Featuring more than 500 public art installations, this is the first comprehensive guidebook to explore Vancouver's urban treasures. The character of a city is revealed by the public art that neighborhoods and residents collectively place on streets and walls and in their public spaces. As a city known internationally for its breathtaking cityscapes and mountain backdrop, Vancouver has much to offer visually including the diverse and thriving public art in the city's neighborhoods. Engaging color photos and detailed descriptions that focus on the historical and cultural context of each art piece, its place in modern art and the artist who created it allow for a greater understanding of these urban treasures. Easy-to follow maps take readers to communities and destinations such as False Creek, Chinatown, the West End, Downtown, East Vancouver, VanDusen Garden, Stanley Park and the University of British Columbia. Tour the better known and the unknown art installations that are made from every possible media and include monuments, paintings, murals, tapestries, figures, First Nations art, relics, busts, fountains, gateways, mosaics, sculptures and reliefs.

This beautifully designed book is the first to explore Susan Point's publicly commissioned artworks from coast to coast Susan Point's unique artworks have been credited with almost single-handedly reviving the traditional Coast Salish art style. Once nearly lost to the effects of colonization, the crescents, wedges, and human and animal forms characteristic of the art of First Nations peoples living around the Salish Sea can now be seen around the world, reinvigorated with modern materials and techniques, in her serigraphs and public art installations - and in the works of a new generation of artists that she's inspired.People Among the People beautifully displays the breadth of Susan Point's public art, from cast-iron manhole covers to massive carved cedar spindle whorls, installed in locations from Vancouver to Zurich. Through extensive interviews and access to her archives, Robert D. Watt tells the story of each piece, whether it's the evolution from sketch to carving to casting, or the significance of the images and symbolism, which is informed by surviving traditional Salish works Point has studied and the Oral Traditions of her Musqueam family and elders. In her long quest to re-establish a Coast Salish footprint in Southwest British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest of the US, Point has received many honours, including the Order of Canada and the Audain Lifetime Achievement Award. This gorgeous and illuminating book makes it clear they are all richly deserved.

Public art is produced and ‘lived’ within multiple, interlaced and contested political, economic, social and cultural-symbolic spheres. This lively collection is a mix of academic and practice-based writings that scrutinise conventional claims on the inclusiveness of public art practice. Contributions examine how various social differences, across class, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, ability and literacy, shape encounters with public art within the ambits of the design, regeneration and everyday experiences of public spaces. The chapters richly draw on case studies from the Global North and South, providing comprehensive insights into the experiences of encountering public art via a variety of scales and realms. This book advances critical insights of how socially practised public arts articulate and cultivate geographies of social difference through the themes of power (the politics of encountering), affect (the embodied ways of encountering), and diversity (the inclusiveness of encountering). It will appeal to scholars, students and practitioners of cultural geography, the visual arts, urban studies, political studies and anthropology.

Arguably, public art is experienced daily by more people than most offerings in galleries, yet our notion of what constitutes public art is surprisingly limited. Public Art in Canada broadens the critical discussion by exploring public art's varied means of engaging with public space and the public sphere. Annie Gérin and James S. McLean have assembled contributions from new and established Canadian scholars, curators, and artists. Each contributor enlivens our understanding of public art as a practice and its place in the social and aesthetic formation of which it is a part. As a result, the book provides an overview of the current debates in the field of public art that are informed by the theories and critical literature of art history, communication studies, cultural studies, sociology, and urban studies. The rigorous essays and original works of art collected in this volume present a compelling demonstration of the strategies, aesthetic and otherwise, used by artists to elicit intellectual, sensual, or emotional responses that can only be obtained through artistic practices in public places. Public Art in Canada is a major contribution to the study of Canadian art and culture.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art gallery from February 18 to 28 May 2017.

This is an art book on the politics of urban conflict based around artist Stan Douglas' stunning photo installation of the same name, depicting a violent confrontation in 1971 between police and Vancouver's counterculture known as the Gastown Riot. The book, which features essays by Alexander Alberro, Serge Guilbaut, and others, addresses various issues raised by Douglas' work, including the suppression and assimilation of the counterculture. It also includes other works from Douglas' Crowds and Riots series. Stan Douglas has exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and documenta. He is the subject of numerous books, including Stan Douglas (Phaidon Press).

Tom Burrows, and the exhibition that preceded the book, presents work by the artist from his early career to the present. The book is a timely refocusing of attention on an artist who has made an immense contribution to the development of art in Vancouver, not only as an artist but as an educator and activist as well. Burrows first rose to prominence in the late-1960s and was included in several exhibitions at the UBC Fine Arts Library, an institution that was seminal in encouraging Vancouver's growing and now vibrant art community. In 1975 he received a United Nations commission to document squatters communities in Europe, Africa and Asia, a work that is now in the Belkin's collection. Burrows' work, which demonstrates an interest in process and new materials, has encompassed a number of disciplines including sculpture, early performance art, video, painting and iconic hand-built houses on the Maplewood Mudflats and Hornby Island. Currently most well known for his innovative monochromatic cast polymer resin "paintings/sculptures" produced during the last forty-five years, the book examines the full breadth of his career with works from the Belkin's permanent collection as the basis with other works from the artist, collectors and public institutions. Burrows has had solo exhibitions in London, Rome, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Edinburgh and across Canada. His work is included in private, corporate and public collections in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

The project is a personal exploration of public art in Vancouver consisting of an essay and a DVD comprising three documentaries. Each episode refers to a different question in the paper: What is public art? What is its relationship to where it is situated? What is the process by which it is commissioned in a civic public art program? Artists, curators, and bureaucrats involved in the commission and installation of public art in Vancouver are interviewed; one project's construction is followed to completion. Public art, whether civic or private-sector funded, can be defined as much by its relationship to a site as by its various categorizations, e.g. place-specific, site-specific. Offering local identity, opportunities for dialogue, and creative interpretations of a city's history and culture, Vancouver's public art contends with several challenges, e.g. available land, the value placed on views. Temporary installations and ephemeral art events can resolve some contentious issues.