After my rant on the failure of public art to find a home in valuable, visible places, the City of Nashville has the guts to hire Alice Aycock with its first artwork and site it on the Cumberland River. Not any location, but at the terminus of an important historic street, under the shadow of the Titans football stadium and in plain view of every river boat and corporate window in downtown … [Read more...]

Since I coordinated a contest for a mural in the freshman architecture studio at Georgia Tech in 1976, I have been involved in public art and public space. After 30 years, how did the public art establishment get cornered into public bathrooms and terrazo floors with their limited public art dollars? It's time for public art to be front and center of new spaces and buildings again. A few years … [Read more...]

Last week, the Black Rock Arts Foundation coordinated the creation of the Panhandle Bandshell in San Francisco. In part as a recycle advocacy action, the steel armature of the bandshell is sheathed in metal car hoods, decorated with obsolete computer motherboards and backed with a wall of bottles. The project is very collaborative with artists from the Finch Mob and Rebar (The inventors of the … [Read more...]

An artist based non-profit in Toronto, Them.ca, has proposed a new funding source for public art. They have done the research and art lobbying. Maybe they will be successful. Who knows. From the Press Release Them.ca proposes a charge of $6.00 per sq. foot of billboard space per year. Those funds will then be redirected towards public art. Thus, five 15'x25' billboards could subsidize one small … [Read more...]

Congratulations to Indianapolis Public Art program and the director, Mindy Taylor Ross. They were the first to start an online system of video podcast interviews with artists and tours. Now they are the first to master the new Google map programs. Very easy navigation of the city to find public art by geography, type and artist. Will they become the first to succeed on "iphone" integration … [Read more...]

What happens to sculpture in the real world of time and history? The Serra exhibit reminders me of all the discussions that I had with Tom Finkelpearl and Kyong Park during the Storefront for Art and Architecture exhibition on the Titled Arc in 1985. Serra's sculpture was precisely made for the site, but what would happen when the site changed - the front door relocated or even the buildings … [Read more...]

http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/one_day/The official public art chance of a lifetime for less experienced artists. For the cost of a little paint and one day of your life, seven artists transformed 1970's bus shelters on the main street of one of the most liberal towns in America, Madison, Wisconsin. Painted on July 1, the shelters will be demolished starting on July 29, … [Read more...]

I started with the idea to compare multiple flickr photos of the Richard Serra's sculptures at MOMA in NYC this summer. If you are interested, visit the 436 pictures on The MOMA Project. Favorite shots by the amateurs and professionals: Sky/buildings cut by curving steel line, walkers in a tight linear space, full body portraits against the rusting steel and kids when available. The real … [Read more...]

In Hamburg in 2004, Zoll-Douane art in public places exhibition asked 30 artists to create works about boundaries - mainly national ones after the unification of the European currencies. Artists Anja Steidinger and Raul Cordero projected the image of two people waving on the exterior wall at the entrance/exit of the exhibition. "Goodbye/Hello" presents the ambiguous gesture - waving - in which … [Read more...]

In 1968, Atsuko Tanaka created a large pink square of fabric floating over the grass. This summer the pink plane was re-created at Documenta 12 in Kassel. In Austria, another square pink will be constructed as a shallow pool in 2007. The "Der Rosa Platz" by Hans Kupelwieser is the Monument for Homosexual and Transgender Victims of the Nazi Regime in Austria. The letter "QUE(E)R" will rise from … [Read more...]

If you missed the opportunity in June, you can still see some small-scale inventions by artist participants in Javier Abarca's workshop on "Spontaneous Public Art". Taught through the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Abarca formalizes the methodologies of inventions by stressing the link between the immediate context and the artist's addition. "Close" Project by Santiago Cortizo in Abarca … [Read more...]

Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post cannot handle the world. He traveled to Venice, Kassel and Munster and concluded the artwork is directionless, an attribute that according to Gopnik fits nicely with the marketing of art. No artist is out. Everyone is equally for sale. I don't want to be as flippant with Gopnik as he is with three serious artworld events. Rather than stress his apparent … [Read more...]