A Walk Through the Public Art Landscape: Unpacking Its Deeper Meanings
Updated: Sep 24
On a team visit to London, Artelier's curators examine what makes a successful public artwork from the top-down to the bottom-up: institutional to grassroots.
Introduction
Contemporary public art is unlike any other form of art: it is democratic, free to see and a fundamentally civic practice. Unlike museum art, which requires a conscious choice to buy a ticket and cross a threshold, public art has no door; it is art for all.
For the artist, the challenge is unique. There is no white cube to protect the work; creating for the public sphere demands a negotiation between durability against the elements, mass-scale community engagement and deep sensitivity to the locale. That negotiation plays out differently depending on who initiates it. Top-down initiatives, driven by institutions, developers and urban planning requirements, tend to prioritise monumental legacy and urban regeneration. Bottom-up movements, emerging from local artists and community needs, thrive on immediacy and organic community voice. The tension between the two defines the field.
That negotiation plays out differently depending on who initiates it. The difference between top-down initiatives – driven by institutions, developers and urban planning requirements – and bottom-up movements, emerging from local artists and community needs, is a defining tension of the public art field. For instance, top-down public art often prioritises monumental legacy and urban regeneration, while bottom-up public art thrives on immediacy and organic community voice. Understanding the friction and synergy between these two forces is essential to curating work that avoids the dreaded "plop art" phenomenon: a term given to public art thoughtlessly "plopped" into public spaces like a "turd in the plaza" without care for its social, cultural and environmental context (both terms are coined by architect, public artist and sculptor James Wines in 1970).
This essay draws on that dichotomy across five key public art provenances: street art, grassroots initiatives, commercial developments, museums and, finally, the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Drawing on a team visit to London, we examine the city's public art landscape through a dual lens, contrasting the grand institutional gestures of Kensington Gardens with the granular, grassroots interventions of the city's alleyways and housing estates. One question follows us around all five: who decides what a public artwork says, and what separates the work that truly belongs to a place from the work that has simply been plonked there?
Contents of the Tour
Street Art: how graffiti and street art energise unfiltered voices.
Grassroots Initiatives: exploring local, community-driven public art efforts.
Commercial Developments: art installations that intersect with planning regulations.
Museums & Public Art: delving into the successes of art curated by institutions into public spaces.
The Fourth Plinth: a stage for ever-changing contemporary art.
Street Art
A journey into public art begins on the streets. Our tour began at Aldgate East, where the towering glass buildings of Whitechapel High Street loom large, a stark reminder of London's corporate façade. Yet just a turn away onto Brick Lane reveals a different world entirely. What was once a 19th-century market for fruits and vegetables has transformed into an open-air museum, with murals and graffiti painted over seemingly every crevice in every wall. Much of it isn't 'public art' in the terms we mean to define it: curated, considered, locally rooted, intentionally planned and delivered. But it raises an interesting question. When does street art become public art? When does work born from refusal of official channels get funded and delivered as permanent cultural artwork?
Street art is essentially public art born from the ground-up, especially for those without access to formal art education. Its roots are tangled in the urban sprawl of New York, where the likes of Basquiat and Keith Haring made their name. Soon this subversive form made its way across the Atlantic, arriving in London in the 1970s and 80s, a city grappling with high unemployment, industrial decline and rising crime. Amidst this turmoil, training as an artist felt a world away for most.
Street art was vandalism: unsanctioned, political, a way of claiming public space when you had no other claim. A great deal of it still is, and that unsanctioned work remains the engine of the form. What has changed is that it now runs alongside a commissioned tradition, where councils, transport authorities and community organisations put real budgets behind the same visual language.
"It it is recognised that street art can positively contribute to the appearance of an area, attract visitors and is good for business. Locations such as Brick Lane have become street art tourist attractions, with visitors from around the world going on locally organised graffiti and street art tours."
