Public Art Highlights for 2024

UAP is proud to present this year's best public art showcase which celebrates remarkable achievements in the field. This year has been marked by visionary projects that push boundaries, foster meaningful engagement with the public, amplify diverse voices and unite communities. Through the transformative power of public art, these works have inspired connection, dialogue and a more profound sense of belonging.

UAP's Director Curatorial, Natasha Smith, and Principal Senior Curator, Danielle Robson, have collaborated with a distinguished group of internationally acclaimed curators to highlight the most exceptional public art projects of 2024. This year's contributing curators include Felicity Fenner, Chair of the City of Sydney’s Public Art Advisory Panel, writer and renowned academic; Joanna Warsza, City Curator of Hamburg, writer, editor, and educator; Justine Ludwig, Executive Director of Creative Time, celebrated curator, and writer; Marina Reyes Franco, curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC); and Sebastian Betancur-Montoya, a seasoned Landscape Architect, Public Art Consultant, and Senior Project Specialist (Public Art) at Qatar Museums. Together, this team brings unparalleled expertise and insight to this year’s reflection on the transformative power of public art.

According to Natasha Smith, “This year’s list of nominated artworks packs a political punch – a trend that continues from recent years. Global warming is front and centre, with Hilary Jack’s 2024 edition of Deluge for the City of London, which layers ancient and biblical flood narratives with current global flood data. Emmalene Blake’s street-art mural is also profoundly dedicated to Hind Rajab, a young victim of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, who is not to be forgotten. Nature and our position within it is to be inspected in the playful Dinosaur by Iván Argote, featuring a colossal hyper-real pigeon on the New York High Line Plinth, looking down and bearing witness to us all. There is beauty to behold in Lindy Lee’s incredible Ouroboros which speaks to the cosmos and envelops us in light and life, with over 13 tons of recycled highly polished and perforated stainless steel atop a pool of water in Canberra, outside the National Gallery of Australia. A clear trend emerges in the return of the ancient art of mosaic, with three nominations featuring this beautiful medium reimagined, including tiled works by Mikala Dwyer and Callum Morton in Sydney, Australia and Rashid Johnson, in Doha, Qatar. There is also fun, with the likes of Hot Dog in the City, by Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, featuring a 65-foot sculpture of a hot dog which shot confetti into the air every day at noon during its installation in New York City’s Times Square, between April and June 2024. It is an eclectic and fabulous line-up for 2024, as selected by our esteemed contributing curators. The work encourages timely discourses and inspires us to engage in this important field of public art.’’

Felicity Fenner

• Mikala Dwyer (b. and l. Sydney, Australia) | Continuum, 2024

The development of new transport infrastructure is an increasingly important catalyst for well-funded art in public spaces. The recently completed Sydney Metro Art (2024) foregrounds public art, with a different artist commissioned for each newly built or upgraded station. According to Transport for NSW (TfNSW) Sydney Metro public art program manager Kati Westlake, “Sydney Metro has placed an emphasis on public art as an important component of placemaking: the new artworks, by a range of very talented artists, stand out as bold features helping to make each station instantly recognisable”.

The largest art offering is at the new Martin Place metro station, where artworks were commissioned both by Sydney Metro and Macquarie Group, developer of the site.

Mikala Dwyer was commissioned by TfNSW to create installations spanning the northern entrance to the station at Hunter Street and the southern entrance on Castlereagh Street. Conceived as a single work yet fabricated with very diverse materials, the three components, collectively titled Continuum, are connected by their geometric forms drawn from classical and hypothetical mathematics.

A jewel-like, reflective Möbius strip hovers like a spacecraft above the Hunter Street entrance, highly visible from the street outside. An infinite form made from highly polished stainless steel, it echoes the continual movement of people, and the city, reflected on its surface. At the southern entrance, a brightly coloured mosaic created from custom-made ceramic tiles is embedded into the architecture. The choice of material pays homage to the history of mosaics in subway stations, while its geometric shapes embody those of escalators, tracks and train networks. Linking the composition to the street entrance, a suspended mobile comprising a straight line, crescent moon, sphere and cube activates the mural in three dimensions.

