Public art

In the United States, unlike gallery, studio, or museum artworks, which can be transferred or sold, public art is legally protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) which requires an official deaccession process for sale or removal.

Programs like President Roosevelt's New Deal facilitated the development of public art during the Great Depression but was wrought with propaganda goals.

New Deal art programs were intended to develop national pride in American culture while avoiding addressing the faltering economy.

This program allotted one half of one percent of total construction costs of all government buildings to the purchase of contemporary American art for them.

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.

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.

While the first public and private open-air sculpture exhibitions and collections dating back to the 1930s[24] aimed at creating an appropriate setting for large-scale sculptural forms difficult to show in museum galleries, installations such as Noguchi's Garden in Queens, New York (1985) reflect the necessity of a permanent relationship between the artwork and its site.

This relationship also develops in Donald Judd’s project for the Chinati Foundation (1986) in Texas, which advocates for the permanent nature of large-scale installations whose fragility may be destroyed when re-locating the work.

In another public artwork titled "Mission leopard"[25] was commissioned in 2016 in Haryana, India, among the remote deciduous terrain of Tikli village a team coordinated by Artist Hunny Mor painted two leopards perched on branches on a water source tank 115 feet high.

[26][27][28] Andrea Zittel has produced works, such as Indianapolis Island that reference sustainability and permaculture with which participants can actively engage.

An early and unusual interactive public artwork was Jim Pallas' 1980 Century of Light in Detroit, Michigan[31] of a large outdoor mandala of lights that reacted in complex ways to sounds and movements detected by radar (mistakenly destroyed 25 years later[32]).

Another example is Rebecca Hackemann's two works The Public Utteraton Machines of 2015 and The Urban Field Glass Project / Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars 2008, 20013, 2021, 2022.

[33] Rather than metaphorically reflecting social issues, new genre public art strove to explicitly empower marginalized groups while maintaining aesthetic appeal.

Examples would include Adrian Riley's 'Come Follow Me' in Minster in Lincolnshire where a 35m long text artwork in the public square outside the town's Minster includes local residents own stories alongside official civic history and the town's origin myth.

For the second one can refer to Les Nouveaux Commanditaires[37] launched by Fondation de France with François Hers in 1990 with the idea a project can respond to a community's wish.

Online public art databases can be general or selective (limited to sculptures or murals), and they can be governmental, quasi-governmental, or independent.