The Artist's Guide to Public Art

How to Find and Win Commissions (Second Edition)

Lynn Basa

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781581155013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621536192
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

"What artists don't know—but need to know." —Jack Becker, Public Art Review A Comprehensive Guide to the Complex World of Public Art
Learn how to find, apply for, compete for, and win a public art commission. First-hand interviews with experienced public artists and arts administrators provide in-the-trenches advice and insight, while a chapter on public art law, written by Barbara T. Hoffman, the country's leading public art law attorney, answers questions about this complex area. Packed with details on working with contracts, conflict, controversy, communities, committees, and more, The Artist's Guide to Public Art, Second Edition, shows artists how to cut through the red tape and win commissions that are rewarding both financially and artistically. This new edition discusses recent trends in the field, such as: how the political climate affects public art, the types of projects that receive funding, where that funding comes from, how the digital age impacts public art, how to compete with the increase of architecturally trained artists, and more. Written by an artist, for artists, this guide is packed with everything readers need to know:

• Finding commissions
• Submitting applications
• Negotiating contracts
• Budgeting for projects
• Navigating copyright law
• Working with fabricators
• And much more

From start to finish, Lynn Basa covers all the steps of the process. With The Artist's Guide to Public Art, Second Edition, even readers without prior experience will be more than ready to confidently pursue their own public art projects.

CHAPTER ONE

Public Art Fundamentals

Art is everywhere in our urban landscape. While some of those murals and sculptures, artist-designed floors, windows, benches, railings, lights, and digital installations got there the old-fashioned way—through private patronage—many of them were funded by government “percent-for-art” programs. And their numbers are growing. In 2001, Americans for the Arts estimated that there were 350 public art programs across the United States. By 2017 there were over twice as many: 728. While most public art programs are still public (81 percent in 2001 and 60 percent in 2017), the percentage of public art programs that are registered as nonprofits increased from 19 percent in 2001 to 34 percent in 2017.¹ In 2017, calls for public art totaling $20 million from 222 postings flowed through CaFÉ’s application management system, and that’s only one of several sources for public art listings.² Most of this money comes from federal, state, county, and city governments that set aside between 0.5 percent and 2 percent of their capital building budgets for art. One percent is the most common allowance, but it is inching upward as art becomes a more accepted—and expected—feature of our urban commons. By the time this book is published, barring economic catastrophe, more programs will have been added, and with those, more opportunities for artists of all kinds.

The evolution of public art in both selection and conception has been one of increasing inclusiveness, challenging artists not only to respond to the physical characteristics of sites, but to the communities that inhabit them. Selection panels for public art commissions now attempt to include a diversity of voices, instead of being solely that of art experts and patrons. Institutionally sponsored art for public spaces was once an extension of pedestal art, emblematized by large sculptures on plazas. The social intervention, guerrilla art, and community-based practices that grew out of grassroots community organizing have since infused the selection process. There are still plenty of artworks, perhaps most of them, commissioned to “enhance” already-built spaces. The difference now is that artists are also being invited (or are inviting themselves) to engage more with the users and planners of these places in consultation with the community.

Artists in residence in city departments are still very much alive and well. A hybrid descendent of CETA’s³ Neighborhood Arts Program from 1973 to 1981 and the design-team artist approach pioneered by the Seattle Arts Commission in 1976 with the Viewland Hoffman substation project, the idea of the “embedded artist” has firmly taken hold in this century. Calgary, Boston, Pittsburgh, New York, Los Angeles County, Alexandria, Minneapolis, Memphis, Dallas, Austin, Seattle, and more have programs where artists are partnered with city departments such as streets and sanitation, water quality, utilities, and transportation in order to understand their inner workings and interject new ways of relating to the public and public space.

While treating “the citizens of the city as experts on their own space”⁴ does not guarantee success or failure by any measure, public art has become less about impassive monuments and more about activation and engagement. Increasingly, artists are bypassing institutional support altogether and initiating projects in response to the needs, resources, and opportunities in their own backyards. As Forecast Public Art founder Jack Becker observes, “There’s a growing participatory culture in America. It’s not about buying or selling or authorship or star power. We all have an opportunity to co-create the kind of built environment and social realm we want to share.”⁵

“Current practice in public art engages with issues of spatial, social and environmental concern: artists, with others, are leading in these fields, precisely because they operate independently, free of hierarchies. They are the first to recognize potential and to act in the transformation of space. Artists characteristically lead the way in urban regeneration. At the same time they open new sites of debate—in ecology, music, choreography, geography or science,” according to Vivien Lovell in Public:Art:Space.⁶

