Arts Intranet

This has been a trying week for the public art field across the country. I have heard from many of you, expressing concerns and challenges as your communities turn to you for aide in addressing Confederate memorials and symbols in your public arenas. Please know that you are not alone in your work. The conversations and community meetings that have happened and will happen are necessary for our country to move forward. Your role is essential to your community, and we are here to support you.

I can honestly say that these are words I never expected to hear. Yet, in the summer of 2015 my team and I were lucky enough to be awarded a Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge grant. Having this much money felt almost ludicrous in its generosity. Finally, we could think big—very big. Like many longstanding critical urban issues, the ubiquity and apparent permanence of vacant buildings in our region has made it possible for us to ignore them. So, the question for us was, how should we go about drawing attention to these buildings?

I started using birdseed to draw six-foot intricate designs on the ground in a futile attempt to arrest change and explore fragility in social situations. My first public artwork, Seed the Change, was a chance to scale up these explorations of labor, change, and collaboration in a monumental fashion. My hope for Seed the Change was that it highlighted the city’s human potential, creating a welcoming space shaped by its people that embodies the beauty of labors of love, conversation, and individual expression.

Two sets of wickiups—simple domed structures associated with Native Americans of the Southwest—perched at the top of a manmade mound of a repurposed landfill site—now Pearsall Park—invite you to take in an interesting 360-degree view of San Antonio. The wickiup structures suggest an overlay to the history of this site: a large decommissioned city landfill repurposed into a contemporary City Park. The landfill is our cultural midden; the artwork appropriates the site as a social and ecological comment on consumption.

Trumpet Flower was a labor of love, and at times it felt Sisyphean. In this case, the proverbial boulder was a horn-shaped monstrosity crafted from wood and steel, and the corresponding mountain was a six-story building which would support this towering artwork as it twisted up from the downtown Houston main street. Not only a feat of engineering and a marvel of craftsmanship, Trumpet Flower was also a great opportunity for community engagement. Taking Renner’s popular “painting party” activity to the next level, Flying Carpet invited the public to come make their mark on the sculpture, and Houstonians turned out en masse.

For an artist, the initial concept for a public art project can be an exciting experience followed by anxious moments of uncertainty. Thinking of a concept that speaks to the public, while reflecting the values of your own artistic expression, is a challenging task. Questions preoccupied me as I conceptualized and created Amiskwaciw Wâskâyhkan Ihtâwin, a three-dimensional gateway/mural located in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. My awareness of Edmonton’s historic role as a gathering place for Indigenous peoples provided an essential clue to uncovering the essence of this special park.

An iterative process is often useful, especially in the context of interactive public art: the collective public has a genius ability to subvert or repurpose objects and installations from their intended purpose. It can therefore be very helpful to periodically get something into the hands of someone who hasn’t been immersed in the project since its conception to see what they will do with it. Workshops with the communities that will ultimately be served by a project can serve as valuable de facto prototyping sessions as well.

At the beginning of this project, I thought about how murals serve as tools to strengthen narratives about place. This “Upstanders Mural” is no exception. In addition to strengthening the narrative of Memphis as a place of Civil Rights struggle and heroism, this mural should shift the narrative. It should widen the scope of the history of Memphis’ civic engagement from one predominantly focused on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to one that includes a wider range of Memphis activists and “upstanders.”

47 Stories reimagined Philadelphia's north-south-running 47 bus route, telling the stories of the immigrant and refugee communities that are connected from bus stop to bus stop. Through interviews, audio collage, alternative map designs, and a wrapped SEPTA bus, artists Shira Walinsky and Laura Deutch activated the public space of city transit in a new way. The goal was to make immigrant and refugee communities visible, to acknowledge and bring attention to their contributions to Philadelphia.

Under Magnitude is a two-story tall permanent structure suspended in the atrium of Orlando's Orange County Convention Center that carves a three-dimensional impact into an otherwise vast space. The story behind the design and construction of the project is that it further evolves my invention of “Structural Stripes”: the fundamental premise of the studio to unite surface, skin, and space into a holistic and never-before-seen system.

Yes, Firmament is an experience. It’s not something you come up to look at and say, “oh, how clever” (as the case with many LED pieces). It’s a place where you go, and sometimes stay. It’s an environment that draws you in and gives you a comfy spot to be. This was my biggest lesson from creating Firmament—that being clever and pretty is great, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as a place and space for people to really enjoy the moment.

Debuting in 2016, the series of temporary artworks commissioned through Boulder, Colorado’s “Experiments in Public Art” program disrupt the traditional commissioning process. Each project’s temporality encourages work responding to “now”: What’s urgent? What is an immediate community conversation? How can public art be an agent to facilitate these conversations? What experimental practices can advance the artists’ body of work, the use of a public site, or the community interaction with art?

Artist Mat Tomezsko’s 2016 project with Mural Arts Philadelphia, 14 Movements: A Symphony in Color and Words, started out as a beautification request from the 2016 Democratic National Convention Host Committee, but it became so much more. Tomezsko created a wash of color along the median of Broad Street, stretching out languidly over 14 city blocks, a full mile-long mural marking a major transit corridor. 14 Movements created opportunities for reflection on the diversity of experience in Philadelphia, the very real, rich, inner lives that unfold every day in simple journeys down the street.

