I have been thinking about what the art of a city does. How it acts, how it functions. Art of public place, existing between architecture and ourselves, even in aesthetics, stages a reminder that the things around us are made–that all the human world is constructed and can be un-constructed, repurposed, and rearranged. When I think of art in public I think of Max Neuhaus’ city train grates in Times Square and Downtown Brooklyn. I think of Sharon Hayes’ I March in the Parade of Liberty but as Long as I Love You I’m Not Free (2007), of Richard Sera’s overbearing hunks of metal and of Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Blood Signs) seeping out from behind closed doors. Of other Earthworks from the mid-century. I think of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and of the oversized sundial in Hunters Point that I run into, often. I think of chalk drawings on the sidewalks left by some hours boredom allowed, of the paper signs that collect on our telephone poles or of synchronized exercise classes in Golden Gate Park. These things queue us into happening to the world. The aesthetics of the public space suggest a repositioning of the subject in which you, just by thought, become an actant receiving signals from a mysterious stage. In her 1997, Mourning Sex, scholar Peggy Phelan writes, “theater and performance respond to a psychic need to rehearse for loss.” Even in wonder and magic there is a shimmer of loss, of change, of difference and deference as one’s perspective shifts and warps. Art of a city stages our encounters with that which we are not yet prepared for, so what is it we need of it now?

Signs spread among San Francisco telephone poles

Installation view of Emilio Martínez Poppe, City Planning Commission, South, 2024.

Art is oxygen! Shouts the director of Mural Arts Philadelphia at the opening of artist Emilio Martínez Poppe’s exhibition City Views in the courtyard of Philadelphia’s City Hall. To-scale photographs of the views from the desks or work-stations of dozens of Philadelphia’s city employees are affixed to metal scaffolding. Each faces the direction they sit in real time, accompanied by excerpts from long-form interviews taken by the artist with those same employee’s about their relationships to the city, to being a city worker, and about civic duty throughout life. This project, developed over the course of the last three years with Mural Arts Philadelphia and organized by curator Jameson Paige collaborates with workers across the city’s departments, from education to sanitation to economic empowerment, to the district attorney’s office and makes visible how cities are collective acts and actions. Cities are densely wondrous exercises in trust and entanglement, the work stages a series of encounters, through each civic worker’s literal point of view with each other, modeling, in public space, the passages between each governing sector and allows a viewer to perform traversing the internal workings of the city for themselves, managing its crisis, and marveling at its joy.

Here as of late there has been some upset – the overbearing statue at the end of Market street unfortunately commissioned for temporary exhibition by the Parks and Rec. department is unavoidable for those who commute through the ferry building area each day. This happens all of the time. An unbelievably large corporation in Northern California contracts an artist based in Los Angeles to create works inspired by those of local female legends, to be installed within their yet-to-debut semi-public front arboretum. These are generalized works–their symbolic value only goes as deep as symbolism.

Of a sandstone jutting out from the desert, American curator and writer, Lucy Lippard, known for her writings on the interpolation of life into contemporary art (and vice versa) writes, “Even if we as individuals are cut off from any communal belief system or any collective work system, something seems to flow back to us through these places – which we see perhaps as symbols of lost symbols, apprehended but not specifically comprehended in our own socioreligious contexts.”1 We are reminded we are not separate from those things around us when we are moved, emotionally and physically, by a place. Our Earthworks sought to do this in the 1960’s. Crucially, for Lippard, it is kin to religion. At SITE Santa Fe  photographs by Will Wilson pair those Earthworks most famed (Nancy Holt, Robert Smithson, James Turrell) with documents of abandoned uranium mines across the Navajo Nation. In the 1940’s private mining companies leased land from the Navajo Nations, employing their inhabitants without warning them of the dangers of uranium exposure. Now left abandoned, wounds on the Earth, Will’s work explores the possibility of resignifying the dominant affective pilgrimages public art has scripted us to expect. The work uses a ritual, how we have marveled and traveled for public art of the past, to instruct us on how we might relate to the current environmental crisis and the violent mismanagement of the United States’ relationship with Native peoples today.