– Borough of Tower Hamlets, 2019
Brick Lane, East London
Brick Lane, known locally as Banglatown, is where the Bangladeshi diaspora has thrived for over 70 years, and where street art is embraced as part of the neighbourhood's cultural fabric. The lane, lined with bhojanaloy (restaurants), mas bazaars (fish shops) and mishit dukans (sweet shops), has long been infused with the heady aromas of coriander, turmeric and fenugreek. These local businesses now jostle against the tide of gentrification. In 2021, as part of its Brick Lane Regeneration programme, Tower Hamlets council set out to commission a mural marking fifty years of Bangladeshi independence. The site was a council-owned wall at 14 Brick Lane, beside the Banglatown Arch, which was being restored at the same time. The commission went to Mohammed Ali MBE.
Mohammed Ali, Mateer Tan / The Land is Calling (2022)
© Mohammed Ali
Mateer Tan / The Land is Calling (2022) is split into two poignant scenes: on one side, a boatman paddles through the serene waterways of Bangladesh; on the other, a woman tends to the fields, set against Bengali text "মাটির টান," translating as "Connection to the Soil". Both are drawn from film footage Ali shot in Sylhet, his ancestral home and the birthplace of many within the local area. To the far left, the shadowy silhouette of London emerges from a misty fog, and it's deliberately unclear whether the figure steers away or towards the city.
"Too often street-art murals fail to engage and resonate with the people that live amongst those walls. It's always baffled me. This community steeped in history that saw migrants arrive and transform the area needed art that spoke to them meaningfully."
– Mohammed Ali for Soul City Arts
This detail is significant: it articulates the community's own ambivalence about belonging and through an artistic lens – despite being funded by the council. And the council selected an artist with a genuine ancestral stake in the subject. Ali married into a well-known Tower Hamlets family; his late father-in-law ran a leather factory just off Brick Lane and was involved in the founding of the Brick Lane Mosque. He has described the mural as a gift to his in-laws and to that generation of early immigrants, made in the period after his own mother's death, when the idea of an ancestral land calling took on a deep weight.
Brixton, South London
South of the river, another story has been playing out over decades. After the Brixton uprising of 1981, Lambeth Council and the Greater London Council funded a wave of murals across the area, dealing directly in politics, community and protest. Stephen Pusey's Children at Play (1982) went up behind what is now the Brixton Academy, showing children of different backgrounds playing together, painted in Keim silicate so that it might last a century.
In 1985, the GLC went further, commissioning four anti-racist murals across the city as part of its London Against Racism year. Keith Piper and Chila Kumari Singh Burman painted the Southall Black Resistance Mural, while Lubaina Himid and Simone Alexander created Unity, Freedom and Equality in Notting Hill, five figures striding beneath a banner, half carnival, half demonstration. Himid would go on to win the Turner Prize and now represents Great Britain at the Venice Biennale; Burman was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth. The wall, in other words, was where some of the most significant British artists of the next four decades were already working. Almost none of those murals survive today.
In 2018, Art on the Underground began an annual commission at Brixton Underground station that takes those lost murals as its starting point, reviving the mission of the GLC back in the 80's. Rudy Loewe's The Congregation holds it now, twenty scenes honouring Brixton as a site of resistance and Black gathering; in November 2026 it makes way for Hurvin Anderson's Universal Travel, tracing a Windrush-era journey from the Caribbean to London. Each lasts a year, then goes – speaking to the moment rather than settling into permanence.
So, when does street art become public art? Ali's mural and the Brixton commissions suggest it was never really a question of funding or permission. Both are paid for, sanctioned and are unmistakably street art: paint on an exterior wall, in a specific place, speaking to the people who pass it every day. What they effectively share is that the commissioner chose the wall, set out a brief and then stepped back to let the results integrate with the community expression. As Ali put it, the work has to resonate with "the people that live amongst those walls". Street art takes its name from the street, and it becomes truly a public artwork for exactly as long as the voice on the wall belongs to the artist and to the place it's rooted in.
Grassroots Community Initiatives
Our next stop: grassroots initiatives.
