Art on Location

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Art on Location is a special focus on outdoor art experiences, with news, features and archive content covering public art, sculpture parks, urban and country house sculpture shows, artist's trails, and the use of location-specific technology

Silent echoes: flame and frost meet in Bill Fontana’s latest sound installation

Artist brings together recordings made in an Austrian ice cave and on the surface of a giant historic bell at Notre-Dame de Paris

Helen Stoilas2 September 2024

Khaleb Brooks wins commission for London’s transatlantic slavery memorial

London Mayor backs new work, which will be unveiled in 2026, with £500,000 funding

Gareth Harris23 August 2024

George Rickey sculpture partially collapses outside News Corp's New York headquarters

One of the work’s two hoop-like pendulums fell off outside the Manhattan offices of the Wall Street Journal publisher

Benjamin Sutton15 August 2024

‘We want people to have fun’: Dulwich Picture Gallery’s director on the institution’s new sculpture park

The London museum has embarked on a £5m redevelopment that will see its grounds filled with contemporary sculpture and versatile family spaces

Alexander Morrison15 August 2024

I am Discosailing: Rasheed Araeen's water ballet comes to east London's outdoor sculpture trail, The Line

The artist's 1970s concept, brought to life in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, invites the public to perform as a floating sculpture moving with the wind and water

Hannah McGivern1 August 2024

Sculpture parks in the US

Arlene Shechet’s sculptures are animated through dance at Storm King sculpture park

Ritualistic performance piece by Annie-B Parson amid monumental, brightly coloured steel sculptures marks Upstate Art Weekend in New York’s Hudson Valley

Helen Stoilas28 July 2024

The US sculpture park communicating difficult truths amid a cultural backlash

In a time of increased lawsuits over diversity initiatives, a civil rights organisation aims to make the history and legacy of slavery in the US undeniable through art and first-person narratives

Julia Halperin17 May 2024

From the archive | 'Trying to tap into the memory of the place'—as Storm King turns 60, artists reflect on the storied outdoor art centre

Beyond its visually rapturous value, the Storm King region also had a pivotal but lesser-known role in the development of US environmental law and policy

Gabriella Angeleti20 October 2020

From the archive | artists turn Montana ranch into vast open-air sculpture and music centre

Tippet Rise Art Center is due to open in the Beartooth Mountains in June

Gabriella Angeleti26 April 2016

From the archive | a first glimpse of Storm King Art Center’s $45m redesign

The celebrated upstate New York sculpture park will begin an overhaul of its grounds to enhance visitor experience and biodiversity

Gabriella Angeleti3 August 2022

Public art

From the Colossus of Rhodes to Michelangelo's "David" in Florence's main square to Nelson's Column in London's Trafalgar Square, to Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago, public sculpture has been an unavoidable part of city life over three millennia

Giant pigeon sculpture will land on New York's High Line this autumn

Iván Argote’s hyperrealist aluminium aviary statue will be perched on the High Line Plinth from October

Although it is a ‘sumptuous’ tome, this survey of contemporary public art from around the world baffles at times

The self-proclaimed atlas gives voice to works from often overlooked global-majority cultures but tends to favour mainstream over more challenging works

Tree-planting project memorialising Black lives lost brings 40,000 trees to urban centres across the US

The community-driven living monument from MIT Media Lab’s Poetic Justice will include an evolving, digitally networked story archive

New public art projects to coincide with Democratic National Convention

Next Stop: Chicago will focus on infrastructure inequality after Covid

The Indigenous artist brightly patching up a Toronto expressway

Nico Williams has created a series of colourful interventions along an elevated highway that cuts through the city centre

Artist's trail: Vincent van Gogh

The Art Newspaper's special correspondent Martin Bailey selects four of his acclaimed blogs on Vincent van Gogh that serve as an art lover's trail to where the artist lived and worked

An insider’s travel guide to Van Gogh's Arles

Follow in the artist’s footsteps and discover the places that inspired his greatest paintings

Martin Bailey31 May 2019

Van Gogh’s astonishingly bold painting of the church at Auvers, now on show in Amsterdam

