The Best Public Art of 2024, According to Curators

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. The art and design fabrication company UAP has revealed its annual list of the standout public art projects of 2024, in partnership with internationally recognized curators.

The 2024 projects were selected by Felicity Fenner, chair of the City of Sydney’s public art advisory panel; Joanna Warsza, city curator of Hamburg; Justine Ludwig, executive director of Creative Time; Marina Reyes Franco, curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC); and Sebastian Betancur-Montoya, senior project specialist for public art at Qatar Museums.

According to Natasha Smith, the curatorial director of UAP, “This year’s list of nominated artworks packs a political punch—a trend that continues from recent years.” She highlighted global warming and human relationships with nature as topics that have preoccupied artists this year, and highlighted a rise in mosaic as a medium for public artworks.

“It is an eclectic and fabulous lineup for 2024, as selected by our esteemed contributing curators,” Smith continued. “The work encourages timely discourses and inspires us to engage in this important field of public art.’’

Mikala Dwyer, Continuum

Sydney, Australia

The recently completed Sydney Metro foregrounds public art, with a different artist commissioned for each newly built or upgraded station. Mikala Dwyer was commissioned by TfNSW to create installations spanning two entrances at Martin Place metro station. 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 colored 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. 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.

—Felicity Fenner

Callum Morton, In Through the Out Door

Sydney, Australia

Melbourne artist Callum Morton, who has an abiding interest in modernist architecture, savored 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, 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 central business district or harborside. Curated by Barbara Flynn, the mosaics respond to iconic Sydney patterns and colors such as the 19th-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.

—Felicity Fenner

Diana Lelonek, Trzcinowiska (Reed Field)

Warsaw, Poland

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, organized by Fundacja Witryna and curated by Agnieszka Sural. Next to nourishing the local plants and animals, it also commemorates the Jewish Kibbutz. The core protagonist of the piece is a wetland reed called Phragmites australis. In previous centuries, it was cultivated in kibbutzim, serving humans by producing gardening mats while performing its natural function of storing water. At the same time, it has become a refuge for birds, frogs, and insects. The traces of mats made from that reed can be found in the ceilings and walls of Grochów buildings. Reed Field is both simple and complex in how it combines the challenges of the climate crises with the burden of the memory politics with consequences of which we live today. It weaves the past with the planetary thinking about the future of cities and all forms of co-habitation.

It is a public artwork that is planetary, tuning in with the changing seasons, overcoming mere representation, and testing various forms of human and non-human coexistence; it is participatory without pressure. And it simply makes the world a bit better place.

—Joanna Warsza

Ingela Ihrman, First Came the Ocean

Val Gardena, Italy

In one of the valleys in the Dolomites, Val Gardena, the local, self-initiated Biennale Gherdëina has been operating for 20 years, relating contemporary art to that majestic landscape and often to questions of environmental justice. At this Biennale, curated by Lorenzo Giusti with associate curator Marta Papini, 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. Encountered by both art-goers and hikers, it also had zero carbon footprint.

—Joanna Warsza

Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, Hot Dog in the City

Manhattan, New York

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 the 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.

Catron and 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.

—Justine Ludwig

Morgan Canavan, Peggy Chiang, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Lina McGinn, and Amy Yao, “HOT” at Art Lot

Brooklyn, New York

Art Lot, the ongoing outdoor contemporary art exhibition space in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, 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 just happen upon public art that changes your relationship with the city. With Art Lot, you start to see the possibilities for reclaiming space and profound and unexpected curation.

—Justine Ludwig

Iván Argote, Dinosaur

Manhattan, New York

The hyperrealistic 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. Iván 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. Argote’s Dinosaur is the fourth High Line Plinth commission.

—Marina Reyes Franco

Emmalene Blake, Hind Rajab

Dublin, Ireland

The killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab—whom 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—by Israeli forces galvanized the growing sentiment of injustice inflicted on civilians, particularly against Palestinian children. This mural in Dublin depicts a glowing Hind in black-and-white tones with a pink shirt and a crown of flowers with the colors of the Palestinian flag.

Despite a lack of political action from most world governments, the actions of artists such as Emmalene Blake—who has painted several murals in honor of other victims, such as slain Gazan journalists—reflect the power of public art to memorialize and express the popular sentiments of our times.

—Marina Reyes Franco

Rashid Johnson, Village of the Sun

Doha, Qatar

Rashid Johnson’s colorful mosaic-clad surfaces operate between drawing, painting, and sculpture, portraying forms neither fully figurative nor abstract, but legible as human. Commissioned by Qatar Museums’s Public Art program, Johnson’s Village of the Sun consists of four 24-meter-long walls in an orthogonal array that create four quarters and converge into a central space. Each quarter is contained on one side by a grid of dozens of stacked and aligned faces.

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. 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 running sitting bench at their footings—both welcome gestures in the scorching summer months of Doha.

Stemming from Johnson’s own gallery works, these figures are linked to his self-portraying “Anxious Men” series. 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.

—Sebastian Betancur-Montoya

Hilary Jack, Deluge (edition)

London, England

Hilary Jack’s Deluge, a 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 is 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.

Currently installed in London’s business district, the 2024 version of the work (part of the Sculpture in the City program) 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.

—Sebastian Betancur-Montoya

Lindy Lee, Ouroboros

Canberra, Australia

Lindy Lee is an Australian Chinese contemporary female artist with a practice spanning more than four decades. Born in Brisbane/Meanjin, 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.

Ouroboros 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 (abstractly) 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 wondrous themes and more encircle this timeless and accessible work with a creative energy that is palpable and thrilling to physically experience. All 13 tons of its recycled and reclaimed stainless steel were formed, cast, welded, and cut by many talented hands under the direction of Lee’s all-seeing creative eye.

—Natasha Smith

Tina Havelock Stevens, Sonic Luminescence

Sydney, Australia