What Is the State of Public Art in Atlanta?

Good question. 

A little over a week ago Atlanta played host to the 2024 South and Appalachian Creative Placemaking Summit. That name needs a little unpacking, and we’ll get into what it means and what it has to do with design—but let’s just say that when hundreds of creatives and urbanists converge on the Woodruff Arts Center for three days of workshops, presentations, tours, and performances around the city, we are prepared to swerve from our best-laid editorial plan. (Good design depends on good questions. Good planning allows for right turns.) So with the Summit still fresh in our minds, let’s discuss placemaking, public space, public art, and where we stand in Atlanta.

Since 2018, the regional Creative Placemaking Summit has convened in cities across the South to explore and support the intersection of art, community, policy, and the built environment—or “placemaking.” Dating back to the 1960s and the work of those great champions of life on the street, Jane Jacobs and William “Holly” Whyte, the term placemaking took root with reference to public spaces in particular: why we need them, how to protect them, how to design them. 

As an aside, public space probably seems straightforward as a concept: the places everybody shares, right? But if you stop and think about it, there are actually a lot of rules and expectations about all that sharing. On a recent episode of the Perkins&Will podcast Inhabit, show hosts Eunice Wong and Dr. Erika Eitland—an urban designer and public health scientist, respectively—tackle these visible and invisible boundaries head-on, using Eunice’s hometown, Toronto, as a case study. But we are in Atlanta, not Toronto, and the Summit was about creative placemaking, not the plain old kind. 

Actually, there will never be anything plain or old about good placemaking, but in the decades since it captured the urban imagination, the idea has received some tweaks and amendments. Recently, designers have started to use “placekeeping” and “placeknowing” to express the greater range of relationships to place beyond new buildings, infrastructure, or amenities. (See here a few definitions that came out of three museum-design charrettes our firm co-hosted a few years ago.) “Creative placemaking” followed closer on the heels of the original concept but was really established in 2010, when Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa established the term in a white paper for the National Endowment for the Arts, the US Council of Mayors, and the American Architectural Foundation. If placemaking emphasizes the critical role of public space in anchoring neighborhood vitality and well-being, then creative placemaking emphasizes the essential role of art and culture in the vitality and well-being of public spaces. 

Which brings us to art in public space, or public art, in the place now called Atlanta. The Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs reports 149 works in the City of Atlanta Public Art Collection. The City’s Public Art Program maintains another 400 works in its “art on loan,” or Portable Collection, and this is not to mention the public performing arts at Elevate and the Atlanta Jazz Festival, one of the largest free public jazz festivals in the country. (Hot tip: The Fest is coming soon! And André 3000 is performing his new album! Though you’ll probably catch us at Cecile McLorin Salvant’s set on the first night.) 

The works in the Public Art Collection tend to fall into one of two buckets. The first is civic-minded commissioned works that remember and honor our histories. Think statues of MLK and Xernona Clayton, John Wesley Dobbs and Andrew Young, Hank Aaron, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Asher… the King Memorial installations, the fountain at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, or any of the phoenix sculptures downtown—although the one commissioned for the Olympics, Birth of Atlanta (1996), now lives in Westside Park.

The second bucket is commissioned works by high-profile international artists that are given a home in Atlanta. Ever notice those Stonehenge-like columns at the corner of Glen Iris and North Highland? It’s called 54 Columns (1999), and it’s by minimalist pioneer Sol LeWitt. Officials once had to remove a bunch of dogwood trees that were planted among the columns to obscure them. How about that oddball playground just inside the 12th Street entrance to Piedmont Park? Public art (Playscape, 1976) by the renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi!

Atlanta has precious few works in this second category, though former Mayor Kasim Reed’s Landmark Public Art Initiative is in the process of adding nine to the City’s Public Art Collection. The third of these, depicted in our illustration for today’s post, is Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa’s Self-Portrait III (2023). The spectacular stainless-steel sphere is formed out of the script of nine international languages, enclosing a human figure contemplating our global experience. It was just unveiled this past October in Freedom Park, the City’s designated Art Park.

Here’s the thing: if you take one of the in-person and virtual public-art tours offered by the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, you might find yourself asking, What about X? What about Y? What about 54 Columns (actually part of the Fulton County Public Arts Program)? What about all the art on the BeltLine? What about the sculpture that changes up every couple years at the corner of Peachtree and 10th? Some of us still miss the white car being swallowed by a melting scoop of marble soft-serve.

Public art, like the space it’s in, is not as straightforward as it seems. First of all, not all public art is on public property. A favorite new sculpture of ours is Dee Briggs’s Can’t You See (2021), a monumental Cor-Ten steel installation outside the Norfolk Southern headquarters on West Peachtree. It looks a bit like a series of uprooted railroad tracks threading the landscape. You can’t miss it, so in that sense it’s public, but Norfolk Southern owns the site and the art.

Another nuance of public art illustrated by Briggs’s sculpture is the difference between permanent and temporary display. Can’t You See is a permanent work. The pieces in the City’s Public Art Collection are permanent. On the other hand, the art at the corner of Peachtree and 10th, like most of the art on the BeltLine, is temporary, maintained by nonprofit organizations like Midtown Alliance and Atlanta BeltLine Inc. 

As you might expect, getting approval for permanent public art is a deliberative process. The City in particular wants to make sure that any art permanently displayed is meaningful for generations. Temporary art is a safer commitment by comparison. It is less expensive to procure, display, and maintain—and replace when public opinion changes. In fact, we would be willing to bet that Atlantans are generally more familiar with public art around the city that is either on private property—like Briggs’s sculpture or the works outside the High Museum of Art—or a temporary exhibit—like Mei Chin’s new installation by the Old Fourth Ward skatepark (Wake, 2023). 

And there is another wee elephant in the room: Georgia ranks dead last in the nation in per capita spending on the arts (National Assembly of State Art Agencies). Nope, not a fluke year. We have been on or near the bottom for more than a decade.

The irony is that this funding scarcity in part drives what is probably Atlanta’s most familiar and richest public art program: our murals. Every sector, every market, every community is engaged in coloring the surfaces of our city. As designers of the built environment, this investment in placemaking has special interest, because the muralist’s (and street artist’s) canvas is also ours. 

In our next post, we’ll visit some Atlanta places where art and the built environment meet and get into the state of the city’s mural scene. For now, we leave you with the image of one of the highlights from the Creative Placemaking Summit, a historic performance organized especially for the conference and which just so happened to take place at one of the city’s most iconic places. 

Around 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 7, the Spelman Glee Club, directed by Dr. Kevin Johnson, filed into the elevated sidewalk on each side of the Krog Street Tunnel to perform Resurgens Requiem: History, Heritage, Harmony for the hundred-some conference participants and curious BeltLiners who gathered in the lanes below, which were temporarily closed to cars. We won’t soon forget their renditions of “Wade in the Water” and “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord,” echoing through the tunnel, resonating with the traffic, harmonizing with the graffiti, making strangers into neighbors.

What is the state of public art in Atlanta? A better question might be what is the power of public art in Atlanta?

Featured image illustration by Julio Brenes.

This is sponsored content.