Private Eye in Public Art

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These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. 4

— Daniel Boorstin

MY LIFE IN ART

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. My father was an interior designer. My mother was a housewife, raising her children and caring for her home – a strong woman with energy, which could have been better directed if she had worked. In her eighties, she talked about the few years before she married. As a young woman, she managed a store selling handbags; as she told us often, within two weeks of work, she was made store manager. She never recovered from that early experience of being independent. I saw my mother’s energy, but determined to use mine more broadly.

I wanted to live in a world of art.

Museums were my earliest art education. From the time I was eight or nine years old, my mother dropped me off at the Brooklyn Museum every Saturday. It was in that encyclopedic museum – a repository of culture and art – that I became passionate about African and Native American art. Those collections were forever imprinted on my consciousness. By the time I was ten, I was traveling by myself on the subway to the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where I became a member in 1946 at age 18.

My interest in public art was encouraged while I was an undergraduate at Hunter College. I had painted, and I wanted to be an art major. I studied anthropology, and my visits to the American Museum of Natural History enhanced my understanding of diverse cultures. But my parents’ fears (which mirrored the times) about the bohemianism of artists’ lives affected me, and I received a degree in English Literature and American History instead of Art.

My younger brother, Lee Harris Pomeroy, encouraged continually by my mother, became an architect. From him I learned the importance of context in formulating an architectural solution and, in turn, about the context of public art. I was drawn to artists for their intuitive questioning, and to public art rather than easel or studio art, convinced that placing art in a public context affirms democratic values and enriches the lives of all people, whether conversant with or uninitiated in the arts.

My activities in the arts had their first public expression in the 1950s, when I was a young mother and one of several women (including Eleanor Tunick and Evelyn Mauss) who founded the Rockaway Music and Arts Council, the second such organization in New York State. Our objective was simple: to bring the arts

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Tony Smith

She who Must Be Obeyed

1975

Frances Perkins Building, Washington, D.C.

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Brassaï

Graffiti 1

1959

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Collection of Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz

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The term “public” signifies the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us … It is related to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as the affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together … If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. 11

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

HISTORY

This volume does not pretend to be a comprehensive history or academic critique of public art: many admirable histories have been written – by art historians, leaders of government agencies charged with the promotion and stewardship of public art, and independent consultants. This is my story.

I have had meaningful relationships with the contemporary artists I cite and whose works illustrate my convictions about public art. They have been mentors, associates, and friends. I wish I could say that I have completed projects with all of them, but realistically, one has only so much time.

At the approximate midpoint of my career, editor Joseph Wilkes invited me to write a chapter on public art for a multi-volume Encyclopedia of Architecture. 12 The profusion and diversity of art in public places from ancient times provided the historical backdrop for my focus on the evolution of public art in the United States. I suggested that public art offered the unique cultural legacy for a complex and diversified nation.

Beginning tentatively in the late 1960s, just as I was launching my career, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) resuscitated imperatives of the Depression-era Works Projects Administration (WPA). The program had lost its vitality and all but disappeared in the years immediately following WWII. The GSA was both building owner and art patron; the NEA provided incentives by officially promoting art as a positive contributor to the health of communities, the renewed urbanization of cities, and the general well-being of America. Percentfor-art legislation, initially the province of the federal government (already widespread in Europe), was adopted by states, counties, and cities throughout America. This excitement about the promise of art in public places coincided with the burgeoning conceptual art and environmental art movements and contemporary artists’ growing desire to move beyond the gallery and museum spheres.

