Public art

Public art refers to art expressly created for the purpose of being displayed in public spaces. This is in contrast to art created for a museum or private collections. Public art is typically displayed outdoors in a setting accessible to a large number of people. It can take on any form, from sculpture to painting to environment-specific projects. Some definitions restrict public art to art created using public funding; however, this definition is not universally accepted. The idea of public art has its roots in ancient monuments and statues built for religious or political purposes. Modern public art can be created as part of a community beautification project, a commissioned project, or as a form of protest. Some well-known modern examples of public art include the reflective Cloud Gate in Chicago, Illinois; painted murals on the remains of the infamous Berlin Wall in Germany; and the work of British street artist Banksy.

Background

Because public art is a highly subjective concept, tracing its historical origins is an inexact science. Ancient Egyptian monuments such as the Great Pyramids of Giza were certainly built to be seen by the public; however, their main purposes were to serve as tombs to help shepherd Egypt’s dead kings to the afterlife. Public art is generally believed to have begun in ancient Greece where temples and statues were constructed not only for a religious function but also for their aesthetic beauty. Roman emperors and nobility peppered the empire with public statues of themselves to remind its citizens of the glory and might of Rome.

During the medieval period, public art was used by Christian and Islamic leaders to demonstrate the power and majesty of their respective religions. The greatest architectural achievements of the time were great cathedrals and mosques meant to stand out as the most prominent structures for miles around. The Renaissance period of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries saw a shift toward public monuments and statues, but these were still primarily built to glorify the church or promote local rulers or nobles.

Religious-inspired public art slowly lost prominence heading into the nineteenth century. Political figures continued to be honored in public art, but a growing number of monuments were built to celebrate military achievements and battlefield heroes. For example, Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square was constructed as a memorial to British Admiral Horatio Nelson who was killed in battle in 1805; the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France, was commissioned by Napoleon in 1806 to celebrate his wartime victories.

Overview

The idea of art solely for the purpose of public appreciation began to develop in the late nineteenth century. Large-scale projects such as the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and the Eiffel Tower in Paris were meant to have a prominent place in their cities’ landscapes and provide aesthetic value. On a more intimate level, efforts sprouted up in the United States to fund public art projects as a way to beautify urban communities. As part of his New Deal program during the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Federal Art Project. The project’s goals were not only to provide work for the unemployed but also to raise the spirits of Americans through positive artwork. From 1933 to 1943, the project’s artists created more than one hundred thousand paintings and murals and eighteen thousand sculptures across the nation.

In the late 1950s, the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began a program allocating a percentage of the budget for each capital improvement project to fund public art. In 1963, the federal government followed suit with the Art in Architecture program, which set aside 1 percent of the budget for new federal buildings to commission public art. Similar programs soon popped up in cities and states across the country. In 1965, Congress created the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a taxpayer-supported agency designed to fund art projects in the United States. To provide money for public art, the NEA instituted the Art in Public Places program two years later. The program lasted until 1995 and in that time funded more than seven hundred projects.

Funding and support for modern public art projects can come from a variety of sources. The Art in Architecture program and percent-for-art programs are still providing money for public art into the early twenty-first century. While the Art in Public Places program is no longer in effect, the NEA continues to fund public art projects as part of its regular grant programs. Public art projects can also be paid for by cooperation between communities and businesses and through donations from the public. In many cases, the artists themselves use public spaces as their “canvas,” choosing a location as a place to make an artistic statement or to incorporate the surrounding environment into his or her art.

Public art can be done in any medium; one of the most common of which is sculpture. Monuments and statues honoring specific people or events remain a popular source of public art. In the United States, the stone faces of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota and memorials to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson in Washington, DC, commemorate former presidents. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington honors the famed civil rights leader. In the former Soviet republic of Ukraine, the 354-foot (108-meter) tall Rodina Mat, or Motherland, statue commemorates the millions of Soviets killed during World War II (1939–1945). The world’s tallest public statue is the Statue of Unity unveiled in India in 2018. The statue stands 597 feet (182 meters) tall and was built to honor a leader of India’s independence movement of the mid-twentieth century.

Most modern public art sculptures, however, are not intended as commemorative monuments but are created for their aesthetic value. Many embrace abstract form and are intended to both convey the emotions of the artist and evoke emotions from the public. For example, in the 1980s, a farmer turned artist created Carhenge in a field near Alliance, Nebraska. Carhenge is a recreation of the famed stone monoliths of England’s Stonehenge that uses thirty-eight old cars in place of the standing stones. British artist Antony Gormley constructed a 66-foot (20-meter) tall steel sculpture called Angel of the North on a hill overlooking Gateshead, England, in the 1990s. The sculpture resembles a person with a 177-foot (54-meter) wide wingspan. Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor has received worldwide acclaim for his abstract art that he integrates into local environments. One of his best-known works is 2004’s Cloud Gate, a highly polished, bean-shaped steel sculpture meant to reflect the Chicago skyline.

Another popular form of public art is outdoor painting, typically in the form of colorful murals. Murals adorn the walls of urban settings in most large US cities. Many of these are painted as a way to beautify a city landscape and as a reflection of community pride. The numerous murals of the Latino Mission District in San Francisco, California, have been celebrating the section’s Mexican heritage since the first paintings were created in the early twentieth century. In Berlin, Germany—a city divided in two for decades by the Berlin Wall—murals act as a symbolic reminder of the battle between communism and democracy. At the height of the Cold War, the wall was often a target for political graffiti. After it was torn down, a surviving section was turned into the East Side Gallery, the world’s largest open-air art gallery. Since 1990, artists have created more than one hundred murals and paintings on the remains of the wall.

While murals tend to be community projects, another form of public art grew out of the urban trend of illegally defacing public property in the 1960s and 1970s. Street art, or graffiti art, began as vandalism and was often associated with street gangs and underground culture. In the 1980s, artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring brought street art more into the mainstream art world. Many modern street artists use their work as spontaneous political statements on popular culture or society. Perhaps the best-known twenty-first-century street artist is enigmatic British artist Banksy. Banksy primarily uses stencil cutouts to create more elaborate designs that are often meant to criticize modern consumerism and globalization. One of his most famous works is Balloon Girl, a mural painted in 2002 depicting a young girl releasing a heart-shaped red balloon.

Another type of public art is installation art, so called because the artwork is “installed” in a public location. Installation art is tailored to a specific environment and can be either temporary or permanent. This type of art may be interactive or connect with the viewer on more than just an aesthetic level. For example, the Federation Bells in Melbourne, Australia, is an installation featuring a series of thirty-nine bells mounted on metal poles. The bells play music written by local composers at certain times of the day. Earth art, or land art, uses the natural landscape itself as a medium to create public art. One of the more prominent examples of earth art is Spiral Jetty, a 1970 creation by Robert Smithson. Smithson used rocks, stones, algae, and other materials to create a 1,500-foot (457-meter) long, 15-foot (4.8-meter) wide spiral off the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The artwork was covered by water two years after it was created. However, falling water levels in 2002 brought it back to the surface, where it continues to be a major tourist attraction.

Bibliography

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