Name: Outdoor Art Turning Public Spaces Into Open Air Museums
Uploaded: 2026-02-13T17:19:48.000Z
Duration: 14 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

The art world is often seen as exclusive, even elitist.

And so what happens when art steps outside and creativity claims the streets?

Because it's important, because it's beautiful, because it's powerful.

In the last century now, public art has started engaging with the city.

And not only with the city, but with the landscape.

So I like to think of public art right now as an artistic presence that can take any shape or form.

Typically subversive in nature, modern graffiti spread across the world from 1960s America and is often rejected as vandalism.

But the work of some artists, artists like the anonymous yet world famous Banksy, has blurred the lines between high art and street art.

His spray painted stenciled works are highly valued and stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the world's most opulent commissioned sculptures, posing questions around the purpose of public art and its role in society.

Since 2002, Israel has built a barrier wall through and around the west bank separating communities from each other and unwittingly creating a canvas for street artists from across the globe.

Once used to project power and ideology, it now takes many forms.

Anish Kapoor's sky mirrors manipulate reflections and force people to confront their place within the vast universe.

AI Weiwei's Forever Bicycle installations spark conversations on freedom and society.

And Shahzad Dawood's Playground playfully invites the question, is it art or just something to climb?

How do you introduce wonder into the everyday?

And if that just puts a smile on someone's face, that's great.

What always excited me was, was the democracy of public art.

It's available and accessible to everyone and they make it their own.

But you also have the absolute democratic right to walk on by.

One of the through lines of my work is a real interest in architecture from the modernist period in non Western locations, because you had all these newly independent countries starting to imagine their own identity through the built environment.

And I feel like not enough has been done or explored of that period.

Each of these buildings, as it went up, actually expanded the ambition, the optimism that people felt.

You've got a range of nationalities coming in.

You've got Lebanese architects, you've got American architects, you've got British architects, you've got Iraqi architects.

It presents a potential to actually be in collaborative and collegiate dialogue.

Humanity is a puzzle in which everyone plays a part and a really important role.

So it's creating almost a sort of non hierarchical approach to place, to play.

You know, these are things that we can all respond to.

Doha is quite unique in being quite ambitious and visionary in terms of how they think about public art.

You know, it's really trying to see the city as a sort of blank canvas where you can consistently create moments of wonder and points where you can stop and dream in a way that few other cities can compete with.

What was really exciting about the opportunity that the playground presented in Doha was we spent a long time trying to find the right location for it.

From three of them, kids, while playing on them, have sight lines to the buildings they reference.

The Almastra park is just next door to the National Theatre.

And you have this National Theatre which has tunnels and from the balcony you can see right over to the National Theatre swinging on the swings.

On the Doha Sheraton inspired play object, you can see the Doha Sheraton in the distance at the end of the Corniche.

The scale of the play objects in the playground relative to a child are roughly in correlation with the scale of the actual buildings in relation to an adult.

So it was this idea of creating a miniature city for kids that they could inhabit.

It wasn't just this is a slide, you know, this is a climbing wall.

But no, this becomes our city, which is a map of the larger city.

One of the most exciting things is that although my title for it as an artwork is Doha Modern Playground, it's actually been renamed, you know, the Monument Playground.

That's now become the name on Google Maps.

I love the fact that people have made it their own to feel that it's theirs.

I remember a really beautiful experience I had with one of my very favorite pieces.

It's Salvarada Shuquer's Bench, which is installed beautifully looking at the sea.

She was a Lebanese artist who lived to be 101 years old.

And she worked until the very last minute.

The day she passed away, I felt the urge to visit her work, specifically this one, because it's public and it's something I'm fond of and stumble upon other people who I guess had a similar feeling and a similar need.

And we all sat there in silence for a reason.

That's a very beautiful memory I have of an interaction with the public artwork, how the artwork was way more than what it was supposed to be, just a bench.

Where a lot of people get it wrong, is that art making is not just an act of generosity on the part of the artist.

It's an act of generosity on the part of your audiences.

Public art, in my mind, should be artwork that you can just stumble on.

In my public artwork, it's the one area where I've had assistants help me.

Sometimes people just walking by like, well, why don't you come and help us and take a brush and start painting.

Social practice is a relatively new mode of art making where the art is actually in the engagement with other people.

The nature of public art breaks down these dichotomies that we've created over hundreds of years.

I mean, we use this word post colonial a lot.

There are some artists that have taken it to that next level where they've examined their identity, their now trying to communicate some ideas with the world about breaking down stereotypes, about challenging assumptions of the west, which we all know need challenging.

Yomi and shufhalabsa al batol al Qatariya adarams municipally.