I described public art’s powerful role in illuminating the majesty of America’s spectacular landscapes, threats to our natural environment, and the

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Robert Irwin

Two Running Violet V Forms

1983

Stuart Collection, UC San Diego, CA

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Donatello

Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata

1445–53

Padua, Italy

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Charles Ross Star Axis 1971–New Mexico

Charles Ross Star Axis 1971New Mexico

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CONTROVERSY

Art is an activity of change, of disorientation and shift, of violent discontinuity, of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes. 34

— Robert Morris

The more controversy there is at the time [the art] is created by a tried-and-true artist, the more chance there is that it is a significant statement. 35

— Robert Buck

The artist is frequently at conflict with the status quo. He takes us out of the realm of the ordinary, He captures our imagination. He stretches our minds. He changes the way we see the world. Art opens our eyes: it offers a new perspective and makes us turn an idea, a thought, and sometimes even a fact over and over until we see it in a new light with new eyes. 36

— Joan Mondale

Public art is a venerable, if not always venerated art form. It is also vulnerable. Its long and honorable history includes unremitting controversy, spectacular and enduring art, bad and banal art, and significantly, many unrealized superior proposals. Dialogue and debate are positive and essential aspects of the public art process. Whether addressing specific content, chosen medium, celebrity of the artist, or politics, controversy engages people, to take notice, criticize, love, or hate an intervention in the spaces of their lives. Whether based on aesthetic preferences, the work’s appropriateness to the site, or cultural identity, differing opinions are evidence that an artist has touched their audience. Unmitigated approval is not the measure of a work’s success long term.

Robert Irwin has said that one primary intention of art is “to make people see a bit more tomorrow than they saw today.” 37 In that regard, dialectical controversy is a measure of its reach. Can we shy away from controversy sponsored by the creation and placement of public art? Or conversely, should we encourage it?

Suppressing controversy or denying its positive impact on the public art process opens the door to banal and mediocre art. Among the most controversial works of art are those that break from traditional modes and explore new and unfamiliar ideas. They may not be universally accessible, challenging the general public as well as art critics and historians. Critic Arthur Danto has said: “It is the preemption of public spaces by an art that is indifferent, if not hostile, to human needs that has aroused such partisan

Agnes Denes Model for Probability Pyramid – Study for Crystal Pyramid

1976–2019

The Shed, New York, NY

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Auguste Rodin

The Burghers of Calais

1889 (cast 1908)

Victoria Tower Gardens, London, UK

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I.M. Pei

The Louvre Pyramid

1988

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The Louvre Palace, Paris. France

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LIVABLE CITIES Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

By the time I began my first public art project in Philadelphia, the city’s progressive position had long been codified in an ordinance requiring all public and private development to allocate a percentage of a building’s construction budget for public art. My projects in Philadelphia – Sheraton Hotels, Buttonwood, Penrose Plaza, PNC Bank Operations Center – were collaborations with private developers.

A model for other cities, Philadelphia’s percent-for-art program was the remarkable work of visionary city planner Edmund Bacon. 100 The city established a national standard for percent-for-art legislation in 1959, founding the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia (RDA) Fine Arts Program. Unusual in that it applies not only to public buildings but also to the private development which benefited from Bacon’s planning, the city’s mandate not only requires that one percent of all building construction costs under the RDA be budgeted for original works of art, but those works must be created specifically for public spaces within the development. Philadelphia’s longstanding commitment to public art had long been set by the Fairmount Park Art Association (founded 1872; now the Association for Public Art), another program supporting art in public places, now directed by Executive Director and Chief Curator Penny Balkin Bach. It has produced such innovative works as Jody Pinto’s Fingerspan. One good program in a city encourages another.

Philadelphia has one of the most exceptional public art collections in the country, including sculpture by three generations of Calders. The RDA seeks artists internationally, but local and regional artists have benefited as well. Hundreds of works enhance diverse developments: high-rise commercial and residential towers, industrial plants, universities, hotels, hospitals, libraries, and schools.

Developer, architect, and artist work together from the inception of each construction project, selecting a public art consultant or panel of art professionals to guide the process. The site for art, the artists selected, and the proposal must be approved by the Fine Arts Committee of the Redevelopment Authority (RDA), which includes at least one contemporary art professional, architect, landscape architect, artist, and lay-citizens with an interest in the arts. That the private developer has an integral role in the process is a testament to the city’s commitment to public/private collaboration.

One of the first projects I did for the RDA was with the Korman Company, the developers of a project for Penrose Plaza, a private shopping mall in

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Jody Pinto Fingerspan 1987 Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, PA

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Robert Morris Bull Wall 1992 Kansas City, MO

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