On Brick Lane and in Brixton, local people were the subject of the work and its audience, but ultimately the vision on the wall belonged to the artist. Grassroots public art goes a step further. Here, the community helps make the public artwork. This is public art at its most benevolent, driven by cultural democracy: less concerned with what counts as 'Great Art' but rather with opening doors, breaking down walls and letting the public co-create.
"Cultural democracy isn’t about low quality art or dumbed down culture. It’s rooted in the principle of excellence - that everyone should feel able to express themselves creatively and that by doing so, excellent outcomes can be achieved."
Thessaly Road, Nine Elms
To best explore this, we headed to Thessaly Road, where Yinka Ilori's Happy Street (2019) sees a mundane railway bridge reimagined into a vibrant passageway underpinned by colour theory. The underpass sits on a key pedestrian and cycle route between Wandsworth Road and Nine Elms Lane, but it was dark, forbidding and unsafe at night. Wandsworth Council ran an open design competition with the London Festival of Architecture to fix it, and Ilori's proposal was chosen ahead of five others, becoming his first public realm commission. Ilori worked with residents and schoolchildren from St George's C of E Primary School throughout the development of the scheme, ensuring the result would be a shared, collaborative vision. The colours themselves were drawn from the Thames sunsets that Nine Elms residents see from their own stretch of the river, so that the palette truly belongs to its surroundings.
Yinka Ilori, 'Happy Street', 2019 -
Before & after installation
The result is the opposite of what the underpass once was: an explosion of kaleidoscopic tone across 56 glossy vitreous enamel panels in 16 different colours, the material chosen for its durability and fire rating in a wholly unsupervised public space. At night the panels are illuminated, which made the underpass a landmark and, more practically, makes a tangible difference deterring crime (and perhaps all round general misery). The bridge, once a gloomy, greyed thoroughfare, is now cloaked in joy, glowing with vitality, and when it opened in July 2019, over 1,800 people came to a street festival beneath it. In a city steeped in uniformity, Ilori's condensed colourscape is both truly in service of the local community and a clarion call to joy for everybody.
“The most important part of the project was talking to the community, especially the young children... seeing the smiles on their faces when they walk under the bridge has been magical.”
— Yinka Ilori
Priory Court, Walthamstow
Happy Street shows what happens when an artist brings a community into a commission led by the top-down. Five miles north east, in Walthamstow, a project began the other way round entirely: with the community itself. Priory Court was built to rehouse East Londoners who lost their homes in the Blitz, an estate founded on looking after people. Eighty years on, it has picked up a reputation for anti-social behaviour, and residents are quick to say that outsiders see something very different from the place they actually live in.
"People are scared to come here, but in reality, we're a deeply connected community and I want the outisde world to know that"
– Ibrahim Mohamed, resident of Priory Court for 14 years
A mural came up as an idea to unite and connect the residents, conceived from several estate-wide resident consultations and then over 60 face-to-face interviews, focus groups and workshops, so that in effect Priory Court was consulting itself. The Digital Story Company and Wood Street Walls, both community-based arts organisations, supported its conception, while the money came from the residents' own landlord: Clarion Futures with further backing from the Wates Group, who maintain the homes. This funding example illustrates why public art works well: the housing group wants to elevate their developments, just as much as the residents want colour and meaning infused in their neighbourhood.
The artist chosen was INSA, an anonymous British street artist whose GIF-ITI technique paints, photographs and repaints a wall frame by frame so that it animates through his app. Before a single design was drawn, young people from the estate were trained in his technique over two days, giving residents an understanding of the process from the inside. His first concept, a patchwork of flags for the estate's diversity, divided opinion and was rejected (left). So it took further meetings to arrive at something far more particular to Priory Court. Older residents fondly remembered a willow tree that once stood on the estate, while 'The Bees Knees', the estate's own sewing group, drew up a template of their own for INSA to work his magic on.
