How can public art be made more sustainable? This collaboration among the Centre for Sustainable Curating, the Synthetic Collective, the Institute for Public Art and Sustainability (IPAS) at Evergreen Brick Works, and The Bentway took place in the warm spring of 2023, and coalesced around a series of conversations with architects, public art commissioners, conservators, artists, curators, and arts managers, leading to in-depth discussion of what sustainability means for public art. The conversations led to this initial list of best practices and an idea that sustainable public art reflects and nourishes the communities that live with it, causing no harm in its making or presence.
Public art responds and also is responsive to its environs. Temporary or permanent, it is connected to land, air, water, and community. Sometimes it is welcomed for its ability to create place for community. Other times it is deeply critiqued. Public art can be a signal of displacement, upholding developer agendas and, in the words of the artist and activist Judith Baca, providing “something beautiful to stand in for the loss of public space.” In considering public artworks, the colonial histories of the land must be acknowledged. Sustainability must consider all of these elements, with the understanding that public art is many things: a memory made static, a beautiful stand in, possibly a rock where it already is.
This Public (Art) Notice opens a conversation and shares an initial list of best practices in order to encourage sustainable approaches to the making of public art.
Sustainable choices aren’t always clear. Sharing knowledge is key.
Often, public art is defined as permanent and unchanging. We resist this notion. Increasingly, public art works are temporary or performative. But even monuments and statues are always changing due to exposure to unpredictable weather, as well as the whims of passersby, pets, salt trucks, construction, graffiti, and relentless processes of chemical and physical degradation. Public art works are never static. They disperse, rust, break, crack, and degrade.
Read more about the project and download A Public (Art) Notice here:
Kirsty Robertson 
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