Accepted by the city council, it will guide art projects in public space in the coming years. Public Art Agency Finland created the program over a two year project in collaboration with representatives from the city’s departments of cultural affairs, urban planning, and other involved in curating, installing, and maintaining public art in the city.

The joyful creatures of the renown graphic artist Seela Petra will take central stage in the public artwork to be opened together with the Ainoa commercial centre in Tapiola, fall 2019. Public Art Agency Finland will facilitate the production process of the project made possible trough collaboration with the city of Espoo and EMMA - Espoo museum of modern art.

In this multi part artwork, a young okapi animal in a mural ends up climbing up on a square, and taking three dimensional form. We were responsible for the production of the project from start to finish.

During 2017, Public Art Agency Finland will create guidelines for future public art projects in the form of a public art program for the city of Mikkeli. These common guidelines will connect different parts of the city administration and help in the production of high quality public art projects - be it in the form of monuments, light art, temporary snow sculptures during winter, murals, or sound art - in a flexible way.

A new collaborative project with the University of Lapland and the northern travel industry is to develop the use of Public Art in the Arctic Region. The aim is to create general guidelines for collaboration between contemporary artists and the arctic travel industry. Here are preliminary thoughts on the arctic areas in relation to Southern Finland.

The founder of Public Art Agency Finland, sculptor and architect Maija Kovari worked in a study project of public art, the results of which are now public. In the project, Kovari worked as an artist in a street design team, designing artworks that could replace ordinary structures in city space. The goal was to study, if art could be integrated in urban surroundings in more cost affective methods than is currently customary. The results are promising.

We are very proud to be involved in a project in Espoo, where a public artwork by Lotta Mattila will be the connecting force between three areas of a new neighbourhood of Niittykumpu. 

Working in collaboration with the City of Espoo, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art EMMA, as well as with Ramboll Finland, we make sure that the artwork is created seamlessly in collaboration with the other parts of the huge construction project.

We designed a series of collectable cards for the in Tampere, a city of approx 220 000 inhabitants in Southern Finland. The collectible cards tell stories along the tracks of the soon to be built tramway that will permanently change the city and its infrastructure. Each card sheds light on the history, and the future of a specific area around the future tram stops.

In October 2016, Maija Kovari spent a month in Singapore, meeting local experts and professionals in art and urban planning to understand the particularities that make up the rich urban landscape of the city state, from the point of view of public art. Join her on this trip here.

Why do we need art in urban areas? What is art for anyway? Would a vampire make a good urban planner?

... read about these and other pertinent questions concerning art as part of urban planning and landscape architecture, as discussed in an interview with Tobias Baur