New genre public art and social policies

New Genre Public Art and Social Policies

New genre public art developed as a result of artists becoming interested in addressing social issues and changes through their artistic endeavors. Prior to having such interest in contemporary social concerns, artists were confined to focusing their energies towards creating abstract and innovative works of art that were to be privately displayed in museums and art galleries away from general public view.

The evolution of public art began in the late 1950's, when artists at the time were initially trying to simply break free of conventional ties to galleries and museums. By 1966, artists began to question through their artwork the structures maintained and propagated by the elitist art establishment, including the notions that a piece of art's value is mainly determined by its economic worth, that works created by white male artists gain more of an audience, that art can only be appreciated by upper-class individuals, and that artists should remain culturally isolated from the rest of society.

In 1967 the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) established the Art in Public Places Program, which sparked the formation of local percent-for-art programs throughout the country. Through this program, the government promised artists the opportunity to publicly promote their social ideals and concerns in exchange for beautifying inner city landscapes. Thus, during the sixties the full-fledged use of art as a promotional tool for grass-roots democracy emerged. Despite its promise to promote socially engaged public art, the late sixties and early seventies saw the NEA program approving of projects that focused more on art history than on cultural history.

Starting in 1974, the NEA began encouraging artists to develop artwork that was representative of the physical site on which it stood. This led to artists' differentiation between "public art" and "art in public places." "Public art" referred to sculptures occupying a public space that glorified one version of national history adhered to by members of the socially dominant group in society. The "cannon in the park" phenomena is an example of such art, in which America's military might and glory celebrated by its privileged members of society was put on artistic display in public spaces such as parks, plazas, shopping malls, and so on. In contrast to this, "art in public places" referred to artwork that sought to bring attention to the physical, visual, historical, and social properties of a particular site. This type of public art led to its burgeoning use in the seventies towards promoting social and historical concerns of groups traditionally under-represented in the art world, such as women and minorities.