Public Art Reading List (updated January 2011)
Acconci, Vito. 1993.
Making public: the writing and reading of public space. The Hague: Uitgever.
Bach, Penny Balkin, ed. 2001.
New•Land•Marks: public art, community, and the meaning of place. Washington, DC: Grayson Publishing.
———. 1992.
Public art in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Basa, Lynn. 2008.
The artist’s guide to public art: how to find and win commissions. New York: Allworth Press.
Beardsley, John. 1981.
Art in public places. Washington: Partners for Livable Places.
———. 1984.
Earthworks and beyond: contemporary art in the landscape. New York: Abbeville Press.
Becker, Heather. 2002.
Art for the people: the rediscovery and preservation of Progressive and WPA-era murals in the Chicago public schools, 1904-1943. Chronicle Books.
Becker, Howard S. 1982.
Art worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bishop, Claire, ed. 2006.
Participation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Borden, Iain and Jane Rendell. 2002. Private reflections/public matters: public art in the city. In
Art and the performance of memory: sounds and gestures of recollection, edited by R. Cándida Smith. London: Routledge.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998.
Relational aesthetics. Paris: Les Presse Du Real.
Boyer, Christine. 1994.
The city of collective memory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brenson, Michael. 2001.
Visionaries and outcasts: the NEA, Congress, and the place of the visual arts in America. New York: New Press.
———. 2004.
Acts of engagement: writings on art, criticism, and institutions, 1993–2002. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Brown, Thomas J. 2004.
The public art of Civil War commemoration: a brief history with documents. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2005. Images in the mind: visual studies and global imagination.
Art US (February): 47–53.
Certeau, Michel de. 1988.
The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crow, Thomas E. 1999.
The intelligence of art. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. and Pam Korza, eds. 1988.
Going public: a field guide to developments in art in public places. Amherst, MA: Arts Extension Service.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996.
Evictions: art and spatial politics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Diaz, Eva. 2006. The new public art: encounters in privatized space. In
Mind the gap. Brooklyn: Smack Mellon Gallery.
Doherty, Claire, ed. 2009.
Situation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Doss, Erika. 1995.
Spirit poles and flying pigs: public art and cultural democracy in American communities. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
———. 2010.
Memorial mania: public feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Duncan, Carol. 1995.
Civilizing rituals: inside public art museums. London: Routledge.
Ericson, Kate, Mel Ziegler, Ian Berry, Bill Arning, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, and MIT List Visual Arts Center. 2005.
America starts here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Felshin, Nina, ed. 1995.
But is it art? The spirit of art as activism. Seattle: Bay Press.
Finkelpearl, Tom. 2000.
Dialogues in public art. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fleming, Ronald Lee. 2007.
The art of placemaking: interpreting community through public art and urban design. London: Merrell Publishers Limited.
Freedman, Susan, Tom Eccles, Dan Cameron, Kay Siegel, Jeffrey Kastner, and Anne Wehr.
Plop: recent projects of the Public Art Fund. London: Merrell Publishers Limited.
Gamboni, Dario. 2007.
The destruction of art: iconoclasm and vandalism since the French Revolution. London: Reaktion Books.
Gerace, Gloria. 2007.
Urban surprises: a guide to public art in Los Angeles. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.
Goldstein, Barbara. 2006.
Public art by the book. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Graves, James Bau. 2004.
Cultural democracy: the arts, community, and the public purpose. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hall, Tim, and Iain Robertson. 2001. Public art and urban regeneration: advocacy, claims and critical debates. Landscape Research 26 (1): 5–26.
Harris, Neil. 1999. Building lives: constructing rites and passages. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The power of place: landscapes as public history. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heartney, Eleanor, Marvin Heiferman, and New York Dept. of Cultural Affairs. 2005. City art: New York’s Percent for Art Program. New York: Merrell.
Hein, Hilde. 2006. Public art: thinking museums differently. Landham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Jacob, Mary Jane. 1995. Culture in Action: A public art program of Sculpture Chicago. Seattle: Bay Press.
———. 1997. The “public” in public art. In La Citta degli Interveni, edited by R. Pinto. Milan: Comune de Milano, Progetto Giovani.
———. 1998. Conversations at the Castle: Changing audiences and contemporary art. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kahn, Barry. 1981. Public sculpture as living presence. New Art Examiner
9 (2): 1, 6–7.
Kammen, Michael G. 2006. Visual shock: a history of art controversies in American culture. New York: Knopf.
Kester, Grant H. 2004. Conversation Pieces: community and communication in modern art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kimmelman, Michael. 1993. Of candy bars and public art. The New York Times, September 26.
———. 2005. In a saffron ribbon, a billowy gift to the city. The New York Times, February 13.
Knight, Cher Krause. 2008. Public art: theory, practice and populism. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kramer, Jane. 1994. Whose art is it? Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kwon, Miwon. 1998. Public art and urban identities. Paper read at The Photography Institute, New York.