The picture exudes spirituality, but after the artist shot himself, its priest refused to help bury him

Martin Bailey2 June 2023

Van Gogh paints by the River Seine, a stepping stone to Provence

A revelatory exhibition in Amsterdam on Vincent’s landscapes from the outskirts of Paris—along with those of his avant-garde colleagues

Martin Bailey13 October 2023

Van Gogh’s Starry Night is back in Arles, revealing more of its mysteries

Visitors can also go to the spot where he stood his easel, enjoy the riverside view—and see how the artist transformed the scene into one of his best-loved paintings

Martin Bailey7 June 2024

Country house sculpture

Castle Howard: stage set for Bridgerton and Brideshead, and now for a full-dress Tony Cragg show

The Liverpool-born sculptor's 50-year engagement with organic, layered, forms works in natural harmony with the Yorkshire treasure house and its Arcadian grounds

Louis Jebb3 May 2024

Exo architecture

From the 1977 Pompidou Centre in Paris to the massive 2023 Sphere in Las Vegas, the exterior expression of some art-world structures has completely changed the character of their neighbourhood, and how people engage with it

Tipping point: how new immersive institutions are changing the art world

Digital art venues are a global phenomenon, attracting massive audiences with radical new forms of immersive experiences. Are they a threat or an opportunity for traditional galleries and museums?

Chris Michaels28 January 2024

From the archive | The art machine: the Centre Pompidou at 40

As the Parisian cultural behemoth hits a landmark anniversary, figures from the world of art and architecture discuss its legacy

By Ben Luke1 February 2017

Exploring the rise and fall of British architectural sculpture

A timely study examines the unique confluence of artists and architects in British buildings from the 1850s to the 1950s

Roger Bowdler4 June 2024

From the archive | Twenty years on: how the Guggenheim Bilbao came of age

Against the odds, Spain's US-branded museum has drawn more than 20 million visitors since it opened in 1997

Hannah McGivern24 November 2017

Memorial art

Sculptures and installations to commemorate dead politicians, monarchs and poets or the victims of brutality, war and genocide have long attracted a vivid mix of criticism, veneration and public outrage

UK government commits to building national Holocaust memorial in London

Keir Starmer’s Labour administration is reintroducing a bill that will allow the monument and accompanying learning centre to be built, after the project was challenged in the courts

Alexander Morrison18 July 2024

Bicentenary appeal seeks to move Byron memorial to prominent site in London's Hyde Park

Group launches £360,000 fund to re-site 1880 statue isolated on UK capital's roundabout

Louis Jebb3 May 2024

From the archive | how MacDonald Gill's lettering provides an egalitarian monument to the British and Commonwealth fallen of two world wars

The first biography of ‘Max’ Gill reveals the versatile talent of an artist who was a master of lettering and murals and a standout mapmaker-artist

Jeremy Musson23 October 2020

From the archive | world’s oldest war memorial may have been identified in Syria

The White Monument at Tell Banat contains the bones of what are believed to be around 30 dead soldiers, posed as if they fell in battle

Garry Shaw28 May 2021

Land Art

The artist Judy Chicago and the late patron and art dealer Virginia Dwan have stood out as women leaders in a world of Land Art long dominated by male artists such as Michael Heizer, James Turrell and the late Robert Smithson

An expert's guide to Land Art: five must-read books on art and the environment

Books that make connections between art and the current climate crisis, chosen by the curator and author Ben Tufnell

Jacqueline Riding2 November 2021

From the archive | Michael Heizer’s City, a vast art project in the Nevada desert 50 years in the making finally opens to the public

The artist’s sprawling gesamtkunstwerk has been described as the largest contemporary artwork on earth, evoking the scale of Mesoamerican cities and Indigenous burial mounds

Benjamin Sutton19 August 2022

Remembering Virginia Dwan: champion of land artists and the US's first bicoastal gallerist

Hugely influential art dealer whose galleries in Los Angeles and New York launched Minimalism and Land Art in the US

Charles Darwent7 October 2022

From the archive: Nevada Museum of Art acquires Judy Chicago’s full 'fireworks' archive

The museum aims to rewrite the legacy of the historically male-dominated Land Art movement

From the archive | James Turrell will unveil another Skyspace this year in the Colorado mountains

The permanent work will be installed on a hillside in Green Mountain Falls later this summer

Location-specific technology

Campaigners and curators are increasingly using location-specific technology to repatriate looted objects virtually or to generate virtual memorials to improve the representation of all communities

Can location-specific digital technologies help to resolve debates on restitution?