Art has a big role to play in terms of how people feel a connection through recognition, and even a sense of belonging to places such as transport hubs that are frequented regularly, merging into the fabric of everyday experience. Dwyer’s Continuum deftly captures the cyclical movement of people and train lines, evoking concepts of the past, present and future as it connects north and south, form and function.

• Callum Morton (b. Montreal, Canada l. Melbourne, Australia) | In Through the Out Door, 2024 

Melbourne artist Callum Morton, who has an abiding interest in modernist architecture, savoured the opportunity to reimagine the back entrances of city buildings lining two hidden laneways in central Sydney. Thoroughly integrated despite being installed decades after the buildings’ completion, In Through the Out Door is a series of three mosaics that bring a sense of fun and wonder to these narrow back streets.

Usually frequented by office workers on smoko, cleaners putting out the bins in the morning and rough sleepers at night, the project serves to entice pedestrians on their way from Town Hall to the northern CBD or harbourside. Curated by Barbara Flynn, the form and compositions of the mosaics respond to iconic Sydney patterns and colours such as the 19###sup/sup### century tiled floor of the nearby Queen Victoria Building, Sol LeWitt’s foyer mural in Harry Seidler’s Australia Square, the tile patterns of the Opera House shells, and the crown sitting above the Luna Park entrance.

Transforming the laneways from peripheral transitory spaces to immersive works of art, Morton has elevated service and exit doorways to site-specific portals of curiosity. Additionally, the project establishes a dialogue between iconic patterning found elsewhere in the city, brought together here in celebration of previously non-descript spaces.

Joanna Warsza 

• Diana Lelonek (b. Katowice, Poland l. Warsaw, Poland) | Trzcinowiska (Reed Field), 2024  

Rain gardens or fields, also called bioretention areas, are used for storage and infiltration of rainwater. One such rain garden, located in the Warsaw-Grochów district, is also a new public artwork by Diana Lelonek. Next to nourishing the local plants and animals, it also commemorates the Jewish Kibbutz community. The core protagonist of the piece is a wetland reed called Phragmites australis. In the previous centuries, it has been cultivated in Kibbtuz, serving humans to produce gardening mats while performing its natural function of storing water. At the same time, it has become a refuge for birds, frogs and insects. Still today the traces of mats made from that reed can be found in the ceilings and walls of Grochów buildings.

The piece Reed Field is both simple and complex in how it combines the challenges of the climate crises with the burden of the memory politics, the consequences of which we face today. It weaves the past with the planetary, thinking about the future of cities and all forms of co-habitation. Through the history of local reeds, it speaks volumes about some of the most charged topics of our times: the story of the marginalisation of humans and non-humans, of willful and forced displacement both from Eastern Europe and, in consequence from Palestine, the Kibbutzim, the transnationalism, the antisemitism, and the larger picture of the climate crises. It is public art that is planetary, tuning in with the changing seasons, overcoming the mere representation, and testing various forms of human and non-human co-existence. It is participatory without pressure, and it simply makes the world a bit better place.

• Ingela Ihrman (b. Kalmar, Sweden l. Stockholm Malmö, Sweden) | First Came the Ocean, 2024 

Hiking in the Dolomites in the North of Italy, one can feel like walking on the bottom of the ocean. It is because the huge, whitish pinnacles, spires and towers were once enormous coral reefs, formed in the primordial ocean called Tethys, into atolls and volcanos. In one of the Dolomites valleys, Val Gardenia, sits a local, self-initiated Biennale Gherdëina which has been operating for 20 years, relating contemporary art to that majestic landscape and often to the questions of environmental justice. It is one of the slopes where I encountered Ingela Ihrman's installation First Came to the Ocean, an enormous skeleton of some marine creature – a possible inhabitant of that area from 150 million years ago. The bones of the being were made up of trunks and branches of local trees, which suffered from the current bark beetle epidemic and had fallen in the storms. Ihrman found a language in which a public sculpture bridges the ancient seabed with our ecological concerns today, the marine fossils with the trees suffering from epidemics, the Alps with the coral reefs, the life and the non-life. It is an installation that empathically relates to the circularity of the Earth and its ecosystems and uses what is there, which builds a bond between humans and non-humans, opening up “the new horizons on what it means to be alive.” Encountered by both art goers and the hikers, it also strikes by its materiality, since it produced zero carbon footprint.

