Public Artists Who Changed How People Use Shared Space

Rivera and the Mexican muralists put art on the walls of ministries, schools and markets so that people who never entered a gallery would meet their own history every day. His frescoes in the Ministry of Education and the National Palace in Mexico City, painted with teams of plasterers and assistants, turned staircases and courtyards into public history books. Contest came with the territory: his Rockefeller Center mural in New York was destroyed in 1934 for including Lenin, while his Detroit Industry murals survived a campaign to whitewash them.

Noguchi spent decades arguing that sculpture should be something children could climb on. New York's parks department rejected his Play Mountain of 1933 and most of his later playground designs, but the idea survived in Playscapes in Atlanta's Piedmont Park, finished in 1976 and still in use, and in Moerenuma Park in Sapporo, a former rubbish dump he planned as a whole landscape of play hills, fountains and climbing forms, completed after his death by Japanese architects in 2005. Both show sculpture as somewhere to spend an afternoon.

A former customs officer who took up sculpture in middle age, Wyllie used Glasgow itself as his stage. In 1987 his Straw Locomotive hung from the Finnieston Crane, the giant that once loaded Clyde-built engines for export, and was then ceremonially burned; in 1989 his huge Paper Boat sailed down the Clyde and later to New York. Both were mournful, funny events about the end of heavy industry that drew crowds to the river. He worked with shipyard workers, engineers and volunteers, and his spires and question marks still dot the city.

Saint Phalle's huge, joyful Nanas, voluptuous women in bright polyester and mosaic, made public space feel playful and female. Her Stravinsky Fountain beside the Pompidou Centre, made in 1983 with her husband Jean Tinguely's clanking black machines, is a place where Parisians eat lunch and children watch the sculptures squirt water. The Tarot Garden in Tuscany, built over two decades with local craftspeople and mosaicists, invites visitors to walk inside the figures. In Hanover, her Nanas were mocked when installed in 1974 and are now civic mascots.

In the summer of 1982 Denes and volunteers cleared rubble and planted two acres of wheat on the Battery Park City landfill in Lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street, then harvested nearly 1,000 pounds of grain in August. Wheatfield, A Confrontation made a building site into a farm that office workers walked through, and asked what land in the world's costliest city is for. Her later Tree Mountain in Finland, 11,000 trees planted by 11,000 people on a man-made hill, is meant to last 400 years.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary projects changed how millions moved through familiar places for a fortnight. The Gates of 2005 put 7,503 saffron fabric gates along the paths of New York's Central Park; The Floating Piers of 2016 let 1.2 million people walk on water across Italy's Lake Iseo. They paid for everything by selling Christo's drawings, spent years winning permits through public hearings, often against fierce opposition, and relied on hundreds of paid workers to install and remove each work. Christo's posthumous wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe followed in 2021.

Serra is here as the most famous cautionary tale. Tilted Arc, a 37-metre curved wall of weathering steel installed across Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1981, was meant to make office workers feel the space anew; many said it simply blocked their way and their lunch spot. After public hearings it was cut up and removed in 1989, and the case still shapes how cities commission art. His later walk-through spirals and ellipses, such as The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Bilbao, show what the same steel can do when people choose to enter.

Since 1977 Ukeles has been the unsalaried artist in residence at New York City's Department of Sanitation, and her subject is the maintenance that keeps public space usable. For Touch Sanitation, from 1979 to 1980, she shook hands with every one of the department's roughly 8,500 workers across the five boroughs and said thank you for keeping New York alive. Later works turned garbage trucks and waste-transfer stations into galleries, and she has worked for decades on Freshkills, the former landfill on Staten Island now becoming a park.

Lacy makes public space for conversations that rarely happen there. The Crystal Quilt, staged in 1987 in the atrium of the IDS Center in Minneapolis, seated 430 women over 60 at tables on a vast quilt-patterned floor, talking about ageing while the public watched from the balconies; she spent two years organising it with local women's groups. Between the Door and the Street, in 2013, gathered hundreds of activists on the stoops of a Brooklyn street, and the front steps of the Brooklyn Museum carried its questions about gender and race. Silver Action at Tate Modern the same year used the same method of large, carefully prepared gatherings.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles runs for about half a mile along the concrete flood channel of the Tujunga Wash, and Baca painted it over five summers from 1976 to 1983 with more than 400 young people, many referred from the juvenile justice system, alongside historians and community members. Its scenes tell California's history from the viewpoint of Indigenous, Mexican American, Black and Asian American communities. Through SPARC, the arts centre she co-founded, the mural has been restored and extended, and the riverside site is being turned into a walkable park around it.

Gormley's iron figures, cast from his own body, change how people use a landscape. Another Place, 100 men standing across two miles of Crosby beach near Liverpool and gradually disappearing with each tide, was meant to stay for months in 2005 and became permanent after a local campaign, despite worries about safety and wildlife; families now dress them up and walk out to them at low tide. The Angel of the North, raised above the A1 at Gateshead in 1998 with Hartlepool steelworkers and Ove Arup engineers, was widely opposed before it opened and is now a regional emblem.

Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park, unveiled in 2006 and nicknamed the Bean by the public before it was even finished, is a 110-tonne mirror of polished stainless steel plates welded and polished seamlessly by a fabrication team. People do exactly what it invites: walk under its arch, photograph their distorted reflections against the skyline, gather there for proposals and protests. It turned a corner of a park into the city's living room. His ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in London's Olympic Park has had a much cooler reception, a useful contrast.

A few steps from Cloud Gate, Plensa's Crown Fountain of 2004 turned a plaza into a summer paddling pool. Two 15-metre glass-block towers face each other across a shallow black granite pool and show video faces of about 1,000 Chicago residents; every few minutes a face purses its lips and a jet of water spouts from its mouth onto the children below. It works because the faces belong to the city's own people. His later giant heads, such as Dream on the site of the former Sutton Manor colliery in St Helens, use the same quiet faces to mark a place.

Haring started in the New York subway, drawing chalk figures on the black paper pasted over expired advertising panels, thousands of them between 1980 and 1985, often arrested and always watched by commuters. He then painted more than 50 public murals worldwide, frequently with children: Crack Is Wack on a Harlem handball court, painted without permission in 1986 and then protected by the city, and Tuttomondo on a church wall in Pisa. He opened the Pop Shop so people could buy his work cheaply, and his foundation still funds children's and HIV charities.

Lin was a 21-year-old Yale student when her design won the 1981 competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Instead of a statue, two black granite walls cut into the ground, polished so visitors see their own reflection among the more than 58,000 names listed in order of death. Critics called it a black gash of shame, and a conventional bronze of soldiers was added nearby as a compromise. Yet the way people use it, touching names, taking pencil rubbings, leaving letters and medals, changed what memorials everywhere try to do.

In 1993 Lowe and six other Black artists bought and restored 22 derelict shotgun houses on a block in Houston's Third Ward. Project Row Houses now uses some as rotating artist installations and others as homes for young single mothers, alongside low-cost housing and small businesses, so the art is the neighbourhood's daily life rather than an object in it. It became the model for social-practice art across the United States. Lowe won a MacArthur fellowship in 2014, and the project has also had to weigh how its success affects rising property values nearby.

Whiteread casts the empty space inside things. House, a concrete cast of the interior of the last Victorian terraced house on Grove Road in east London, stood for 80 days in 1993 and became a fierce local argument: thousands queued to see it, the council voted to demolish it, and she won the Turner Prize the same day. Her Holocaust Memorial on Judenplatz in Vienna, a closed library cast inside out with the book spines facing outwards, took five years of disputes to build and opened in 2000; it is now the square's quiet centre.

Deller's public works are events made with hundreds of people. The Battle of Orgreave in 2001 re-staged the 1984 clash between striking miners and police in a South Yorkshire field, with former miners and police officers alongside re-enactment societies. We're Here Because We're Here, made with National Theatre director Rufus Norris on 1 July 2016, sent about 1,400 volunteers dressed as First World War soldiers silently into stations and shopping centres across Britain, handing out cards naming the men they represented. Sacrilege, his bouncy-castle Stonehenge, toured parks for families to jump on.

Eliasson's art makes people behave differently together. In The Weather Project of 2003, a giant artificial sun and mirrored ceiling in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, visitors lay on the floor for hours and waved at their own reflections far above, turning a gallery into something like a beach. His New York City Waterfalls of 2008 drew crowds to the East River, and Ice Watch placed melting Greenland icebergs in public squares in Copenhagen, Paris and London for passers-by to touch. A large studio of craftspeople, engineers and architects in Berlin builds the work.

Gates, trained as a potter and urban planner, buys and rebuilds abandoned buildings on Chicago's South Side and opens them to the neighbourhood. His Dorchester Projects began with a house he bought on Dorchester Avenue around 2006 and filled with salvaged books, records and glass lantern slides for public use; the Stony Island Arts Bank, a derelict 1923 bank restored in 2015, now houses archives including Johnson Publishing's library and a record collection from Frankie Knuckles. Some critics question the art-world money behind it, but neighbours use the spaces daily.

Banksy's stencils, which appear overnight on walls from Bristol to Bethlehem, change how a street is used the next morning: crowds gather, owners put up perspex, councils argue over whether to protect or paint over, and sometimes the wall is cut out and sold. Dismaland, his bleak mock theme park in a disused lido at Weston-super-Mare in 2015, made with dozens of other artists, drew about 150,000 visitors and boosted the town, and the Walled Off Hotel faces the separation barrier in Bethlehem. The anonymity is part of the work, and so is the debate about vandalism.

JR pastes giant black-and-white photographic portraits of local people onto walls, roofs, trains and barriers, so a neighbourhood sees its own faces at the scale of advertising. Face 2 Face put Israeli and Palestinian portraits side by side on both sides of the separation wall in 2007; Women Are Heroes covered hillside homes in a Rio favela with women's eyes. His Inside Out project, launched with the TED Prize in 2011, sends printed posters to communities who paste their own portraits, more than 500,000 so far. Teams of volunteers and residents paste every work.