,
Leeds,
UK 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.
Interactive public art ) by Steve Mann, which the public can play.|alt= 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. 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. It was mistakenly destroyed 25 years later. 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, and
The Urban Field Glass Project /
Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars, which are public viewing devices for speculative or altered cityscapes. (
Genoa, 2005), which everybody could modify by using a mobile phone.
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". Rather than metaphorically reflecting social issues, new genre public art strove to explicitly empower marginalized groups while maintaining aesthetic appeal. 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.
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. 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. For the second one, can refer to
Les Nouveaux Commanditaires 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.
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. == Controversies ==