Justine Ludwig 

• Jen Catrone (b. Bluford, Illinois, USA | l. Brooklyn, NY, USA) and Paul Outlaw (b. Fairhope, Alabama, USA | l. Brooklyn, NY, USA) | Hot Dog in the City, 2024 

Hot Dog in the City is high camp and absolutely delicious. Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw have a knack of bringing to life ambitious installations ripe with poignant humor. This work, located in the middle of Times Square, perfectly contends with site—a rare instance of an installation that simultaneously fits the environment perfectly and is audacious enough to stand out. The project felt so perfectly New York and so perfectly Times Square. We all need a little levity, and this project brought so much joy especially partnered with thoughtful, and often funny, public programming. Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw’s Hot Dog in the City was a program by Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, which collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places.

• Morgan Canavan (b. and l. Los Angeles, California, USA), Peggy Chiang (b. San Francisco, California, USA | l. Baltimore, Maryland, USA | l.and Brunswick, New Jersey, USA), Sophie Friedman-Pappas (b. New York, New York, USA | l. Los Angeles, California, USA and New York, New York, USA), Lina McGinn (b. and l. Brooklyn, New York, USA) and Amy Yao (b. Los Angeles, California, USA | l. Los Angeles, California, USA and New York, New York, USA) | HOT at Art Lot, 2024 

Art Lot, the ongoing outdoor contemporary art exhibition space is such a gem and a consistent art highlight for me. The exhibition HOT featured Morgan Canavan, Peggy Chiang, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Lina McGinn and Amy Yao. Rooted in themes tied to heat and volatility, it felt perfectly poised for the fall of 2024 as we contended with unseasonable warmth and an incendiary election. HOT was a subtle and surreal intervention in the exhibition lot. Works appeared to melt, it was evocative and beautiful. All the projects at Art Lot bring a profound self-awareness of space. It is a magical thing to happen upon public art that changes your relationship with the city. With Art Lot you start to see the possibilities for reclaiming space, and for profound and unexpected curation.

Marina Reyes Franco 

• Iván Argote (b. Bogotá, Colombia | l. Bogotá, Colombia and Paris, France) | Dinosaur, 2024 

The hyper realistic sculpture depicts a common city animal, the pigeon. A ubiquitous sight, pigeons evolved from dinosaurs and later became dependent on humans for most of their food. From essential workers as carrier pigeons or food staples themselves, the animal is now commonly viewed as a city pest by many historically unconscious citizens. Argote’s hand-painted pigeon is ennobled by its height and position on a plinth on the High Line as if lording over New York City. However, the uncanny image also brings to mind the inevitable decline of our standing as humans dominating the planet. Iván Argote’s Dinosaur is the fourth High Line Plinth commission.

• Emmalene Blake (b. and l. Dublin, Ireland) | Hind Rajab, 2024 

I decided to pick this mural as a symbol of all the public art, murals and poster campaigns that have emerged worldwide as a result of solidarity with the Palestinian people and against the genocide in Gaza. The killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab by Israeli forces, who millions got to hear desperately plead for her life on a call with first responders as she was trapped in a car surrounded by six dead relatives, galvanised the growing sentiment of injustice inflicted on civilians, particularly against Palestinian children. The mural depicts a glowing Hind in black and white tones with a pink shirt and a crown of flowers with the colours of the Palestinian flag. Despite a lack of political action from most world governments, the actions of artists such as Emmalene Blake in Dublin, who has painted several murals in honour of other victims, such as slain Gazan journalists, reflect the power of public art to memorialise and express the popular sentiments of our times.

Sebastian Betancur-Montoya 

• Rashid Johnson (b. Chicago, Illinois, USA | l. Brookyln, New York, USA) | Village of the Sun, 2024 

I am drawn to observe the ways in which the individuals and the surrounding communities interact with public art interventions, and the layers of meaning and even myths built around them; often these drift away from the artist’s intentions or, in some cases, unintentionally amplify and elevate the principles the artist stands for. Usually, this is only proven with the test of time; yet Rashid Johnson’s assemblage of mosaic-clad walls has instantly woven itself into the social fabric of the site and connected in physical and emotional ways to its audience. At the same time workers rushed to remove construction hoarding and lay turf for next morning’s unveiling ceremony, parkgoers gravitated towards the wall’s shade with folding chairs and books, kids bounced a football against the mosaic, and friends sipped chai leaning on the figures as if the installation had always been there, making it worthy of being recorded as one of the most powerful public artworks of 2024, short of a month after its unveiling.

