My assignment - to present 50 projects from the last 50 years for 50 minutes at lunch on Sunday at the Convention - has been a fascinating way to put my own career and observations about public art in perspective. I entered the field making flags for the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, visiting Art on the Beach and working for the Public Art Fund while Agnes Denes was planting wheat in the Battery Park landfill. When I started at NYC Percent for Art in 1983, Tilted Arch was recently installed downtown and the selections of artists for the Battery Park City design teams were just getting off the ground in a trailer onsite.  Now there are fabulous books and websites that document the accomplishments of programs throughout the country.

I am pursuing multiple strands of research to identify these 50 projects. I started by making a list of the projects that are meaningful to me.  Then a made a list of “significant” artists who shaped the field over the last 5 decades who might be on a “who’s who list”. Then made another list of controversial, ground-shifting projects. But the most interesting prong of my research has been my very informal poll: asking people to identify 3 personally pivotal public artworks. This has been an excellent way to tease out projects that have a lot of staying power as well as more immediate and recently exciting ones.  There are surprises, such as David Hammond's Snow Balls, that go beyond what might be the public art cannon, that make me realize how elasticity and vitality of public art. They won’t all make it into the top 50, but lets hope they mix it up.

I would like to invite everyone to share their 3 personally pivotal projects with me, either here, or via email at [email protected].