Art in public

188 articles

Public art is an art genre in which the concept, function, and form of the work are created through public discourse and for the general public. The works of public art are there for public access and often appear in public spaces, serving as a powerful avenue for the artist to express to the general public.

Essentially, public art engages the viewer outside of traditional exhibition halls, museums, and art galleries. It appeals to the masses through interventions, ideas, actions, performances, and visuals. Today’s public artists look to redefine cardinal concepts such as social engagement, collective identity, social contract, and community.

Richard Jackson - Bad Dog feat

Richard Jackson’s Bad Dog pees on prestigious Californian art collection

Sculptures / 3 minutes of reading
Richard Jackson’s Bad Dog was installed as part of the artist’s Orange County Museum of Art retrospective. The installation, titled simply as Bad Dog, was a giant 28-foot temporary sculpture of a black Labrador urinating yellow paint on the museum walls for his exhibition titled Ain’t Painting a Pain. It was an immediate hit. Crowds […]

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Kaarina Kaikkonen – These are some of her best installations

Environmental Art, Installations / 3 minutes of reading
Kaarina Kaikkonen is one of Finland’s most important artists. She is best known for her inventive use of second-hand clothing pieces (mostly jackets & shirts) and molded craft paper to transform public places like churches, streets and plazas into memorable jacket installations. The environment is incorporated into these installations in some way, resulting in a

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Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege – Stonehenge has never been this much fun

Sculptures / 1 minute of reading
Sacrilege is a life-sized, inflatable replica of Stonehenge, the British heritage and pagan site and popular tourist attraction. It is a bouncy castle, an interactive inflatable pillow that viewers may walk and jump on. It is an energetic, humorous work that Jeremy Deller describes as a way to get reacquainted with ancient Britain with your

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Wim Delvoye - Mountains Sweetheart 2003 feat

Wim Delvoye’s profane messages hammered into rocks in stunning scale

Installations / 1 minute of reading
With the advancement of technology, delivering messages has never been this easy. All we do is create emails, text messages and even Twitter posts, and it’s just a click away! Except for the Belgian artist who puts great effort in delivering such message, Wim Delvoye. About Wim Delvoye’s mountain carvings Delvoye created iconic works by

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Bettina Pousttchi covers complete castle with photorealistic print

Architecture, Installations / 5 minutes of reading
Born in 1971, Bettina Pousttchi is a German-Iranian artist, living and working in Berlin. She is known for her sculptures, videos, and photography, often involving architecture in urban and historical contexts. Her site-specific installations explore systems of time and space from a large-scale perspective. World Time Clock Currently living in Berlin, Pousttchi is best known

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Etienne Lavie’s billboard project – Parisian art on the loose

Installations / 1 minute of reading
Why visit a museum if you can just roam around the streets of Paris just to appreciate art? Through the hustle and bustle of the streets in Paris, it’s not hard to notice such unique placement of the classical French paintings, namely, La Liberté Guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, Souvenir de Mortefontaine by Jean-Baptiste-Camille

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Cao Fei’s Cosplayers & the power of costumes

Performances, Photography, Video Art / 6 minutes of reading
Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei’s 2004 work explores the imagined identities of cosplayers, young people who dress up like game characters, and how they interact with the real world. A costume bestows magical powers upon the wearer of these individuals, rendering their person more special and enabling them to transcend their mundane reality. These are

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Public Delivery: Project during Olympics in Sochi, Russia

Performances / 1 minute of reading
Produced in the Olympic Park in Sochi, Russia during the Olympics in 2014. Silence Was Golden is an on-going global performance series. Across the world, performers choose a word or a short phrase that expresses something important or meaningful to them and then spell it out of golden letter balloons in relevant locations. This site-specific

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Yoshitomo Nara’s shining dog sculptures – What you should know

Sculptures / 6 minutes of reading
Yoshitomo Nara is a well-known and influential Japanese contemporary artist who lives and works in Nasushiobara. He grew up in post-Pacific War Japan. For some reason, throughout his work, he usually channels memory of his lonely childhood into his sculptures and paintings, evoking the viewers to revisit their own childhood memories. His projects and artwork

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What is Yvette Mattern’s global rainbow?

Light Installations / 2 minutes of reading
Global Rainbow, After the Storm is a monumental outdoor laser installation by American artist Yvette Mattern, viewable to millions of New Yorkers. Organized in response to Hurricane Sandy, the artist projected seven beams of high power laser light over communities hit hard by the storm, originating on Manhattan’s Lower West Side and spanning across Brooklyn

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Elmgreen & Dragset’s Short-Cut looks like an accident scene

Installations / 7 minutes of reading
Berlin-based artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset have carved their career out of fixation with objects and their settings and what happens when those particular objects are recontextualized in the name of art. In this instance, the duo was commissioned by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi to create a large-scale installation for Milan’s quintessential shopping mall, Galleria Vittorio

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michael-lin-model-home-shanghai-feat

Why did Michael Lin install a complete house on a roof in Shanghai?

Architecture, Installations / 4 minutes of reading
Model Home – A Proposition by Michael Lin was an exhibition of new conceptual work, made by Michael Lin. For the exhibition, he installed a temporary structure on top of the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, China. The exhibition has been created in collaboration with building workers, furniture makers and musicians, filmmakers, and urban studies

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Dave Cole’s Knitting Machine is producing a gigantic American flag

Installations / 2 minutes of reading
In 2005, MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) presented a monumental and uniquely American sculptural installation by Providence-based sculptor Dave Cole. For Cole’s industrial-sized project The Knitting Machine, he used two excavators and replaced their shovels with telephone poles, fitting them with massive 6 meters (20 ft.) knitting needles. This giant machine produced an

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Karl Haendel – Scribble, 2009, paint on brick, 441 Broadway, New York feat

Karl Haendel’s large murals don’t make any sense

Murals, Paintings, Street Art / 2 minutes of reading
In 2009, Los Angeles-based artist Karl Haendel made two large scribble murals. One was his first public installation in New York. The other, a similar painting, was executed in Los Angeles. His gigantic scribbles are an anti-heroic gesture with roots in street art, public mark-making and a universal means of communication. Karl Haendel about his

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Why did Josephine Meckseper install oil pumps in Midtown Manhattan?

Sculptures / 2 minutes of reading
In March 2012, two monumental kinetic sculptures, each about 7.5m tall, transformed a disused public space in Midtown Manhattan into an art piece by Josephine Meckseper. Though mirroring the forms and materials of the mid-century oil industry, the artist locates her work firmly inside the contemporary debate about American business, wealth and consumerism. What inspired

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Sunghee Lee’s mesmerizing photos of empty billboards in Thailand

Photography / 4 minutes of reading
The Empty Billboards is a unique series produced by France-based photographer Sunghee Lee. Originally from South Korea, the artist came up with the project as a way of promoting positive thinking. With so much negative energy in the world, the Panneaux would be the legacy that surely lives on after he is physically gone. Before

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