The ends and means of public art making: A case study of 'public art' and 'art in public' in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan regio

The subject of public art has been prolifically but narrowly discussed in conjunction with controversies over particular public artworks. To investigate more broadly the complex aesthetic, institutional, social and political dimensions of public art, I examine a pluralistic landscape comprising nine arts organizations in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan region. A neo-Marxist framework defined by David Harvey organizes the case findings into four topics: material practices or public art outcomes; beliefs, values and desires; institutions and their rituals; and power and social relations.;I capture the differences among the arts organizations by portraying them as metaphorically inhabiting unique spaces in the landscape: communitarians inhabit the space of place-making art; environmentalists---of activist art; public agents---of institutional art; and globalists, elitists, modernists, and localists---of movers and shakers. I argue that if regions and cities want to have diversified public art landscapes, they must sow and nurture diverse agencies, organizations, and actors to produce art through a variety of processes.;Information was gathered through interviews and e-mail exchanges with artworld professionals, grassroots activists, and artists; and through a review of policy documents, brochures, catalogues, slides, websites, and press releases and reports. The respondents identified three distinct manifestations of public art: community art, art in public, and public art, as further analyzed through an institutional and activist lens. The respondents were more collaborative in practice than their rhetoric of divergent beliefs and practices might have suggested. They also revealed commonalities characteristic of Portland's civic culture in general, notably, an appreciation of place-making and of the need to deal with tensions between urbanism and environmentalism. There were also negative impacts of the art culture, notably, limiting of creativity through aesthetic conservatism and maintaining a "comfortable" environment at the expense of "edge.".;I shift the public art discourse from a modernist polemic about success and failure in achieving ends, toward a postmodernist discussion of means and of landscapes of material production. Building on Tom Finkelpearl's approach to "dialogues in public art," I describe not only the processes of art production by diverse actors, but also the landscapes these actors and processes ultimately produced.