In the 2008 edition of this book, I made this prediction: a new form of public space created by the internet and mobile media, such as cell phones and PDAs, would be explored by individual artists and collectives. It is no doubt on the verge of being discovered by institutional public art funders as artists begin to propose networked approaches in response to calls for artists for traditional brick-and-mortar projects. Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum and the author of Digital Art, writes, “Internet art, which is accessible from the privacy of one’s home, introduces a shift from the site-specific to the global, collapses boundaries between the private and public, and exists in a distributed non-local space.”⁷ The new frontier created by the “networked commons”—public defined by shared interests and issues, not geographical proximity—is tailor-made for the community-contribution aspect of public art.

I retained the previous paragraph for its sheer time-capsule quality. For you younger readers, PDA used to mean “personal digital assistant,” the precursor to smartphones, not “public displays of affection.” The “networked commons” has taken over our lives in the form of social media. The digital revolution hasn’t impacted public art in the narrow way I imagined it would, with the artworks themselves transcending geographic permanence through the miracle of the internet. Instead, digital technology is now a common component of site-specific work in the form of programmable LEDs and fabrication methods.⁸ Trompe l’oeil digital video–projection mapping onto buildings has become a minor industry. Virtual reality is the next game changer on the horizon for public art. But the most surprising development (to me, anyway) regarding virtual and real-life interaction with public art is through the selfie. Everywhere you go, people are experiencing art by immortalizing themselves with it as a marker for a specific place at a specific moment. I’m sure there are excellent scholarly papers with insights to the social psychology of this phenomenon, but the takeaway for the purposes of this book is that artists must now take into account the potential for their work to become a backdrop for photo ops as another dimension of viewer engagement. Oh, and remember to put a hashtag near the work where people can see it. (As I write this, I wonder if in another ten years hashtags will be as anachronistic as PDAs.)

TREND SPOTTING

I took an informal survey of public artists and managers to ask them what new trends they’ve seen emerge in the last ten years. Here’s what I heard, listed in no particular order:

• the dispersion of public art programs from large cities to small and midsized towns and rural areas;

• the rise of extravagant European-style mixed arts festivals in US cities;

• increased demand for spectacle and interactivity as an element of public artworks;

• more opportunities for work that contributes to safer streets and air and water quality;

• increased sensitivity to more equitable racial, economic, geographic, and technical access to opportunities;

• the recognition of public art and social practice as distinct artistic disciplines;

• the proliferation of artist-initiated, community-driven projects and spaces;

• increased support from private foundations, public charities, and nonarts government agencies for artists who are leading change in their communities;

• increased access to public art via the internet;

• more fabricators who specialize in public art; and

• the growing volume of critical writing on the role and effect of art in public.

WHY DOES THE GOVERNMENT BUY ART?

What motivates politicians to support legislation that spends the public’s money on a lightning rod for controversy like art? What benefit do they expect from it for their communities, and how does that affect the panel’s choice of artist and artwork? These questions are not academic. Just as artists need to understand how their work will relate to the context of a site, they need to understand the social, political, and economic contexts of the selection process. One answer is economics. As manufacturing jobs decline and the US economy depends increasingly on the technology, service, and entertainment industries, urban regions need to make themselves attractive to the sort of people who work in those sectors. And nothing says “welcome” to a creative, educated, and taxpaying workforce like the outward symbol of civic enlightenment embodied by public art. Of course, the crime rate, weather, affordable housing, quality of schools, and availability of jobs may have more tangible weight in the livability equation. Acc...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Mary Jane Jacob
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 | Public Art Fundamentals
• Chapter 2 | Start Here: Where to Find Public Art Competitions
• Chapter 3 | Anatomy of a Call for Artists: The Selection Process
• Chapter 4 | Application Readiness
• Chapter 5 | Congratulations! You’re a Finalist! (Now What?)
• Chapter 6 | Budgeting for Public Art Projects and Other Financial Survival Strategies
• Chapter 7 | Insurance: The Lowdown
• Chapter 8 | Ask the Expert—Contracts Q&A
• Chapter 9 | Ask the Expert—A Primer on Copyright and Artists’ Rights
• Chapter 10 | Working with Fabricators
• Chapter 11 | Making the Leap
• Chapter 12 | Voices of Experience
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index