagement but cannot demand a particular conclusion. It introduces social ideas and leaves room for the public to reach its own judgments. That principle of openness, rather than prescription, is central to how practitioners define the form.

  Public art can also appear in privately owned spaces. When it does, general public access rights still apply. And programs called Percent for Art initiatives allow government entities to direct a share of public funding specifically toward commissioning new works.

• 3. Forms and Permanence

  ›

  A basalt block paired with a sapling is one form of public art. So is a fountain that doubles as a musical instrument, a transit station tiled with mosaics, or a cloud of colored smoke released in a public square.

  The genre spans a wide range of physical relationships with the built environment. Works can stand alone, like statues and freestanding sculptures. They can be integrated directly into facades, pavements, or landscapes, including bas reliefs, hill figures, geoglyphs, petroglyphs, and digital lighting. Others are applied to surfaces, such as murals or building-mounted sculptures. Installation works go further still, embedding the artwork and the site so completely that the two become mutually dependent, as in transit station art. Ephemeral forms, including performances and temporary installations, make up the final category.

  For permanent works, durability is a practical requirement. Public artworks must withstand sun, wind, water, and sustained human activity. In the United States, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, known as VARA, provides a legal protection that gallery and museum works do not receive. Unlike a studio painting, which can be sold or transferred, a piece of public art cannot simply be removed. An official deaccession process is required before any sale or removal can take place.

• 4. Ecological and Interactive Turns

  ›

  Agnes Denes planted a two-acre field of wheat in downtown Manhattan in 1982. In the same year, Joseph Beuys began planting 7,000 oaks paired with basalt blocks in Kassel, Germany. Both projects reflected a shift that had been building through the 1970s and into the 1980s, as gentrification and ecological concerns began shaping what artists chose to make and where they chose to make it.

  The individual, Romantic retreat quality associated with land art was redirected into a political claim. Artists were not just reconnecting the urban environment with nature; they were making an argument about ecological awareness through the act of green urban design. That tradition has continued. High Line Art, launched in 2009, grew from the conversion of a disused section of railroad in New York City into a public park. Gleisdreieck, an urban park created from the partial conversion of a railway station in Berlin, has hosted an open-air contemporary art exhibition since 2012.

  Interactive work took a different approach to engagement. Jim Pallas completed Century of Light in Detroit, Michigan, in 1980, a large outdoor mandala of lights that responded in complex ways to sounds and movements detected by radar. It was mistakenly destroyed 25 years later. More recently, Rebecca Hackemann built The Public Utteraton Machines in 2015, recording visitors' opinions of other public art in New York, including Jeff Koons' Split Rocker, and displaying those responses online. The architectural centerpiece in front of the Ontario Science Centre is a hydraulophone by Steve Mann, a fountain and musical instrument where visitors produce sounds by blocking water jets.

• 5. New Genre and Community Art

  ›

  In the 1990s, a group of artists pushed the form further by insisting that public art should do more than reflect social issues. It should explicitly attempt to change them.

  Suzanne Lacy defined this tendency, which she and others called new genre public art, as socially engaged, interactive art for diverse audiences with connections to identity politics and social activism. Other practitioners called it contextual art, relational art, participatory art, dialog art, community-based art, or activist art. Whatever the label, the shared aim was to move beyond metaphor and toward direct empowerment of marginalized groups, without abandoning aesthetic appeal.

  Curator Mary Jane Jacob's 1993 public art show, Culture in Action, investigated social systems by engaging with audiences who typically did not visit traditional art museums. Mel Chin's Fundred Dollar Bill Project became another example of this mode: interactive and rooted in social activism.

  Curated public art developed as a related but distinct approach. Rather than a top-down commissioning structure, curated public art emphasizes the context, the process, and the various people involved. Les Nouveaux Commanditaires, launched by Fondation de France with Francois Hers in 1990, built a system in which a project responds to a community's wish. The doual'art project in Douala, Cameroon, begun in 1991, brings together the community, the artist, and the commissioning institution in a shared process. Adrian Riley's Come Follow Me, a 35-meter-long text artwork in the public square outside the Minster in Lincolnshire, weaves local residents' own stories alongside official civic history and the town's origin myth.

• 6. Controversy and Consequence

  ›

  Richard Serra's Tilted Arc was removed from Foley Square in New York City in 1989. Office workers had complained that the minimalist piece disrupted their work routine, and a public court hearing ruled against the continued display of the work.

  Detroit's Heidelberg Project generated controversy for several decades after its inception in 1986, largely on the grounds of its visual appearance. Ron Robertson-Swann's Vault, an abstract yellow polygonal structure installed in Melbourne City Square, was considered so visually offensive that it was moved multiple times; much of the public referred to it using a racist color metaphor. Victor Pasmore's Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee, an English New Town, became a flashpoint for complaints about local governance and resource allocation. Artists and cultural leaders mounted a campaign to rehabilitate its reputation, and in 2003 the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art commissioned Jane and Louise Wilson to create a video installation about the piece.

  Sam Durant's Scaffold, installed in 2017 at the Walker Art Center's garden, depicted the gallows used in seven government hangings. Native American groups found the work offensive because it included the gallows from the hanging of 38 Dakota people at Mankato, Minnesota. Durant agreed to dismantle the piece and permitted tribal elders to burn and bury it.

  Maurice Agis' Dreamspace V, a large inflatable maze erected in Chester-le-Street, County Durham, killed two women and seriously injured a three-year-old girl in 2006 when a strong wind broke its moorings and lifted it 30 feet into the air with thirty people trapped inside. Memorial works occupy a different but related contested space: Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, Tim Tate's AIDS Monument in New Orleans, and Kenzo Tange's Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park all represent individuals, groups, or events whose memory remains charged.

• 7. Documentation and Record

  ›

  Online databases of local and regional public art began to appear in the 1990s and 2000s, developing alongside the broader growth of web-based data.

  Those databases vary widely in scope and ownership. Some are general; others are limited to specific forms like sculptures or murals. Some are maintained by government agencies, others by quasi-governmental bodies, and others by independent organizations. The Smithsonian American Art Museum's Archives of American Art currently holds over six thousand works in its database. The Institute for Public Art, based in the United Kingdom, maintains information about public art across six continents. Public Art Online focuses specifically on the UK and holds works, essays, and case studies.

  The WikiProject Public Art effort started in 2009 with the goal of documenting public art around the globe. It drew early attention from the academic community but came to rely mainly on temporary student contributions. Its current status is unknown. Dozens of non-government organizations and educational institutions continue to maintain their own databases, including the National Endowment for the Arts, WESTAF, Public Art Fund, and Creative Time. The open question of who owns the record of public art, and how completely that record can be kept, is one the field has not yet resolved.