ABSTRACT
Public art began in the United States in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love in San Francisco, when the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) instituted a fund for the commissioning of art in public places. The first commission was for a sculpture by Alexander Calder in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In an unrelated history, 1967 was the year of the first black-power wall paintings in Chicago, and of mass protest against the US war in Vietnam. Hippies followed the overland route to India while young people across North America dropped out and turned on, and the women’s movement introduced the idea that the personal is political. In these days of liberation, Herbert Marcuse lectured at the Free University in Berlin, the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London’s Roundhouse, and the Conversations on Humanism in Salzburg. In New York and London small galleries proliferated during a boom in the market for contemporary art. In 1967, too, I began a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art, London. I smoked herbal tobacco in a cherry-wood pipe and wore orange beads and lilac and green chiffon scarves. I remain grateful for the optimism of that era but it was not until the mid-1980s, teaching art history in a provincial art school, that I heard about public art as a specialist area of graduate employment, and began to research it.