Will Wilson, Hubris on the Land, installation at SITE Santa Fe, 2025.

The late sound artist and composer Max Neuhaus hides his public artwork: A false grate in Times Square installed originally from 1977 to 1992 at the Times Square Street Business Improvement District (BID), plays subway noises where none actually exist. A hidden speaker at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn train stop in Brooklyn acts the same. Here, public art is an infrastructural discovery and mystery. The sense of unraveling infrastructure through your own engagement with it makes visible the building of the city itself. By dramatizing its subjectivity, it reveals its very construction, and it engenders, through the joyful detective work of those inhabiting the space, a sense of wonder. Wonder is crucial to human infrastructure. As artist Mary Kelly says, Wonder is anterior to other experiences – it has no opposite.

A news article circulates about Coyotes, and their relationship to San Francisco. My friend Natalya tells me they are something known as meso-predators, they can hunt almost anything. The United States has always tried to rid itself of the Coyote and still it occupies all the public sphere, through parks, cities, or suburbs. The population remains constant in spite. I almost always overshoot the drive down to where my studio is in Hunters Point, and end up on the long road that takes you squarely into the massive yellow sundial that sits at Hilltop Park. For me, it is similar to Max Neuhaus’ city soundworks in discovery. The work is by artist Jacques Overhoff, it sits above a cement orbital with carvings by local school children all made in the 1980’s. Apparently it tells fairly accurate time if you can get a good vantage, and a quick internet search tells me that it is the first park in the city to officially incorporate a skate park element for recreational use. It is bizarre and it makes me think about the looming quality of time, particularly in that neighborhood where public transit is few and far between and the refraction of sunlight over the shallow murky bay makes shadows seem to go on and on stretching back towards the city until they disappear. Some places are like the Coyotes, the more they are fought, the more they multiply. Some places receive an artwork that is so heavy it sits forever and may be forgotten about, as this one feels to me. It stands as a reminder for what that place is owed by its city, a city that often seems to have forgotten about them too.

Jacques Overhoff, Hunter’s Point, San Francisco, California, 1977.

What does public art do? How can it function? I sometimes imagine the soul of the city like my grandfather. He was a pediatrician, and although I am told, rarely home, he was always felt. There is something solid about him. Like Emilio’s photographs and interviews of civic Philadelphia, reinforcing the often unseen but not unfelt workforce that makes the organism of the city go. Rigidity is important–solidity, stone, brick, metal–these hard materials both of the natural world and opposed to its elemental rage insist that there is a continuity to life. Public art reminds us of a future and demands there be a past. Public art need not all be solid, but an element of it must retain itself against passing time. Some amount of public art must be permanent. Not because ideas last forever but precisely because there is a continual run of change. Like Will Wilson’s reincorporation of land art into speaking to the issues of land at present hand, it must continue to allow others to inform. Finally, art of the public realm must endear us to our spaces and ask that we continue to discover them. As Overhoffs’ sundial stubbornly insists that we think about time in a place in the city often lost to it, it redefines its significance. Art of the public sphere rehearses how we engage meaningfully with the world, and therefore change how we act with each other. To see that change, to see additions and iterations around us, means we can envision the world we live in today, livable for tomorrow.

I’m walking through the Castro, I’m looking at the Victorian facades and I’m hearing the doors of the bars open for the night and I’m seeing color around me and I’m thinking this is public art and the city calls to me. There is a man who stands guard on top of Buena Vista with a guitar and a jumble of dog toys hanging from his sides. He is there in the morning. He will tell you he is having a terrible day with the smugness of a challenge, the hint of truth, an enjoyment that feels solid and lamenting, etched against the summit. What do I want from the art of my city? I want be made to see infrastructure as work and work as a site we build together. I want wonder to remind us that we are in control of our own civil services and institutions. That we owe more to the land, and to the Earth that holds us on it. If art of the public is to practice life then I want to practice grief as a run-through for the impossibility of preparing for the endless loss that is systems overhaul, knowing joy comes with it as well.

Yours,
Emily