Public Art and Public Spaces

As long as there has been art there has been public art. But this does not mean that public art has always meant the same thing to the people who made it or the community that it was made for. This paper examines four moments in history and four specific artworks as a way of examining how the function of art in public places has changed as well as the ways in which it has not changed, over the centuries. This paper begins at a moment long before many people would place the beginnings of public art - with the Paleolithic drawings on the walls in French caves and ending with the works of Maya Lin. As each moment in time presents a different form of public art, no single, overriding definition of the term will be offered here. Rather, each moment in history and...
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