Author: Dunbar, Nina and Whitehurst, Deborah

Publication Year: 1992

Media Type: Periodical (article)

Summary:

October 1992 Monograph (National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies) exploring a Percent-for-Art controversy involving public art in Phoenix

Abstract: The question we asked ourselves from the beginning of the Squaw Peak Mitigation Project was can public art really help mitigate the impact of a new freeway on the neighborhoods around it?ﾝ We had good reasons to wonder. To the communities living in its path, the freeway was, as artist team member Lajos Heder characterized it, as welcome as a two-ton elephant in your living room.ﾝ The team's onerous task was to turn the unwanted pachyderm into a house pet. Within weeks of the project's installation, this analogy had new meaning. If the freeway was an elephant to those living near it, the Squaw Peak project quickly became the Phoenix Arts Commission's elephant. Inflammatory local and national headlines even encouraged some in the city to argue that the project and the entire Percent-for-Art Program had become the city's beast. (p. 1)

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Public Art, Funding