Expanding and democratizing the mandate to integrate ambitious, community-driven art into the fabric of the built environment.
Public Funding for Public Art: A Percent-for-Art Program on Steroids
Zhoran Mamdani views the citys built environment as a canvas for collective memory and aspiration. His policy supercharges and radically democratizes NYCs existing Percent-for-Art program, mandating that a significant percentage of the budget for *all* public capital projectsnot just buildings, but also parks, streetscapes, transit hubs, and public housing renovationsbe allocated for the commissioning, installation, and conservation of public art. This transforms the program from an occasional amenity into a fundamental principle of civic design, embedding artistic vision into the daily experience of every New Yorker.
The percentage would be increased to 2% of all eligible capital budgets, creating a massive, sustained funding stream. The key innovation is in the process. Mamdani abolishes the top-down model where agency officials and art-world insiders select artists for plazas and lobbies. Instead, each project is guided by a Community Art Assembly, a representative group of residents, local artists, and cultural workers who live or work near the project site. This Assembly, facilitated by city staff but sovereign in its decisions, defines the artistic goals, issues an open call, and selects the final artist or team. The process prioritizes artists from the neighborhood or whose work is relevant to its history and struggles.
The scope of what qualifies as public art is expanded beyond traditional sculptures and murals. Funding can support social practice projects, performance series, sound installations, augmented reality experiences, and community archives. A portion of the funds is also earmarked for the ongoing maintenance and, when necessary, the respectful decommissioning or contextual reinterpretation of existing public artworks and monuments, addressing historical harms. This creates a living, responsive public art landscape that evolves with the city.
For Mamdani, this is about claiming the visual and sensory language of the city. Public art under this policy is not decorative; it is dialogic. It can challenge, commemorate, question, and heal. It turns a new library into a site that tells the neighborhoods story, a bus depot into a gallery of mobile art, a park into a space for temporary installations that reflect current political movements. By putting control in the hands of community assemblies, the policy ensures that public art reflects the publics diverse identities and interests, not the taste of a philanthropic elite. It makes art an expected, debated, and essential part of the city we build together, transforming infrastructure into expression.