———. 2002. One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lacy, Suzanne, ed. 1995. Mapping the terrain: new genre public art. Seattle: Bay Press.
Levine, Caroline. 2002. The paradox of public art: democratic space, the avant-garde, and Richard Serra’s “Titled Arc.” Philosophy & Geography 5 (1): 51-68.
———. 2007. Provoking democracy: Why we need the arts. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Lin, Maya Ying. 2000. Boundaries. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society. New York: The New Press.
———. 1999. On the beaten track: tourism, art, and place. New York: The New Press.
Luke, Timothy W. 1996. Review of But Is It Art? edited by Nina Felshin and Culture in Action by Mary Jane Jacob. Contemporary Sociology 25 (5): 681–683.
Makiya, Kanan. 2004. The monument: art and vulgarity in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. London: I. B. Tauris.
Manghani, Sunil. 2003. Picturing Berlin: piecing together a public sphere. In Invisible Culture: University of Rochester. [Accessed 4/8/06. Available from http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_6/manghani/manghani.html]
Marling, Karal Ann. 2000. Wall-to-wall America: post-office murals in the Great Depression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Matzner, Florian, ed. 2004. Public art: a reader. Ostfi ldern: Hatje Cantz.
McCombie, Mary Eleanor. 1992. Art and policy: The National Endowment for the Arts’s Art in Public Places program, 1967–1980. Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin.
Miles, Malcolm. 1997. Art, space, and the city: public art and urban futures. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. 1992. Art and the public sphere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Neff, Terry Ann R., ed. 1991. Places with a past: new site-specific art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival. New York: Rizzoli.
Nordland, Gerald, ed. 1983. Controversial public art: from Rodin to di Suvero. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum.
Peltason, Ruth A., ed. 2007. Creative Time: the book. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.
Phifer, Jean. 2009. Public art New York. New York: W. W. Norton.
Phillips, Patricia C. 1988. Out of order: the public art machine. Art Forum, December, 92–96.
Raven, Arlene, ed. 1993. Art in the public interest. New York: Da Capo Press.
Rogoff, Irit. 1998. How to dress for an exhibition. In Stopping the process: contemporary views on art and exhibitions, edited by M. Hannula. Helsinki, Finland: The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art.
———. 2002. Reading the agreement: making art in public. Paper read at Project Arts Centre, October 20, in Dublin.
———. 2005. Looking away: participations in visual culture. In After criticism: new responses to art and performance, edited by G. Butt. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Ryan, Mary P. 1997. Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sapega, Ellen W. 2002. Image and counter-image: the place of Salazarist images of national identity in contemporary Portuguese visual culture. Luso-Brazilian Review 39 (2): 45-64.
Savage, Kirk. 1997. Standing soldiers, kneeling slaves: race, war, and monument in nineteenth century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sax, Joseph L. 1999. Playing darts with a Rembrandt: public and private rights in cultural treasures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and memory. New York: Vintage Books.
Senie, Harriet F. 1987. Public art/public controversy: the Titled Arc on trial. New York: Council for the Arts.
———. 1992. Contemporary public sculpture: tradition, transformation, and controversy. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2003. Reframing public art: audience use, interpretation, and appreciation. In Art and its publics: museum studies at the millennium, edited by A. McClellan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Senie, Harriet, and Sally Webster, eds. 1992. Critical issues in public art: content, context, and controversy. New York: Icon Editions.
Shearer, Linda. Vito Acconci, public places. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998.
Sholette, Gregory. 2004. Dark matter: activist art and the counter-public sphere. Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, issue 3. Protest
Schrank, Sarah. 2008. Art and the city: civic imagination and cultural authority in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Storr, Robert. 1985. Tilted Arc: enemy of the people? Art in America, September, 90–97.
Sturken, Marita. 1997. Tangled memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the politics of remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. 2001. Practices of looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Suderburg, Erika. 2000. Space, site, intervention: situating installation art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Fannie, and Anthony L. Barresi. 1984. The arts at a new frontier: the National Endowment for the Arts. New York: Plenum Press.
Thompson, Nato, Arjen Noordeman, and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. 2004. The Interventionists: a users’ manual for the creative disruption of everyday life. North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA.
Uchill, Rebecca, ed. 2009. On procession: art on parade. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Wang, Dan. 2006. Notes on a public space: Daley Plaza. Milwaukee: Art Street Window.
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
Wetenhall, John. 1988. The ascendency of modern public sculpture in America, Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Weyergraf-Serra, Clara, and Martha Buskirk. 1991. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Whyte, William H. 1980. The social life of small urban spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces.
Yngvason, Hafthor. 1993. The new public art, as opposed to what? from Philadelphia to Chicago. Public Art Review (8).
Yngvason, Hafthor, ed. 2002. Conservation and maintenance of contemporary public art. London: Archetype Publications Limited.
Zuber, Devin. 2006. Flânerie at Ground Zero: aesthetic countermemories in Lower Manhattan. American Quarterly 58 (2): 269–299.