Many believe new applications—from AI and NFTs to 3D scanning—are game changing in returning objects to source communities. Lawyers say they can make the process harder

From the archive | Black Lives Matter murals—can truly public art exist on private platforms powered by private algorithms?

An expert view brought to you by our XR Panel of artists and storytellers who create in virtual reality and augmented reality

Netflix’s co-founder will redevelop Utah resort into a ‘skiable outdoor art museum’

Large-scale installations by James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, Paul McCarthy and others will be fully unveiled in 2026

After decades of neglect, public Amelia Toledo sculpture in Rio will finally be restored

The giant rose-quartz work at a metro station in Copacabana will get a much-needed makeover

Joining the dots: Yayoi Kusama’s mind-bending sculpture turns heads at London station

The artist's 100-metre long piece fills public space outside Liverpool Street interchange

The Constable trail: National Gallery to focus on the social, political and artistic context of the artist's 'The Hay Wain'

Visitors on foot to Dedham Vale, in Suffolk, can view the remarkably well preserved locations of John Constable's paintings of the countryside in which he was nurtured

Shahzia Sikander says she will not fix statue that was beheaded in Houston

In a Washington Post op-ed, the artist wrote she wants to leave the sculpture damaged to show the “fissures in our country”

Ancient Roman highway and Brâncuși sculptures among 26 sites added to Unesco World Heritage list

Landmarks in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia also included as committee meets in New Delhi

The 15-ton itch: truce reached in battle over giant Marilyn Monroe sculpture in Palm Springs

The city council has worked out a tentative agreement to move the lightning rod of a sculpture

$11m worth of public art at the LA Clippers' new arena

Charles Gaines, Refik Anadol, Glenn Kaino and four other renowned artists with local connections were chosen to create some monumental works in Inglewood

A storied public art collection in California makes space for emerging artists

The Stuart Collection at the University of California San Diego is launching an emerging artist programme with a trio of new commissions

New beginnings for public art programme at Newfields

More than a decade after it opened, the art and nature park at the Indianapolis institution has $3m in new funding and its first new show

Oyster sculptures and whale songs: exhibition on Governors Island explores the role of extraction in climate change

Jenny Kendler’s multidisciplinary project seeks kinship between humans and other animals

Agnes Denes resurrects famous ‘Wheatfield’ work in Montana

Sowing seeds of sustainable development, the artist has planted a version of her celebrated Land art piece in booming Bozeman, Montana

‘Iron fist in a velvet glove’: Detroit public sculpture tracks air quality and cleans the polluted environment

A new regenerative installation by Jordan Weber raises awareness of environmental racism

From the archive: exploring a London's borough's pixies-to- princesses public statuary

Kensington and Chelsea is home to celebrated statues and hidden pieces

From the archive: San Francisco to unveil Hiroshi Sugimoto's towering sundial monument

The 70ft-high public art commission expresses "humanity's yearning for the infinite"

From the archive: Hirshhorn Museum is under pressure to reconsider redesign of its sculpture garden

Critics and city planners question changes to a historic reflecting pool and addition of stacked stone walls in a Modernist environment, while the artist Hiroshi Sugimoto defends his designs but says he is open to negotiating

From the archive: Wearing its art on its sleeve—Los Angeles' enduring passion for murals

The city’s street paintings, vehicles for protest since the 1930s, continue to be a flashpoint

From the archive | the story behind the ‘controversial’ Picasso sculpture that became a symbol of Chicago

When it was first unveiled 50 years ago in the city centre, the monumental "homely" figure was not beloved by all