Though painted in spray paint, the final patchwork banner is made to look stitched and embroidered: a tribute not only to the estate's sewers but to the garment factories once a vital part of Walthamstow. The finished Unity Banner runs 160 square metres up six storeys of a housing block, with the willow at its heart, and it is the first permanent artwork in Priory Court's eighty-year history.
INSA for Priory Court, Unity Banner (2025), Walthamstow
© Wood Street Walls & The Digital Story Company
Neither project was funded from below. Ilori won a council competition, and the Unity Banner was funded by the residents' own landlord. Cultural democracy has never really been about where the money comes from, it's far more important that the work is genuinely of the community – meaning voices are heard and people collaborate. At Thessaly Road, that meant schoolchildren and residents shaping a palette drawn from their own stretch of the Thames, and at Priory Court, it was an estate concieving of the project, seeking funding, and ultimately rejecting a design most were unhappy with to co-imagine one truer in its place.
Commercial Developments & Public Art
We’ve unpacked how artists and council bodies act as community custodians, connecting with the public throughout London. But how can public art support commercial infrastructure?
As one of the worlds largest economic power cities and a hub for a highly skilled, diverse workforce, London’s demand for office and residential spaces is constantly intensifying. Walking through the city, it’s clear that London is in a state of perpetual change and improvement. With its eclectic mix of architectural styles – from Georgian avenues to huge, stark Brutalist estates – businesses and developers are seeking to find their voice, to stand out, and to contribute meaningfully to the city's socio-cultural fabric. The result is a new generation of distinctive developments shaped by human-centred design, with public art increasingly infused into them.
Paddington Square, a new Section 106 development by Renzo Piano Building Workshop (2024). Ugo Rondinone, Yellow Orange Hermit. Why Do We Care About Art, Kathrin Bröhm.
© Renzo Piano Building Workshop
Section 106
Much of that art is made possible by Section 106, a key piece of legislation introduced in 1990 under the Town and Country Planning Act, meaning that councils can require new developments seeking planning permission to support the cultural well-being of communities and the overall quality of the environment. For developers navigating the labyrinth of planning regulations, meaningful public art is one of the most rewarding ways to meet those obligations. For a fuller explanation, see our guide to Section 106 and public art.
Section 106 can promote public art in new developments, but it can't guarantee that it gets made well. Planning guidance has long warned against relying on the legal agreement alone: it's important that the obligation should secure an art strategy that works with the buildings architecture and design from the get-go. If this isn't practised, then the art only exists to tick a box: bought late, hardly considered and then placed wherever there's space left over. Unfortunately, such instances are destined to become the "turd in the plaza" James Wines warned about half a century ago.
Paddington Square
Left: the approach to Paddington Station in 2009. Right: the same arch in 2026, seen from the new piazza.
© Ozeye | Hufton + Crow
Paddington Square shows what getting Secrion 106 right looks like today. The 1.35-acre piazza sits between St Mary's Hospital and Paddington Station, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's celebrated Victorian terminus. For years, visitors reached it through a narrow and rather grim approach. The development set out to change that. Alongside a Renzo Piano Architects building of offices, shops and restaurants, it opened up a public route through to the platforms, creating a gateway to London and giving the station the dazzling entrance it had always lacked.
Its public art programme began in the summer of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. Curated by the cultural studio Lacuna within the scheme's Section 106 framework, it is the art that turns this new thoroughfare into a place to remember. Ugo Rondinone's five-metre bronze yellow orange hermit (2024) draws the eye the moment you step off the train, a totemic beacon and a meeting point in one. Pae White's Somethinging (2024) floats above the entrance to the new building. And a rotating wall on Tanner Lane, run with the local arts organisation The Showroom, changes each year with work made alongside the community.
But it's Catherine Yass's NHS Swimmers that stole our hearts. The new development exposed a bare wall of St Mary's Hospital next door, and with the programme born in the pandemic, Lacuna saw an opportunity to celebrate the NHS. Yass took her cue from the angels hovering above Giotto's Lamentation (1304-06), photographing ten NHS workers swimming and piecing the images together across the hospital wall. Yass's swimmers float like angels, weightless and at ease, a gentle subversion of the stressed, overworked image we've come to associate with the health service. The mural also aimed to unite St Mary's and Paddington Square, and for the patients, staff and commuters who pass it every day, it offers exactly what public art does best: a moment of presence, and an opportunity to consider those unsung heroes who play a pivotal part in our society.
