Discussion | Ethics in Public Art (In Person AND Online)

Artists and activists debate the intersections between public art and issues of equity, representation, social justice, and beyond. What are the impacts, positive and negative, that public art can have on the built environment? Drawing on their personal experiences and work, Laurie Anderson, Firelei Báez, Walter Hood, and Justin Garrett Moore explore the thorny issues surrounding the decision-making process of civic projects and the motivations that lie behind public art and monuments. What happens when artistic and creative concerns clash with commercial and political ones? How should social justice and equity be addressed through aesthetics? And how can public art best be used to strengthen and uplift communities?

About the Speakers
Laurie Anderson is a writer, director, composer, visual artist, musician, and vocalist who has created groundbreaking works that span the worlds of art, theater, experimental music, and technology. Anderson has published 10 books and been nominated for five Grammys throughout her recording career with Warner Records and Nonesuch. Her album Landfall, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, received a Grammy award in 2018. Anderson had created numerous audio-visual installations as well as films such as Home of the Brave (1986), Carmen (1992), and Hidden Inside Mountains (2005). Her film Heart of a Dog (2015) was chosen as an official selection of the 2015 Venice and Toronto Film Festivals.

The New York–based artist Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, reworking visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, Báez traces her concerns with the politics of place and heritage back to her upbringing on the border between the island of Hispaniola’s two neighboring countries, whose long-standing tensions are predicated in large part on ethnic difference. In exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that span from hair textures to textile patterns, plant life, folkloric and literary references, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance. Often featuring strong female protagonists, her paintings incorporate the visual languages of regionally specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy to envision identities as unfixed and inherited narratives as perpetually evolving.

Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is a cultural practice, working across art, fabrication, design, landscape, research and urbanism. Hood creates urban spaces that resonate with and enrich the lives of current residents while also honoring communal histories. Hood melds architectural and fine arts expertise with a commitment to designing ecologically sustainable public spaces that empower marginalized communities. Over his career, he has transformed traffic islands, vacant lots, and freeway underpasses into spaces that challenge the legacy of neglect of urban neighborhoods. Through engagement with community members, he teases out the natural and social histories as well as current residents’ shared patterns and practices of use and aspirations for a place.

Justin Garrett Moore is the inaugural program officer for the Humanities in Place program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. With over 15 years of public service with the City of New York, Moore has led several urban design and planning projects. From 2016 to 2020, he was the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission. His work spanned housing and community development, place and open space design, historic preservation, public art and monuments, and civic engagement. In 2021, Moore received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture and was named to the United States Commission of Fine Arts by President Joseph Biden.