• Learn about the First Amendment to the Constitution and US obscenity law
• Examine historical and current incidents of Censorship in the US and their relationship to public funding for the Arts
• Learn about the National Endowment for the Arts
• Explore the relationship of cultural values to free speech and tolerance

Artifact: Public Art Reflection

The reason that I picked the final week of discussion as my last artifact for my portfolio is because I feel like public art encompasses everything about human values and art, to the public. Public art is a piece that the population in America is going to want to represent everyone in the best way possible. This means expressing human values that we can all agree upon. This weeks reading goes into detail of the types of censorship and confrontations artists have had to escape in creating different public pieces of art, and how they have either changed or been placed in certain places as a way to better represent them.

This artifact best represents the objectives of this unit in that I explored the relationship of cultural values to free speech and tolerance. Given the time that the murals were made in I think that they represented the culture of the time and gave way to the free speech of the artist. When you look at them in terms of tolerance for that kind of free speech or the culture that we live in today, there is not much tolerance for it. If there were, there would not be someone taking the time to write a blog page about how these murals no longer coincide with the progress that we have made in America today.

In the future I could really use this artifact to examine some of the public pieces of artwork that I see on a day to day basis. It gives me an idea of the kind of questions that I can ask about the process that goes into public art. Public art is meant to represent the public sphere on many different levels, but also represents that based on the cultural context that it was made in. Public art is pleasing to the eye, but it also bears a lot of representations and should be looked at in question.