Americans for the Arts

This publication is part of the Federal Government's continuing effort to foster design excellence in public spaces. Design is a basic manifestation of all civilized cultures: an activity that helps shape the human environment and, at the same time, reflects and expresses the profoundest values of the peoples and cultures who engage in it.

This Monograph offers an overview of the field for people new to public art and reports on results from the first-ever survey of the Publica Art Network of Americans for the Arts.

This essay suggests a healing and strengthening role for the arts in this altered world. The beneficial function of the arts in health care has been documented over the past 20 years, with significant evidence that the arts have a powerful healing capacity when incorporated into hospitals, treatment facilities, senior care programs, and rehabilitation programs.

This paper provides a close reading of "Flow City," an ecological public art installation by Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the Fresh Kills landsfill site, New York City.

This paper focuses on the cultural future of small cities and on how cultural and arts organizations work together (or fail to work together) in a small city setting.

This paper critically reviews claims that public art helps develop senses of identity and senses of place, contributes to civic identy, addresses community needs, etc., and provides theoretical critiques of public art's contributions to urban regeneration.

This issue of COPC Central looks at how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of University Partnerships, Community Outreach Partnership Centers (COPC) are using arts programming for youth to rehabilitate local communities.

This is a report on a conference about decommissioning public art, organized by the Public Art Forum and Canterbury City Council, that took place in the United Kingdom on December 4th, 2003.

This is a background paper prepared for the National Partnership Meeting, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, in cooperation with the National Assembly of Community Arts Agencies., held June 23-25, 1980, at the Marvin Center, George Washington University, Washington, DC. In it the author traces the history of government support for the arts, the development of a support network at national, state and local levels of government and an examination of the how that network has served the performing arts in the last half of the 1970's.

This idea, that sculpture becomes public by taking the spatial experience of its audience as a subject, is so seductive it has influenced everything from Serra's steel fortresses to the benign and cheery works featured in many shopping malls. If anything unifies the whole range of contemporary sculpture from minimalism to the political agitation of Krzysztof Wodiczko, it is the idea enunciated best by Krauss, that contemporary sculpture takes as its subject the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural space. The shift Krauss describes from the inner space of the artist's

This document was developed to assist the public sector in developing public art policies.

This study offers a new framework for understanding how the arts create private and public value, highlights the importance of the arts intrinsic benefits, and identifies how both instrumental and intrinsic benefits are created.

This essay identifies and analyzes the legal issues raised by the commissioning and proposed relocation of Tilted Arc and the resultant implications for public art programs. When engaged in public commissions, particularly those involving site-specific art, the artist finds himself in a complex series of legal relationships often intertwined with a series of administrative, political and funding considerations. Tilted Arc calls into question the commissioning process itself. By what mechanism and process should public art be selected? What right, if any, does the community have to be

The author traces the attempt to establish a public process for art funding in Gainesville, Florida.

Presented as the opening address at the conference, Public Art Dialogue - Southeast, sponsored by the Durham Arts Council and the North Carolina Arts Council, held in Durham, North Carolina, June 8-11, 1989.