What makes a creative city?
Integrating public art into city spaces has the power to change your everyday experience and leave a strong impression of a place.
From land art to digital interactive works to performances, public art projects can change a cityscape and promote creativity, reflection, and connection in the lives of the people who experience it, even in passing. These artworks, spotted by STEPS team members in creative cities near and far, inspire us with accessible art in everyday spaces. Here are some public art projects from creative cities across the globe that are inspiring the team at STEPS.
This feature is part of Fieldnotes, a public art blog series by STEPS that promotes inclusive and innovative public art through interviews, storytelling case studies, and knowledge sharing.
Participants enjoy the Musical Swings at Montreal’s Place Des Arts
Photo credit: Maude Touchette
The musical swings installation by Montreal’s “Daily Tous Les Jours Studio” is a popular creative city idea that brings a sense of play into the everyday. The swingset produces musical notes when the seats sway back and forth, allowing participants to create music collaboratively and encouraging interactions between strangers in urban space. The public art project was originally installed in Montreal as “21 Swings” and then was developed as a touring installation. In an impact study on the project, participants celebrated the playfulness and fun that the swings brought to public space and reported feeling a sense of renewed pride for their city.
2. ORCHARD by Diane Borsato (Mississauga, Ontario)
Diane Borsato discusses the Orchard public art project at a panel hosted by the Rare Charitable Research Reserve
A creative city can also use its existing natural environment in new ways. This public land artwork by Diane Borsato draws connections between art, food, and urban agricultural communities through a curated orchard of trees growing in Mississauga. Borsato chose 12 varieties of apple saplings to plant as part of the project and under the care of the City of Mississauga’s Public Art division, they have grown and produced fruit. Borsato hopes this permanent public art installation outlives her and provides shade, fruit, and connectivity for the community that surrounds it in the future.
3. Mashup Pon Di Road Circus Truck by Bahia Watson and Liza Paul (Toronto, Ontario)
Who said public art has to stay in one place? Mashup Pon Di Road is a creative city-wide show from performers Bahia Watson and Liza Paul that merges bashment and circus atmospheres to express the fun and freedom of the carnival spirit. Staged on an outdoor truck during the pandemic, the immersive performance made stops throughout Toronto. The performance uses humour to tackle heavier ideas, like the history of the circus and the work of reclaiming those spaces or, as the creators put it, “poking fun at the constraints of the patriarchy, the expectations of womanhood, and the end of the world as we know it.”
4. Roseaux by 1ToMn (Touring)
Created by 1ToMn (One Touch of Madness) in collaboration with UDO Design and Serge Maheu and co-produced by INIT, this public art project uses light and technology to safely bring people together with a playful challenge. Composed of individual reeds that rise into the sky, Roseaux invites users to activate the base of the reeds by stepping on sensors, rhythmically propelling myriad colors up the stem. Alone or in a group, the fun and exciting race begins to give the reeds a single, solid colour. Thanks to the project’s Tour Producer Creos, the ‘particip’active’ installation has been exhibited in St-Jean, Quebec City, Montréal, Green Bay, Houston and Chicago before being presented in Downtown Brampton, where it was spotted by our team.
5. Joy by Rita Letendre (Toronto, Ontario)
The Glencairn subway station in Toronto, with the Joy installation basking the escalator in orange light
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Is your daily commute missing imagination? Creative cities can spark inspiration with public art that’s integrated into infrastructure, like the transit system. This warm panel installation by artist Rita Letendre in Toronto’s Glencairn subway station brings an arc of orange light to the everyday space, using colour to affect positive change. The skylight was named after its mission to bring joy to the space and elevate the spirit of commuters.
6. Interactive light installations by Iregular (Touring)
Founded in Montreal in 2010, Iregular Studio brings digital public art projects to creative cities across the globe. Experimenting with geometry, light, sound, typography, mathematics, algorithms, communication protocols, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, their works exist at the intersection of art and technology and often bring an interactive component to public artworks.
Their recent project CONTROL NO CONTROL, exhibited in over 35 locations including Montreal’s Nuit Blanche in the winter of 2023, is a giant cube that reacts to participants’ touch and motion through light and sound, encouraging intuitive interaction. Conceived as a “socio-digital experiment”, the piece explores the back-and-forth relationship between the public and interactive public artworks.
7. Daughters of the Diaspora by Destinie Adelakun (Toronto, Ontario)
This photographic essay by Destinie Adelakun was displayed as part of Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Art Festival as a modern conceptualized take on West African mythological figures known as Orishas. Adelakun drew from West African ancestral practices, spirituality, folklore, and rituals to create visuals that a new-age diaspora can connect with, as a “call to join the quest of liberating people of the Black diaspora (which include but aren’t limited to women of colour, the LGBTQIA+ community, visible minorities, and the immigrant population).”
8. Breathing Lights by Adam Frelin (New York, USA)
Creative approaches to city space can also be used to provoke dialogue on urban issues that affect the municipality. One example is the Breathing Lights public art project which aimed to draw attention to the high level of vacancy in the Capital Region of New York and spark dialogue between community members and policymakers. Throughout the cities of Troy, Schenectady, and Albany, artist Adam Frelin, architect Barbara Nelson, and more than 90 public and private sector partners brought the windows of vacant properties to life with glowing warm lights that imitated the rhythm of breathing. The public art project started conversations between residents, community groups, anti-poverty organizations, land banks, and policymakers about the next steps for the neighbourhood.
9. Nocturne: Art At Night (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Luminous Cloud by Passage Studio exhibited at Nocturne 2019 inside the Halifax Public Gardens
Photo credit: Lindsay Ann Cory
In a creative city, art can be everywhere. Halifax’s Nocturne Festival embodies this mentality with independent, free, contemporary public artworks and programming across the city every fall. Every year, over 60,000 people enjoy the festival that brightens the streets of Halifax and Dartmouth, connects local emerging artists with business venues for public artworks, and fuels the creative scene of Nova Scotia. This year, STEPS is partnering with the Nocturne Art at Night Society (Nocturne Halifax) to support the development of a temporary public art installation as part of the CreateSpace Public Art Residency!
10. Monsters for Beauty, Performance and Individuality by DUane Linklater (Don Valley, Toronto)
Finding public art in an unexpected place can encourage us to rethink the history and use of the site. Duane Linklater, an artist who often considers the politics of the land, installed these “monsters” along the Don Valley River trail in Toronto to draw attention to the relationship between the valley’s industrial history and a feature of the city’s most recognizable buildings: concrete gargoyles. The exhibition aims to spark questions about the history of the space using gargoyles as symbols of colonial authority and industrialization. The 14 concrete sculptures are casted replicas of gargoyles on Toronto’s buildings, but when arranged as part of the natural world they can be read in a new way.
