Tania Bruguera
Tatlin’s Whisper #5
(2008)
Tate
The term was coined by the American artist, writer and educator Suzanne Lacy in 1991, to define a type of American public art that was not a sculpture situated in a park or a square
The definition was first used in a public performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art and later in Lacy’s book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Lacy defined new genre public art as being activist, often created outside the institutional structure which brought the artist into direct engagement with the audience, while addressing social and political issues.
In 1993 an exhibition called Culture in Action presented a series of works that could be defined as new genre public art, like Mark Dion and his Chicago Urban Ecology Action Group who created an installation about the ecology of their neighbourhood.
