The Purpose of Public Sculpture: Artistic, Institutional, and Cultural Motivations since 1965

Abstract

Since the mid-1960s, the pace and scale of public sculpture production in America has increased exponentially. Notably, the purpose of these sculptures was not commemorative (as is the case for monuments and memorials), but rather for public benefit, broadly conceived. Within two decades, public sculpture moved from a handful of privately-funded examples at major buildings to a veritable industry, thanks to large government-led public art programs, hundreds of smaller public and private initiatives, and the widespread interest of artists and communities. Along the way, an infrastructure developed to maintain that work and ensure its continual production. And yet, beyond a handful of well-known controversies, remarkably little is known about how this new field took shape, what motivated various artistic, institutional, and cultural actors to participate, and what factors fueled and sustained its expansion. Existing scholarship on public sculpture has taken two major paths: celebratory and uncritical surveys of existing artworks, and studies that frame public sculpture as a site that has seen occasional engagement with the major concerns of modern art, but also one that has been unable to maintain any sort of critical or social import. This study reconciles those two approaches and offers an alternative. It uses a combination of focused case studies, data analysis, and attention to structural growth in order to understand how and why public sculpture has become a fixture of the modern American urban landscape. It considers the rapid expansion of public sculpture production as both an artistic and cultural phenomenon—one that has seen sustained and widespread public and institutional interest, but also one that hardly factors into current studies of modern art. This text argues for a reconsideration of the significance of that work and a fuller understanding of the relationship between the dramatic growth of public sculpture production and the larger project of sculpture making in the later half of the twentieth century.