A blog on the intersection of art and public space, the Arrow is an exploration of how our understandings of public art, street art, and public space are evolving in the twenty-first century. Mapping the legal and social milestones determining who has the right to what forms of creative expression in the spaces we share, this blog charts the new direction of increased access to the arts we’re witnessing the world over.

Latest stories

New kinds of canvases: Collaborative Community Canvas, Year 2

Ahead of this year’s project, I’m so excited to share the results from last year’s “Collaborative Community Canvas”—a second iteration of an invitation to create in a shared site, hosted as part of Yale School of Art’s Open Studios. In its second year, 2023, I added a paper wall to exist alongside the canvas one, and stretched snippets of last year’s...

Experimentation results: Collaborative Community Canvas, Year 1

Saturday, April 9 & Sunday, April 10, 2022353 Crown St. Courtyard, New Haven CTHosted as part of Yale School of Art’s 2022 Open Studios I work in communications at the Yale School of Art by day, and as part of our first public event since COVID—Spring 2022’s Open Studios—I hosted the first in a series of projects I’m calling the “Collaborative Community Canvas,”...

The Moving Target of “Finding Home”

Inspired by the existing murals filling both sides of Yale University’s La Casa Cultural de Julia de Burgos building, the luminescent Finding Home now stands as a third testament recognizing and commemorating the ever-expanding myriad of cultural identities that make up the Yale student body. In November 2021, Los Angeles-based artist Lauren YS came to New Haven to collaboratively create...

enabling art’s democratization through a reimagining of public space

An introductory note: The following is my artist statement, submitted as part of my PhD application in the winter of 2020 to the Institute of Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Now that I’ve successfully completed my first semester (😅), I’d like to share this text with you all here in an attempt to better contextualize the work I’m doing online through the Arrow...

Sculptural Infrastructure, Cosmic Altar: Nathaniel Donnett installs “Sub-woofer” for the city of New Haven

From the sidewalk, you might see it from across the street. It looks like it’s supposed to be there, a bit of straightforward wooden fencing that might contain an electrical box or some other public utility. But if you look closely you’ll notice the solitary panel in deep blue, and if you cross the street you’ll see the wood is patterned and that together, the whole of this object stands as an...

Fixing the story we tell ourselves: Why all Confederate monuments must come down

The summer before I started eighth grade, my family moved from a suburb of Hollywood, Florida to Fairhope, Alabama — and on my school calendar, Martin Luther King Jr. Day suddenly become M.L.K. / Robert E. Lee Day. I was a little confused, because didn’t these two historical figures stand in direct opposition to one another? Also, wasn’t this new guy technically a traitor? I could sense, but...

Dreams come true when you refuse to give up

Almost a decade ago and across the country, I started a journey that in a lot of ways is really just beginning today. Today, the mapping platform I self-funded and the WordPress website I built to function in tandem with it are both finally ready for public consumption. It’s already been a long road and there’s so much more I want to do, but today I can celebrate because the digital...

Pubic Space is Public Canvas in San Francisco: An Analysis of 534 Artworks

The following text comes from the recent ArtAround publication, Analysis: San Francisco, a 25-page report based on manually compiled and indexed data on 534 artworks documented across the 7×7 square miles of the city, in a documentary endeavor I conducted (and previously wrote about here) between June 2013 and May 2015. The report offers charts and data on the Where, Who, What, How, and When...

Kaleidoscopic Wonder, Seen in Passing at Intersections

n February 2019, I was in Boston to see the band Dawes with my husband and brothers—but of course there was a lot of new public art to check out during the short 48 hours I’d be in the city. At the top of my list was Spanish artist Okuda San Miguel’s 2018 sculptural series, Air Sea Land, new to Boston since I’d last been there. The project was a perfect confluence of favorites:...

Mapping art in Atlanta and beyond: An interview with Art Rudick

A retired engineer who splits his time between Atlanta, Georgia and Ormond Beach, Florida, Art Rudick started StreetArtMap.org in 2017 and started building an online field guide for finding murals and street art around Atlanta. We’ve been online friends since then, and Art was kind enough, both to be ArtAround’s first official art-mapper / Ambassador and to answer a few of my...

About the Author

Lindsey

Lindsey Mancini is an arts accessibility activist and digital strategist studying the essential connectedness—or disconnectedness—between art and community.

She currently works in communications at the Yale School of Art, and teaches as an adjunct professor of contemporary art at Eastern Connecticut State University. In 2017 she earned an MS with distinction in the history of art & design from Pratt Institute, where she wrote her 80-page thesis on street art theory. Lindsey is currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Arts, Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts.