Arts Intranet

It has been ten years since the Public Art Network came under the umbrella of Americans for the Arts and what a decade it’s been! To celebrate PAN’s 10th anniversary we are going back to the Public Art Preconference format just this year with this year’s Redefining the Public Paradigm, June 23-25, 2010 in Baltimore prior to the annual Americans for the Arts convention.

The Preconference is organized with keynote presentations as well as roundtable workshops categorized under the themes of Technical Assistance and Envisioning Possibilities. Each roundtable workshop will be facilitated by topic experts with discussion among all participants. The goal is to engage emerging and established artists and administrators to discuss the topic issue, share opinions, strategies, tactics, and develop responses and solutions to the issue. Outcomes of the roundtable workshops will generate recommendations for best practices, legislative priorities, areas in need of further exploration, and articulating the needs of the field in the next few years.

Technical Assistance sessions include: Conservation; Collections Management; Contracts and Copyright; Developing an Artist Training Program; Public Engagement and Evaluation Methodologies; and, Public Art-Private Development Ordinances.

Envisioning Possibilities sessions include:  Innovative Project Management; Social Practice and Community Participation; Technology-New Media-Maintenance; Unhinged-New Considerations in Public Art; International Models; and Temporary Public Art.

Glad to hear the selections for Year in Review are going swimmingly. Curiuous to see what you and Fred come up with!........I have been  thinking about your comments and I too agree that public art is alive and vital–simultanesouly, at this time our industry is currently in an  important transition.

I believe that the audience and viewer engagement, participation with “public art” is shifting to one of where ideas, contemporary frameworks and conceptual experimentation is ripe for a  new public engagement, yes - I am utopic in spirit,.... however there has been a   move in attitude - I wonder if others would agree?....and it is time and many are ready for contemporary innovation and the impact of the artist to become more expressive. Without artists, there is no art in the public realm. Does there need to be a divide between studio aesthetics and great art in the public realm? How is a good concept judged "good"?

My assignment - to present 50 projects from the last 50 years for 50 minutes at lunch on Sunday at the Convention - has been a fascinating way to put my own career and observations about public art in perspective. I entered the field making flags for the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, visiting Art on the Beach and working for the Public Art Fund while Agnes Denes was planting wheat in the Battery Park landfill. When I started at NYC Percent for Art in 1983, Tilted Arch was recently installed downtown and the selections of artists for the Battery Park City design teams were just getting off the ground in a trailer onsite.  Now there are fabulous books and websites that document the accomplishments of programs throughout the country.

Arlington County, located just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. in Northern Virginia, has officially hosted a public art program since 2000. But the program got its informal start with the work Dark Star Park by Nancy Holt in Rosslyn, which was commissioned by Arlington County working with local developer Joseph Kaempfer in 1979.

In 2000, Arlington County formally adopted a Public Art Policy and in 2004 approved its first Public Art Master Plan. Cultural Affairs staff member Angela Adams, who developed the Plan with consultant team Todd Bressi, Jennifer McGregor, and Brian Harner, became the Public Art Administrator. In 2002, the Program hired its first public art projects curator. In June of 2007, I took over that position.

Colleagues ask me what the difference is between a public art projects manager and a public art projects curator, wondering if we really all are curators. When I Googled the definition of “curator”—such a modern thing to do—I found many descriptions but they all refer to a curator as a person charged with the procurement, care and research of a collection, usually in a museum.