Negotiating the Public Art Terrain Challenges, Minefields, and Opportunities to Make a Difference

Harriet F. Senie is professor emerita of art history at City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of Monumental Controversies: Mount Rushmore, Four Presidents, and Our Quest for National Identity (University of Nebraska Press,2022); Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2015); The “Tilted Arc” Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (University of Minnesota Press,2001); and Contemporary Public Sculpture: Tradition, Transformation, and Controversy (Oxford University Press, 1992). She is coeditor and contributor to Critical Issues in Public Art: Content,Context, and Controversy (Harper Collins, 1992; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), and coeditor and contributor to the Companion to Public Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), as well as Museums andPublic Art? (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018). In 2008, she cofounded Public Art Dialogue, an international organization and a College Art Association affiliate. She also coedited the peer review journal Public Art Dialogue from 2011 through spring 2017. In 2017, she was appointed to the New York City Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. She has also served on the She Built New York initiative advisory committee, and the selection committees for the Women’s Suffrage Monument for Central Park, as well as the Mexico City Memorial 1968/2018.