Hanover Square
The best public art in new developments is always context-led. Some works, as at Paddington Square, act as wayfinders and placemakers; others are designed to complement the architecture itself.
Towards the end of our trip, we took the Elizabeth Line to Hanover Square in Central London, a prominent historic site laid out in the 1710s in honour of George I. At 11-12 the art is so in keeping to the building and surrounding area that you could walk straight past it, and that is precisely the point. In December 2012, years before the building was finished, Campbell Architects submitted a Public Art Statement with the planning application, committing to a Section 106 agreement with Westminster City Council. It named the façade as the principal site and treated the building as the canvas, including decorative metal screens that at that early stage depicted just a placeholder leaf motif.
The commission went to Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, whose design reimagined that placeholder to something far more specific. Eastwood-Bloom went context specific: he built a 3D wireframe model of the surrounding streets, projected it onto the façade, and used its lines to shape the building's bronze-coloured window guards and entrance. Because the building is mixed-use, he avoided any reference to the businesses inside, so the work resonates to the square's prominence and architectural history rather than the tenants. It's a fresh, contemporary take on the square's Georgian metalwork that pays homage to the history of the area.
Commercial developments that incorporate public art throughout their processes results in context-led, relevant public artwork. Paddington Square and Hanover Square sit in the same borough, under the same planning policy, almost a decade apart. One fills a new piazza with international names and punctuates the 1.35acre site with placemaking artwork, whilst the other cleverly and sleekly infuses to the history and design of a prominent site. In both cases, the art was planned from the start, and Section 106 protected it rather than produced it. The earlier an artist joins the conversation, the less the art looks like an obligation, and the more it looks like it belongs.
Museums & Public Art
So far on our journey, public art has been spearheaded by councils, communities and developers. Now, let's shift our focus to the art that emerges directly from institutions. What happens when public art is curated and commissioned by galleries or museums themselves?
Serpentine North, Kensington Gardens
To investigate this, we headed towards some of London's galleries and museums that actively designate areas for public art. Serpentine North in Kensington Gardens is one such location: a serene green oasis where contemporary art spills out onto their garden wall year by year. Atta Kwami's joyous dance of coloured rectangles, inspired by Kente cloth and Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) held it from 2022 to 2024, packing a punch of joy that brightened up London's drab grey skies. In 2024 it was followed by Esther Mahlangu's Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, [I am because you are], painted in the South African Ndebele patterns she learned from her mother and grandmother.
This year, the wall belonged to the late David Hockney (1937-2026). Alongside his first exhibition at the Serpentine, a vast printed mural brought a single scene from A Year in Normandie (2020-21) into the public at Kensington Gardens, a tree house in spring blossom. The frieze was painted in Hockney's Normandy studio on an iPad in the spring of 2020, when COVID-19 brought much of the world to a standstill. Hockney's artwork captures the beauty and isolation of this time, of a tree- house with an almond tree arching out from its interior. It's a fitting choice of image for the public sphere. In the painting, the inside of the house opens to the trees; on the wall, a Hockney picture is brought out of the gallery walls and into the park. The exhibition closed in August, but the mural stayed up until 20 September 2026, a last invitation to slow down and look.
"I do believe that painting can change the world."
– David Hockney, AnOther Magazine
Of all the models in this essay, this is perhaps the most top-down. Nobody in the area was consulted about Kwami, Mahlangu, Hockney or any other commission – and that is rather the point. What the Serpentine offers instead is cultural ambition, where artists of a calibre a council budget could hardly afford is displayed in public for nothing. The gallery is free to enter in any case, so what the garden wall removes isn't the price of admission but the threshold of entering. This has been a commitment of Serpentine since it launched in 1970: to bring artists outside of the traditional gallery context and into the public sphere. You don't have to decide to go to an exhibition to see a Hockney; dog walkers, runners and school groups can enjoy his vision regardless. And when people do want more, the door is a few steps away. Nearly 300,000 went through it for the Hockney exhibition, the most attended show in Serpentine's history.
