The mission of the Foundation mirrors the intent of the City's public art ordinance and includes the following objectives; the Foundation will endeavor to… Des Moines established such a program in 2001, a program that has since evolved into a private, nonprofit organization known as the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation.
Ugo Rondinone (born 1964 Brunnen, Switzerland) is a New-York based mixed-media artist whose works explore themes of fantasy and desire.
Visitors enjoy miming expression on Rondinone’s sculptures in Des Moines, Iowa’s Pappajohn Sculpture Park. Photo by Clemen Wilcox.
Peter Gibson, aka Roadsworth, began to play with the language of the streets, overlaying city asphalt markings with his own images: a crosswalk became a giant boot print, vines choked up traffic dividers, and electrical plugs filled parking spots. His art poses the question, “Who owns public space?” Roadworth’s expressive commentary on traffic, US oil dependency and how people move throughout the city has earned him acclaim internationally.
Every year, Paris’s Grand Palais gets re-imagined by a famous artist, courtesy of the Monumenta project. In 2008, the artist was Richard Serra and his work of art was called Promenade. Listen to Adrian Searle describe an unforgettable image.
Five enormous slabs of Cor-Ten steel were set along the central axis of the floor. They were precisely placed and angled, leaning 20 inches in or away from their axis, creating shifting lines of sight. As the sun moved over the course of the day, casting different latticed shadows from the building, the plates appeared at times to bend toward or away from the viewer. At night, with the ceiling dark, the sculpture became “more somber, more of a sanctuary,” Serra said.
Richard Serra (pictured with “Promenade”) wants people to experience the art in a particular time and setting: “It’s about apprehension, how you apprehend the space and the piece,” he said. “It’s part of the experience of walking around the space in which the art appears — you implicate yourself in the space, and the experience is in you, not in the frame or on the wall.”
Among the walking and biking tours, a downtown guide created by the Des Moines Bicycle Collective has featured a walking tour called “Public Art in the City.”
Download this PDF—it’s a very cool walking tour!
Des Moines, Iowa: Joel Shapriro’s sticklike bronze sculpture is masterfully poised at the center of the plaza at the top of the grand staircase at City Hall on the east riverbank.
Tel Aviv, Israel: A design for a new pedestrian bridge is constructed from a continuous line of 800,000 shipping containers punctuated by balconies that provide space to stop, rest and take in the view. Wow!
Called the Ecocontainer Bridge, the plans have been put in place by Yoav Messer Architects, an Israeli firm that focuses on bio-friendly constructions. The project seeks to cut down on the 800,000-plus shipping containers that are thrown out each year.
The current plans for the bridge feature a colorful design that will link Ariel Sharon Park and a main thoroughfare into Tel Aviv. The bridge will measure 525-feet and is meant for use by pedestrians, cyclists and small vehicles.
Nine Mudras by Ayush Kasliwal at the canyon wall. ‘Mudras’ of Hands are depicted using huge metallic structures at Terminal-3 at IGI, New Delhi, India.
Nine Mudras by Ayush Kasliwal
Anjolie Ela Menon’s mural, The Walled City, was commissioned for the Indira Gandhi International Airport (T3), New Delhi. “This street in an walled city is a microcosm of the Indian street. It is unique to our urban culture that the street is the arena for life itself,” says Anjolie Ela Menon.
“Walled City” by Anjolie Ela Menon
“This is where people live, work, travel, ply their trades, interact, romance, play, celebrate and protest. Here human beings and animals co-exist in surprising harmony where where tradition and modernity blend seamlessly in a throbbing scenario of sound and color, creating endless street theatre,” she says.
Menon, who is considered as the country’s foremost muralist took over six months to handpaint the mural, according to an official of India’s Vadehra Art Gallery, which is supporting the artist.
Artist Alice Aycock is featured in the May 2013 issue of Sculpture magazine—check it out! The feature celebrates her recent show, Alice Aycock: Drawings at the Grey Gallery, New York University and the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York.
Sculpture Magazine | May 2013 Issue
Aycock analogizes the structure of highways and systems. “Systems with many nodes – like the body’s arterial system – have an efficient design. Something happens in one part of the system, and it affects other parts and layers.”
Opening April 12, 2013 in Millennium Park is a major public art project which will be on view through November 4, 2013. It features 17 figurative sculptures interpreted from Japanese folklore characters called Tanuki. In additionare 13 of the monumental works the artist created at his Mission Clay: Pittsburg project.
From ancient times, the Japanese have expressed the purported shape shifting Tanuki in a variety of ways, but modernly they are usually depicted as a large, stout racoon-dog.
Tanuki are legendarily spirited beasts that take on tasks around human habitats, the most familiar incarnation of which is the “sake buying errand boy” made popular by the
ceramic artists of the city of Shigaraki which has one of the oldest ceramic traditions in Japan and where the Tanuki has evolved into the town mascot and an important symbol of business.
Jun Kaneko worked at Mission Clay Products in California for two years in the mid-90ʼs to create twenty-four immense sculptures and at their Kansas facility for the majority of three years starting in 2005 to create 44 monumental ceramic sculptures. All sculptures are fabricated by hand stitching clay slabs into the walls of singular monolithic hollow artworks.
Artist Jun Kaneko is internationally renowned for creating the largest free standing ceramic art pieces in the world. His monumental design extends to the stage, to opera, and to entire city plazas. His openness to new ideas has led him to begin building what he calls “an open space for the mind” in Omaha, Nebraska’s historic center—it is a place that aims to foster creativity in the arts, sciences, and philosophy.
Jun Kaneko titles his monolithic, hollow-cast sculpture, “Dangos” (dumplings in
Japanese). Art critic Arthur Danto has described Kaneko’s dangos as “an extraordinary creation, inasmuch as it combines monumentality with warmth and a kind of emotional lightness.”
James Turrell is “the first artist who really stated unequivocally that you can liberate light from its source and make it the artwork,” said Alison de Lima Greene, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Houston’s museum is joining with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in coordinated, successive Turrell exhibitions beginning in May 2013, offering an unusual opportunity to experience his immersive light environments that allow viewers to “see ourselves see,” as he puts it.
Recognizing the challenge of accommodating Turrell’s expansive vision within the confines of a single museum, the organizers passed over the standard model of a single traveling retrospective in favor of this collaboration of complementary exhibitions. The LA County Museum’s exhibition opens May 26 and runs through April 6, 2014; it is the largest of the three, with 40 works spanning the artist’s career.
In New York, June 21 through Sept. 25, 2013, the Guggenheim Museum exhibition will feature t a new Turrell commission filling the entire open space of the famous rotunda of the museum, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The trick of the piece is to set up a kind of anti-architecture that allows you to feel the light and space. “You normally look across the ramps and don’t think about this volume that is the center of the museum,” said Nat Trotman, who organized the Guggenheim show with Carmen Gimenez. “That is crystallized and solidified. It’s really about a dialogue between [architect and artist] Wright and Turrell.”
Turrell has site-specific installations in 25 countries, has more typically worked outside major cities. His most ambitious and continuing project is at Roden Crater in the Arizona desert, which he found in 1974 after seven months of canvassing western America in his miniplane in search of an extinct volcanic crater. There, over the last four decades, he has designed and excavated a multi-chambered, naked-eye observatory where visitors can perceive astronomical phenomena from the vantage points he has created.