Commissioned by Qatar Museums’ Public Art program and consisting of four 24 meter long walls in an orthogonal array that creates four quarters and converges into a central space, the colorful mosaic-clad surfaces ambiguously operate in-between drawing, painting, and sculpture, portraying forms neither fully figurative nor abstract but legible as human. Each quarter is contained on one side by a grid of dozens of stacked and aligned faces, and on the other by a shoulder-to-shoulder formation of standing characters.

Initially intended for a soccer stadium, the piece was then modified for a suburban roundabout, and finally migrated and reconfigured for a large lawn surrounded by populous housing blocks. The success of this siting is a valuable opportunity for transparent discussion about the complex mechanics at play on the public realm such as technical limitations, bureaucracy, stakeholder interests, and even chance; as well as to challenge over-emphasized discourses around ‘site-specificity’, instead highlighting the merit of a symbiotic and fluid discussion between artist studios, curators, funding institutions, locals, fabricators, and all parties involved in city decision-making.

Although this is Johnson’s largest permanent public work to date, it eludes monumentality. In an act of sculptural generosity, a value often pursued by the artist, the spreading surfaces cast oblong shadows over a public lawn and offer a sitting bench at their footings, both welcomed gestures in the scorching summer months of Doha. Stemming from his own gallery works, these figures linked to the self-portraying Anxious Men series take on a collective meaning cited in this context, a wide-open lawn surrounded by dense neighborhoods of families and bachelors from all across South and South-East Asia, the vibrant mosaic against the characteristic beige monotone of this desert city, allows the communities around it to identify themselves on the ageless, genderless, raceless, and colorful forms that seem to express tension, anxieties, and longing but also stand proud, loud, and seen.

• Hilary Jack (b. and l. Salford, UK) | Deluge (edition), 2024  

50+ years after the coinage of' ’site specificity’ the concept has become dull at the edges, yet it is often a virtue demanded as a sine qua non for public artworks. Hilary Jack’s Deluge challenges such purist notion, not without being radically specific while also allowing for meaningful connections with different sites.

This digital light work bridges ancient text scrolls and newsreel scrolling texts. A top line displays contemporary record-breaking flooding data extracted from media outlets, while the line below quotes age-old religious and folkloric flood narratives across different times and geographies. The red LEDs news line nods to a sense of emergency and it’s updated to reflect the urgency of ongoing weather emergencies, while the ancient texts remain unchanged reflecting on the universality of fear and prophetical myths of destruction and rebirth.

Originally commissioned by Meadow Art in 2023 and re-installed in 2024 for London’s Sculpture in the City program, Deluge has, in its various iterations evolved its meaning-making means by updating and tailoring its climate contents. Hyperlocal at its inception, it responded to surrounding neighborhoods, regional flood statistics, and the flood defense civil infrastructure it was mounted on. Currently installed in London’s business district, the 2024 work was fed recent global weather events data engaging the audience in a multilayered discourse. The work tackles disastrous cases the world over, while also pointing fingers at the neighboring headquarters of financial institutions, insurance brokers, and the corporate structures upholding the fossil fuel apparatus; its proximity with the River Thames and its increasingly recurrent overflows, the recent floods in Valencia, Spain, and the area becoming a site of protest by the environmental activist groups Extinction Rebellion and Green Peace, shifted the narrative from the consequences of climate change being a Global South issue to a tangible and urgent reality on the artwork’s immediate context.

Deluge suggests that the impact of public art is not singlehandedly in the artist, the commissioner, or the curator’s intentions; it is often a combination of their alignment and an awareness of the moment and place [context] it exists in, and it rather acknowledges the agency of the audience as a collective who most powerfully can expand or re-signify the ethics and aesthetics of a public artwork.

Natasha Smith 

• Lindy Lee (b. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia | l. Northern Rivers, New South Wales, Australia) | Ouroboros, 2024 

Lindy Lee’s Ouroboros opened to the public with much anticipation and swirling press statements at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra on the 24th of October this year, marking the gallery’s 40th anniversary.