This was the first ever permanent interactive public sculpture created in the City of Springfield (population 167,319), and with this size budget. Not only did the work provoke conversations around “exploring the local, questions of ecology and dissecting the systems that make up our everyday experiences,” Cloud House has also provoked conversations about the power of art. 

Ethereal Bodies 8 is the most recent evolution in a series of sculptures I began in 2008 with Sentient Beings, a civic art installation located in North Hollywood, CA. The final work is a group of eight sculptures that together function as one group, smaller groups, and also as single parts. Through the design process, each individual sculpture really took on its own unique characteristics and quirkiness. The human form is something I explore more fluidly in my studio art practice and it was enjoyable to see how this interest unfolded in an abstract form at a larger than life scale.

As an artist whose work addresses both the natural elements of a site as well as its history, Bruce Munro was intrigued by the history of the Arizona Canal and indeed the entire canal system. Respectful of and intrigued by the history of the prehistoric, indigenous people who farmed using a canal system that brought water to the desert landscape, Munro brought to life floating pontoons of fishing rods that sparkled by day in the Arizona sunshine and lit up at night like chandeliers floating atop the canal waters. The result, Blooms, was a stunning acknowledgment of the natural environment.

The artwork is a map of the world, a work of science, a history book, a newspaper, a calendar—all in one! The effort of taking our concept to reality was monumental. Bringing TABULA to life required deep collaboration with architects, scientists, artists, programmers, city officials, construction personnel, and real estate management and insurance companies, but together we were able to get it done. 

“My Your Our Water” evolved from a residency with Salt River Project and Scottsdale Public Art that was primarily focused on the far-reaching functions of SRP and a seemingly invisible desert water delivery system, to a conversation about water issues on an individual, communal, and global spectrum. “My Your Our Water” is forever growing and shifting with each encounter. It shapes how I perceive water, how I perceive myself in relationship to water, and in turn, I like to believe it causes shifts in perception and action in those that engage with it.

MTA Arts & Design has installed nearly 300 permanent projects throughout the MTA region. Our subway system is 112 years old and we normally commission art that is incorporated into station rehabilitation projects. It was a rare opportunity to start from scratch. I have described these installations as the projects of a lifetime, because the immensity of creating new subway stations in Manhattan was a very big deal, and the art had to speak to today’s riders while also pointing the way to the future of mass transit.

Annually, the PAN Year in Review recognizes outstanding public art projects that represent the most compelling work for the year from across the country. This week on ARTSblog, we present you with posts from more than a dozen different perspectives, reflecting on anything from the administrative challenges of public art projects to the artistic thought processes that brought us these amazing works.

Sometimes the most innovative and successful solutions come from collaborating with those who do not think the way you do. This is what practitioners in the Pacific Northwest have been willing to do since the beginning of public art programs in the region. The thinking and unique perspectives of artists have been valued as much as or more than the objects they may produce.

In 2014, a coalition of Wynwood-based organizations invited a frenzy of mural artists to turn the school into an outdoor gallery. Even though the school’s walls looked vibrant, the students were not included in the mural project in any significant way. They were mere spectators to the act of creativity, rather than participants in the creative process. Did the murals fully empower the local students to be capable, responsible and active citizens? In other words, did this good-intentioned mural painting project do enough?

More than anything, this project has shown me the power of art. You can reach a public that spans the globe and this reach is exponential.

As public art project managers, we walk the line between nudging artists to push their vision and practice while giving them the confidence and trust to imagine and execute a groundbreaking artwork. Trusting your own expertise and instinct—paired with an understanding of an artist’s aesthetic, studio practice and process—paves the way for an authentic and successful artwork.

Imagine Art Here: Tysons Tiles was an ambitious project for a public art novice. I learned some valuable lessons managing a public art project for the first time that I’d like to pass along.

My brief was to make something temporary, to create a colorful distraction to the development and inspire people—but it accomplished so much more: it confirmed that culture is an essential amenity to the growth of a city. 

I envisioned an image of the sheep straying into the park. It is as if, from somewhere far away, one day a flock of sheep wander into Chinatown Park at the Rose Kennedy Greenway for some unknown reason. But at the same time, they look natural as if they have been there all along.

“Chroma Booster” plays on the tradition of having a fountain in large public gathering spaces. The 55-foot tall painted pipes invited visitors to the pathway to cool off in the mist or play with other features that will send water cascading on their friends. Visitors see how art can be transformational and repurpose something utilitarian like a parking lot into a vibrant public meeting space.

The more I looked at the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers coming together in Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River, the more I drew parallels between those waters and myself. I, and so many others like me, are the children of two genetic and cultural rivers that propelled towards each other for thousands of years. The confluence of these two rivers can be seen as the unavoidable collision of the Old World with the New World.

Murmur Wall is a two-year experimental installation that offers a glimpse into the immediate future. It is an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking, and feeling in real-time.