Public art

Public accessibility: placement in public space/public realm

Public art is publicly accessible, both physically and visually.^[13][14] When public art is installed on privately owned property, general public access rights still exist.^[15]

Public art is characterized by site specificity, where the artwork is "created in response to the place and community in which it resides"^[6] and by the relationship between its content and the public.^[16] Cher Krause Knight states that "art's publicness rests in the quality and impact of its exchange with audiences ... at its most public, art extends opportunities for community engagement but cannot demand particular conclusion," it introduces social ideas but leaves room for the public to come to their own conclusions.^[16]

Public process, public funding

Public art is often characterized by community involvement and collaboration.^[13][4][16] Public artists and organizations often work in conjunction with architects, fabricators/construction workers, community residents and leaders, designers, funding organizations, and others.^[17]

Public art is often created in the context of formal "art in public places" programs that can include community arts education and art performance.^[17] Such programs may be financed by government entities through Percent for Art initiatives.^[13][18]

Longevity

Some public art is planned and designed for stability and permanence.^[5] Its placement in, or exposure to, the physical public realm requires both safe and durable materials. Public artworks are designed to withstand the elements (sun, wind, water) as well as human activity. In the United States, unlike gallery, studio, or museum artworks, which can be transferred or sold, public art is legally protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA), which requires an official deaccession process for sale or removal.^[4]

Environmental public art

Between the 1970s and the 1980s, gentrification and ecological issues surfaced in public art practice both as a commission motive and as a critical focus by artists. The individual, Romantic retreat element implied in the conceptual structure of land art, and its will to reconnect the urban environment with nature, is turned into a political claim in projects such as Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982) by American artist Agnes Denes, as well as in Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks (1982). Both projects focus on the increase of ecological awareness through a green urban design process, bringing Denes to plant a two-acre field of wheat in downtown Manhattan and Beuys to plant 7000 oaks coupled with basalt blocks in Kassel, Germany, in a guerrilla or community garden fashion. In recent years, programs of green urban regeneration aiming at converting abandoned lots into green areas regularly include public art programs. This is the case for High Line Art, 2009, a commission program for the High Line, derived from the conversion of a portion of railroad in New York City; and of Gleisdreieck, 2012, an urban park derived from the partial conversion of a railway station in Berlin which hosts, since 2012, an open-air contemporary art exhibition.^{[citation needed]}

Interactive public art

Some public art is designed to encourage direct hands-on interaction. Examples include public art that contains interactive musical, light, video, or water components. For example, the architectural centerpiece in front of the Ontario Science Centre is a fountain and musical instrument (a hydraulophone) by Steve Mann, where people can produce sounds by blocking water jets to force water through sound-producing mechanisms.^{[citation needed]}

An early and unusual interactive public artwork was Jim Pallas' 1980 Century of Light in Detroit, Michigan, a large outdoor mandala of lights that reacted in complex ways to sounds and movements detected by radar.^[23] It was mistakenly destroyed 25 years later.^[24]

Another example is Rebecca Hackemann's two works: The Public Utteraton Machines (2015), which record people's opinions of other public art in New York—such as Jeff Koons' Split Rocker—and display responses online,^[25][26] and The Urban Field Glass Project / Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars, which are public viewing devices for speculative or altered cityscapes.^[27][28]

New genre public art

In the 1990s, some artists called for artistic social intervention in public space. These efforts employed the term "new genre public art" in addition to the terms "contextual art", "relational art", "participatory art", "dialog art", "community-based art", and "activist art". "New genre public art" is defined by Suzanne Lacy as "socially engaged, interactive art for diverse audiences with connections to identity politics and social activism".^[16] Mel Chin's Fundred Dollar Bill Project is an example of an interactive, social activist public art project.^[29] Rather than metaphorically reflecting social issues, new genre public art strove to explicitly empower marginalized groups while maintaining aesthetic appeal.^[16][30] An example was curator Mary Jane Jacob's 1993 public art show "Culture in Action" that investigated social systems though engagement with audiences that typically did not visit traditional art museums.^[16]

In the 21st Century, public art has often been a significant component of public realm projects in UK cities and towns, often via engagement with local residents, where artists will work with the community in developing an idea or sourcing content to be featured in the artwork. Examples would include Adrian Riley's 'Come Follow Me' in Minster in Lincolnshire where a 35m long text artwork in the public square outside the town's Minster includes local residents own stories alongside official civic history and the town's origin myth.^[31]

Curated public art

The term "curated public art" is used to define the way of producing public art that significantly takes into account the context, the process, and the different actors involved. It defines itself slightly differently from the top-down approaches of direct commissioning.^{[citation needed]}

If it mainly designates the fact that a curator conducts and supervises the realization of a public artwork for a third party, it can also mean that the artwork is produced by a community or public who commissions a work in collaboration with a curator-mediator.^{[citation needed]}

For the second one, can refer to Les Nouveaux Commanditaires^[32] launched by Fondation de France with François Hers in 1990 with the idea that a project can respond to a community's wish. The New York High Line from 2009 is a good example, although less art is involved. The doual'art project in Douala (Cameroon, 1991) is based on a commissioning system that brings together the community, the artist, and the commissioning institution for the realization of the project.^{[citation needed]}

Memorial public art

Memorials for individuals, groups of people, or events are sometimes represented through public art. Examples are Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, Tim Tate's AIDS Monument in New Orleans, and Kenzō Tange's Cenotaph for the A-bomb Victims in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan.^[33]