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Arte Agora is art that is made, sold, or placed in the public way.
It is where outsider artists meet street artists, outside. Interaction with a confluence of other public actors—municipal buffers, national advertisers, construction workers, scaffold assemblers, and passersby—creates synchronous and asynchronous dialogue in places of density. This book builds on the publication of Arte Agora in May 2019, where we first defined the term and laid out examples that pulled together seemingly separate artistic practices.
Collected here, and described in detail, are the places, pieces and techniques used by practitioners of Arte Agora. Arte Agora is art that happens outside, in the marketplace, with human transaction and constant renewal at its core. It is the foundation for a constant conversation among these actors. We’ve worked to define the terms that make up this emerging field, listing and providing recent examples of the practice.
Here’s the taxonomy we’ve developed:
Spots
Spots are the places where artists make, sell or place their work in public.
- Vacant frontage: The linear space made available when the ground floor of a building is unattended
- Proscenium: A well-proportioned spot that has natural characteristics to frame the art placed there
- Infrastructure: Permanent municipal elements of the public way such as light poles, bus shelters, utility boxes, road signs and street furniture
- Public Studio: An accessible place where an artist makes and/or sells their work
Forms
Forms are the various materials, sizes and attachment styles of art made, sold, and placed in the public way.
- Paper: Ubiquitous, paper is the workhorse of fine Arte Agora
- Stickers: The form with built-in adhesion
- Wood: Durable, pliable, and readily available, wood is a material more common than you might think for art in the public way
- Objects: Three-dimensional items displayed deliberately
- Words: For some pieces, words are the primary form and the material on which they appear doesn’t matter
- Shrines: A location with features such as candles, photos or other objects purposefully arrayed as mementos in front of or under a piece of art affixed to a wall
Methods
Methods are the systems artists use to get their work outside.
- Solo Show: Multiple pieces from a single artist placed at the same time in a deliberate configuration, similar to a traditional artist exhibition at an art gallery or a museum
- Serail variation: The placement of similar works by one or more artists through time and space
- Art drop: The planned placement of art that is meant to be found for others to take
- Collabs: When an artist places their work in the context of others to create new meaning
Bonus: Buff Gallery
The covering of a piece of art in the public way performed as a municipal service.
