Public art is on the urban agenda. Given recent claims about the importance of creativity to urban prosperity, opportunities for installing or performing art in the city have multiplied. As cities strive to appear culturally dynamic, the stakes of artistic production rise higher than ever. Exploring the interaction between art and the public in Canadian cities, Urban Encounters features writing by artists, architects, curators, anthropologists, geographers, and urban studies specialists. They show how people and places affect the structure and content of public artworks, what kinds of urban spaces and socialities are generated through art, and how to investigate and interpret encounters between art and its viewers in the city. Discussing a variety of art forms, including mobile cinemas, street improvisation, audiovisual investigations, and assembled objects, the contributors treat public artworks not just as aesthetic installations, but as agents that participate in the social and cultural evolution of cities. Using original, hands-on approaches, Urban Encounters reveals how art in the urban public space generates encounters that can transform both the city itself and the ways that people relate to it. Contributors include Alison Bain (York University), Robert Bean (NSCAD University), Lawrence Bird (architect, artist), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), Brenden Harvey (Dalhousie University), Wes Johnston (artist, curator), Léola Le Blanc (media artist), Brian Lilley (Dalhousie University), Barbara Lounder (NSCAD University), Mary Elizabeth Luka (York University), Sebastian Matthias (HafenCityUniversity), Christof Migone (Western University), Ellen Moffat (media artist), Kim Morgan (NSCAD University), Solomon Nagler (NSCAD University), Martha Radice (Dalhousie University), Nicole Rallis (McMaster University), Susanne Shawyer (Elon University), Shannon Turner (Aarhus University), Laurent Vernet (INRS Urbanisation Culture Société), and Nick Wees (University of Victoria).

A journey through Johannesburg via three art projects raises intriguing notions about the constitutive relationship between the city, imagination and the public sphere- through walking, gaming and performance art. Amid prevailing economic validations, the trilogy posits art within an urban commons in which imagination is all-important.

This book examines public art outside the normal confines of art criticism and places it within broader contexts of public space and gender by exploring both the aesthetic and political aspects of the medium.

This book links two fields of interest which are too seldom considered together: the production and critique of art in public space and social behaviour in the public realm. Whilst most writing about public art has focused on the aesthetic, cultural and political intentions and processes that shape its production, this edited collection examines a variety of public artworks from the perspective of their actual everyday use. Contributors are interested in the rich diversity of peoples’ engagements with public artworks across various spatial and temporal scales, encounters which do not limit themselves to the representational aspects of the art, and which are not necessarily as the artist, curator or sponsor intended. Case studies consider a broad range of public art, including commissioned and unofficial artworks, memorials, street art, street furniture, performance art, sound art and media installations.

From the verticals of New York, Hong Kong and Singapore to the sprawls of London, Paris and Jakarta, this interdisciplinary volume of new writing examines constructions, representations, imaginations and theorizations of 'cityscapes' in modern and contemporary culture. With specially-commissioned essays from the fields of cultural theory, architecture, film, literature, visual art and urban geography, it offers fresh insight into the increasingly complex relationship between urban space, cultural production and everyday life. This volume draws on critical urban studies and moves beyond familiar cultural representations of the city by considering urban planning and architecture. Organized under three inter-related themes - image, text and form - essay topics range from the examination of cyberpunk skylines, pagan urbanism and the cinema of urban disaster, to the analysis of iconic city landmarks such as the twin towers, the London Eye and the Judisches Museum Berlin. Covering a diverse range of cities, including Berlin, Chicago, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Venice, this fantastic resource for students, scholars and researchers alike, works expertly at the intersections of visual, material, and literary culture.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.