Lee is an Chinese Australian contemporary female artist with a practice spanning more than four decades. Meanjin/Brisbane-born, Lee uses her work to explore her cultural ancestry through Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism — philosophies that see humanity and nature as inextricably linked.

The work creates an infinite visual cycle of movement, light and permeability in space as it seemingly floats on a body of water. Emanating light by night and reflecting life by day, the intriguing sculpture physically represents the ancient symbol of the serpent devouring itself. Universally symbolic and multicultural in its many references, the work speaks to us of fundamental life cycles.

Water, metal, fire, light, cosmos, death and renewal – all these wonderous themes and more encircle this timeless and accessible work with a creative energy that is palpable and thrilling to physically experience. As a visitor you can walk around it and admire it from afar or you can take a step onto the water body by way of a subtle semi-submerged walkway, traversing the water to the mouth of the ‘dragon’, entering the sculpture to be surrounded by Lee’s artistic vision of cosmos.

I was fortunate to see this work born from concept to creation at UAP’s foundry in Brisbane where I work. All 13 tonnes of its recycled and reclaimed stainless steel were formed, cast, welded and cut by many talented hands under the direction of Lindy’s all-seeing creative eye. Every step of the work’s creation was a labour of love and creative outpouring, and it is a testament to the incredible NGA team and its supporters, to see such an ambitious and beautifully crafted work of such scale and vision realised and given to the public.

Ouroboros is on show 24 hours a day at the NGA sculpture garden and is free to all to visit. Lit by night, the work offers beauty and intrigue at all hours and is in my opinion a must-see!

Danielle Robson 

• Tina Havelock Stevens (b. and l. Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Melbourne) | Sonic Luminescence, 2024  

A pedestrian tunnel connecting underground transport amenities in a CBD metro station has been transformed into an astonishing place of reverence with the installation of Tina Havelock Stevens' sound and light artwork, Sonic Luminescence. Havelock Stevens is an Australian multi-disciplinary artist and musician interested in the ways that sounds inhabit place. For Sonic Luminescence, the artist undertook extensive research into the history of the site and has woven archival sound bites with contemporary musical compositions and recordings of 'nature's precolonial symphony' - the birdlife that inhabited Sydney prior to colonisation. The effect is a richly layered sound tapestry that transports commuters to a time and place beyond the tunnel walls.

Havelock Stevens invited three musicians to consider the character of the metro station: Yuwaalaraay vocalist Nardi Simpson; Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr violinist Eric Avery; and Principal Harpist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Emily Granger; alongside her own drumming contribution. Each sound recording was spontaneous and responsive, with the vocals and harp recorded deep underground in the bowels of the Metro station while the violin score was recorded in the studio as Avery watched documentation of trains. Havelock Stevens' addition was a recording of herself drumming aboard a moving steam train. By inviting First Nations musicians (Simpson and Avery) to collaborate on the work , Havelock Stevens placed narratives of Country, custodianship and care at the centre of a modern-day infrastructure project.

Commissioned as the first in a series of permanent sound and light installations for Muru Giligu (the tunnel), Sonic Luminescence heralds the formation of a new public space. What could have been left as an unmemorable public thoroughfare has been reimagined as a destination to congregate, pause, reflect and play. It is glorious, deeply thoughtful and provides a rare moment of awe to commuters who suddenly find themselves submerged in a compelling soundtrack of music and light.

To mark the ongoing celebration of excellence in public art, Public Art in Review: Volume 1 (2019–2023) has been launched. This book highlights some of the most compelling public art of its time, showcasing the dynamic partnerships between curators and artists that have resulted in urgent and inspiring works. Featured and contributing curators include Alison Kubler, Aric Chen, Brook Andrew, Casey Lesser, Dina Amin, Hedwig Fijen, Ineke Dane, Julia Friedman, Kendal Henry, Kirsten Lacy, Luise Faurschou, Manal AlDowayan, Matthew Israel, Natalie King, Nathan Pōhio, Nick Mitzevich, Nicholas Baume, Nora Lawrence, Paul Farber, Raqs Media Collective, Sarah Collicott, Tairone Bastien, Tandazani Dhlakama, Venus Lau, Xiaoyu Weng and Yang Zi, offering an engaging perspective on the evolving field of public art.

For more information and to order a copy, please see here.