Negotiating the Public Art Terrain Challenges, Minefields, & Opportunities

Harriet Senie, PhD will discuss her unrealized monuments project, the process of monument proposals and how unrealized projects can live on.

Studios 15 & 16, 1st Floor

Navigating the field of public art can be a real challenge. In this talk, Professor Emerita of Art History at City College of New York, Harriet Senie, PhD will discuss her unrealized monuments project, touching upon the process of monument proposals and how projects can live on even if they go unrealized. Together, we'll explore some basic ways to navigate public art that will help in getting commissions, checking contracts, and creating competitive proposals. The talk will also consider controversial works by artists such as Richard Serra, Keith Haring, David Hammons and Paul McCarthy and analyze what went wrong once the works went public. Then we will discuss works by the Guerrilla Girls, Isamu Noguchi, Tony Rosenthal, Fritz Koenig and Anish Kapoor whose meaning changed with use orre-siting. And finally the talk will focus on works by George Segaland Maya Lin that made a real difference in the actual world, one by raising consciousness, the other by providing a new memorial model that is still being used today. Harriet Senie, PhD is professor emerita of art history at City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Monumental Controversies: Mount Rushmore, Four Presidents, and Our Quest for National Identity (University of Nebraska Press, 2022); Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2015); The “Tilted Arc” Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (Oxford University Press, 1992). She is coeditor and contributor to Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy (Harper Collins, 1992; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), and coeditor and contributor to the Companion to Public Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), as well as Museums and Public Art? (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018). In 2008, she cofounded Public Art Dialogue, an international organization and a College Art Association affiliate. She also coedited the peer review journal Public Art Dialogue from 2011 through spring 2017. In 2017, she was appointed to the New York City Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. She has also served on the She Built New York initiative advisory committee, and the selection committees for the Women’s Suffrage Monument for Central Park, as well as the Mexico City Memorial 1968/2018.

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Negotiating the Public Art Terrain Challenges, Minefields, & Opportunities

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Negotiating the Public Art Terrain Challenges, Minefields, & Opportunities

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