V&A East, Stratford
Across the city in Stratford, the newly-opened V&A East took the idea a step further, placing a monument at its front door. Ahead of its opening, the museum unveiled Thomas J Price's A Place Beyond (2023): an 18-foot bronze of a young Black woman in casual clothes, phone in hand, gazing out towards the horizon. She isn't a real person, but a figure built from an amalgamation of images, 3D scans and observations, cast using both digital technology and ancient bronze techniques. It is Price's tallest sculpture to date, and his fourth in East London, where he works.
The sculpture belongs to the neighbourhood just as much as to the museum, and not just by virtue of its location. V&A East museum was co-created with young people and those living, working and studying in east London, and its Youth Collective was consulted as A Place Beyond took shape, to decide on a public statue that celebrates the diversity of the area. The V&A describes it as: “an emblem for change and a rejection of social or racial profiling to instead create connection through everyday moments". In a country where the question of who deserves a statue has become a flashpoint (a particularly notable example being the toppling of the statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol, 2020), Price's work challenges not only the absence of black individuals in statues, but also a black woman's presence is made monumental, at a scale normally reserved for royalty and generals.
“I want this sculpture to become an extension of the people who inhabit the museum, and the spaces around it."
– Thomas J Price, Museums + Heritage 2026
This brings us to an essential point about public art: its purpose is not solely to beautify or please, but it's also there to provoke – stimulating thought, discussion and even disagreement. When institutions place art outside their walls, they offer curatorial ambition and world-class names into everyday spaces. Hockney's tree house brought his artworks outside, offering accessibility to his work to all. Meanwhile, Price's young woman asks who deserves to be cast in bronze, a question London has been putting to one plinth in particular for over twenty-five years.
The Fourth Plinth
The final stop on this artistic journey: Trafalgar Square, and the most famous empty pedestal in the world. The Fourth Plinth was built in 1841 to carry an equestrian statue of William IV, but the money ran out and the plinth stood bare for over 150 years, an unfinished chapter in the Square's otherwise storied history. In 1999 the Royal Society of Arts filled it with Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo (1999-2000), and since 2005 the Mayor of London has run it as a rotating public art commission, supported by Arts Council England and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Each work now holds the plinth for two years.
This vacant platform has become one of the most dynamic and controversial sites for public art in London; it's one of the most famous public commissions in the world. There's a joke that whenever a new artwork is erected on the plinth, everyone, from cabbies to politicians, becomes an art critic. This is a fantastic thing. A lightning rod of debate, the choice of artwork extends its discussions into schools, onto the news and across social media, reinforcing its status as part of our cultural zeitgeist and public art as a point of shared human experience.
Even so, how much does the public actually get an input in the commission process? Nominally, yes. Maquettes of the shortlisted proposals go on display at the National Gallery and online, and the public are invited to have their say. However, the final decision ultimately rests with the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, a somewhat diverse panel of art experts: an independent panel chaired by writer and curator Ekow Eshun, including artist Jeremy Deller, and Eleanor Pinfield, Director of Art on the Underground, whose Brixton commissions we visited earlier in this essay. So on one level, public input is a democratic gesture that is perhaps more symbolic than substantial. On another, it protects the work from being chosen by a mass societal consensus, which is rarely how anything memorable gets made.
Greater involvement from the public could democratise the arts further, bringing a wider range of perspectives into play as we've seen in many examples of community-engaged public art. On the other hand, expert curation ensures the Fourth Plinth maintains a certain calibre, and protects the artist's vision from being diluted into something that offends nobody. This tension between democratic engagement and expert oversight is a delicate one, and the plinth is where the two models running through this essay, the top-down and the bottom-up, meet most visibly.
