American art in public spaces, not surprisingly has been dominated by memorials of war and politics—generals, presidents or obelisks and sorrowful figures recalling the fallen.

Washington, DC, for example, takes on trappings of a mausoleum in the monumental neo-classical structures on and around the mall commemorating Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson, as well as statues of state heroes huddled in the Capitol. Additional space on the mall has been found for recognition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a controversial Vietnam memorial by Maya Lin. At a local scale, public art dominates busy crossroads and provides aesthetic/historical touches to squares, parks, cemeteries and gardens.

While generally planned as monuments to shared history beliefs and sentiments, public art can also prove divisive. Civil-War monuments to the Confederate dead in the South have become controversial since the civil-rights era. A proposal to add a statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe to Richmond’s all-white Monument Avenue brought protests from both conservative whites and the Ashe family Political memorials in urban statuary or renamings also rekindle controversies and enmities. Overall, an inherited bias towards white males in memorialization (and choice of artists) also reifies divisions of rights to history that have been challenged since the 1960s.

The presence and meaning of public art in the early twenty-first century is also linked to special programs for public support of the arts, primarily for art initiatives established by cities and states nationwide (ranging from 0.5 to 2 percent) since the 1970s. The National Endowment for the Arts also has sponsored public-arts programs. These initiatives have forced and cajoled government projects as well as private developers to set aside moneys to pose new works in new public spaces, whether administrative offices, entrance plazas, hospitals or airports. Again, this has not been without controversy— Richard Serra’s abstract curve Tilted Arc, in front of the Federal Plaza in New York, was removed in 1989 after complaints about its impact on the space.

Public art also has become associated with urban regeneration and revitalization. But some have argued that while its presence may be public, even the possibilities of interpretation of postmodern forms create stratification in appreciation and responses to the work. Surveillance and campaigns against vandalism also betray multiple visions of monuments and spaces around them within complex urban fabrics. Arts in “controlled” public spaces, moreover, point out that malls and other public forums have private owners and rules of access and use. Urban murals, while widespread in programs for neighborhood beautification, also have been decried as markers of urban decay that simultaneously mask and call attention to abandonment. If art is the mirror of the soul, public art reflects both visions and divisions of American community.