Antony Gormley, 'One & Other' (2009)
© Artichoke
Antony Gormley’s 2009 commission, One & Other, adventured into this tension in a profoundly inclusive manner. For 100 days, Gormley invited 2,400 individuals to occupy the plinth for an hour each, turning it into a living monument of human expression. This project transcended traditional notions of public art, allowing ordinary people to become part of the artwork and thereby engaging the public in an unprecedented way.
Recently, as with Price's artwork at V&A East, the plinth has been used to commemorate people monuments have historically ignored. Teresa Margolles's Mil Veces un Instante (2024) [A Thousand Times in an Instant] stood from 2024-2026, which was 850 plaster casts of transgender and non-binary people in the form of a Tzompantli – the ritualistic placing of skulls in racks by Mesoamerican civilisations. The work is made in tribute to Karla, a transgender woman murdered in Mexico in 2016. The work was built from plaster compared to bronze of the surrounding statues, so that the faces would erode in London's rain. In other words, the sculpture stages the erosion of transgender individuals in public – in real time – a method that both honours and unsettles, and contrasts directly with the permanent bronze statues of admirals and kings guranteed rememberance forever in the square opposite.
Most recently, on 10 September 2026 it was replaced by the sixteenth commission, Tschabalala Self's Lady in Blue (2026). Cast in bronze and patinated with refined lapis lazuli, the pigment Renaissance painters prized and which hangs in the National Gallery across the square, it depicts a young Black woman striding forward with momentum.
She's made of few colours: black skin, blue dress, cobalt jewellery and red lips. Sunlight does the rest. This seems intentional by the artits: Lady in Blue is cast in the same bronze material as every figure in the square but painted, so the surface comes alive with a glossy, almost plasticky sheen and glows in a way none of them do. Ginormous, curvaceous, unapologetically feminine and completely anonymous, she is a vivid display of Black femininity. Just sixty years ago the idea that she could exist here at all would have been unthinkable. Today she strides forward using the space of the plinth to its full, at a height this square has only ever given to men who conquered. That is equity rather than equality.
"She is not an idol to venerate or a historic figurehead to commemorate. She is a woman striding forward into our collective future with ambition and purpose. She is a Londoner who represents the city's spirit."
– Tschabalala Self, BBC
The work is especially poignant when we consider what Self's sculptures have endured. Her earlier public sculpture Seated (2022), first shown at King's Cross, was installed outside the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where in May 2023 a vandal covered the entirety of the figure's skin in white spray paint. In a statement Self said: "despite my disappointment I am not surprised as Black, female – and especially Black female bodies – are often targets for abuse" and described it as "a futile attempt to erase her colour and, in my mind, her strength". The Pavilion organised an event of restoration in response, and 300+ people queued to scrub the paint off by hand. Another beautiful layer to the work, in the end.
Three years on, Self has put another Black woman in public, and this time opposite Nelson's Column, raised to a man who opposed abolition, on the ground where far-right groups gathered against Black Lives Matter in 2020. Lady in Blue is unapologetically present, blazing blue and black against all that bronze.
Lady in Blue will hold the plinth for two years, and then, like every work before it, it comes down. In 2028 it makes way for Andra Ursuţa's Untitled, a hollow equestrian statue draped in a shroud: a take on the original form the plinth was built for in 1841, but returning as a ghost.
And it seems that the ghost of Fourth Plinth's past can be a source of frustration for the artists taking part. In 2023 Rachel Whiteread went as far as calling for the commission to end, having never found a home for Monument since 2001. Michael Rakowitz, whose lamassu of date syrup cans stood on the plinth in 2018, put it plainly: "I have no idea when it will be seen again. Having pieces sitting in storage is always a bummer". The labour and materials that go into a Fourth Plinth work are immense, and each piece is site-specific, so it can't simply be placed elsewhere.
In the end, though, this transience is what gives the Fourth Plinth its power. In a city as layered and complex as London, a fixed monument risks becoming irrelevant or even invisible. Instead, the changing artworks keep the space alive, ensuring it remains a site of active engagement, not passive observation.
As we stood in Trafalgar Square, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of tourists, commuters, and locals, the Fourth Plinth stood out as a beacon of contemporary creativity. It’s a reminder that public art, at its best, is not just a backdrop to the city but a vital part of its ongoing narrative – a conversation that evolves with each new installation, reflecting the ever-changing face of London itself.
""For me this sculpture is very much symbolic of optimism [...] because she's here in the public realm, it's not about moving forward in the individualistic sense. It's about moving forward with the consciousness that you are part of a collective."
– Tschabalala Self in an interview with UNIT London
Conclusion
London is a city steeped in culture. The streets and cultural institutions are continuously brimming with energy within the urban sprawl, where new and diverse modes of expression flourish with vitality. So the public artworks on display, whether spray painted onto a wall by an anonymous street artist or commissioned by a governmental body, lift us from the glare of our phones and individual concerns to a point of shared experience, discussion and ultimately, cultural evolution.
We began with a dichotomy: top-down against bottom-up. What this tour revealed is that almost nothing is purely either. The money, almost always, comes from above. What changes is what happens after the commission. In every public artwork we admired, the commissioner chose the site, set the brief and then stepped back, leaving the meaning to the artist to listen and respond to the people who live alongside the work. Street art needs the least intervention and the most trust whilst grassroots work needs genuine co-authorship. With commercial developments, it's vital that the artist in the room from the start. Museums need only offer their expertise: calibre, reach and the confidence to put a world-class artist in a public park for all to see. Top-down or bottom-up is not what hinders. In the end, what matters is authorship.
So the commission may fail where caution creeps in. Permanent works are expected to endure, and commissioners aware of the lasting impact may lean towards "safe" designs that appeal broadly and avoid potential offence. At Priory Court the residents disagreed with the first design, but recognised they couldn't please everyone: the best result was one most were happy with. The Fourth Plinth has a different luxury entirely. Its rotation every two years is also a unique luxury, freeing each commission from long-term critique and allowing it to embrace the possibility of failure. Otherwise, the risk is "design by committee" art: pieces that, in striving to please everyone, end up overly safe, watered down and ultimately forgettable.
Ultimately, great art requires daring. The most celebrated artists throughout history were pioneers who, by virtue of their profession, acknowledged local contexts and issues. They sparked debate and challenged the status quo because their voices were heard, trusted and listened to without being diluted. This approach is what public art commissioners, stakeholders and committees must strive to champion. Because what makes better art? Something safe and unnoticeable, or something that stands out, packs a punch, and ignites conversation?
Artelier Public Art Consultancy
At Artelier, we are dedicated to bringing artistic visions to life. With over 15 years of experience developing large-scale public art projects across Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia, our art curators are adept in handling all nuances and technicalities.
Our team of public art consultants specialises in every stage of the process, providing a comprehensive turnkey service. From crafting bespoke art strategies that enhance cultural and social vitality, to sourcing and commissioning exceptional artists, and managing projects with precision — we handle every detail. This includes navigating complex planning regulations and ensuring seamless installation.
Discover how we achieve this balance in our diverse range of projects. Check them out here, or get in touch by clicking the button below, to see how we can bring your vision to life.
Writer & Researcher:
Calypso Lyhne-Gold
Curator, Art Research & Editorial
Calypso is a curator and editor at Artelier, and a published academic writer with a BA (Hons) in History of Art from the University of Bristol. She is especially passionate about how public art can democratise access to the arts and has experience in artist liaison, public art strategy and project management.
Contributor:
David Knowles
Founder & Creative Director
David has dedicated his career to supporting contemporary artists. With a Masters in Fine Art, he has experience commissioning, managing and curating public art of all scopes. David has worked with cultural institutions like Riyadh Art on Noor Riyadh 2023, alongside pioneering grassroots projects and mentoring young curators.