Allison Meier on September 17, 2013 Hyperallergic
From Bernard Rosenthal’s “Alamo (The Cube)” in Astor Place to Arturo Di Modica’s bull on Wall Street, public art in New York City is a navigational tool and a meeting place. Currently, an art project is exploring this idea with 80 signs plotted through Manhattan for 46 pieces of public art, both sculptural installations and those less traditionally defined like the ghost bikes and the stunning clock at the center of Grand Central Terminal.

Art within One Mile: The Route from Central Park to Brooklyn Bridge by artist Bundith Phunsombatlert was installed for the New York City Department of Transportation’s August summer streets, but will remain in the city through September. The signs are bright yellow and attached to light poles around Park Avenue from Central Park down through Lafayette Street, with from Tony Smith’s “Tau” 1965 the furthest north on the Upper East Side and Jan Mun’s “BeeVillage” (2013) in Battery Park holding it down as a southern anchor. Between there’s iconic works like Pablo Picasso and Carl Nesjar’s “Bust of Sylvette” from 1968 at the Silver Towers, as well as those you could easily miss like Sylvie Fleury’s temporary “After Hours 2: Miniskirts Are Back” (2013) roll gate painting on the Bowery.
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The Huffington Post  |  By Michelle Manetti

Many abandoned homes are left to the elements, allowing nature to handle the demolition. But when artist Matthew Mazzotta came across an abandoned house in York, Alabama, he and his team decided to turn it into a foldable public theater called "Open House."

According to Inhabitat, with the materials and land from the old home, Mazzotta created a place that looks like a normal house, but can be unfolded to reveal a 100-seat space where the community can watch plays, movies and live musical performances.

It takes about an hour and a half to transform but as you can see if the video, found at this link, it's totally worth.

Creative Visual Artist June 30, 2013

A recently completed commission in Copenhagen by Argentinian artist Hyuro with help of Alejandro Valbuena Martinez is a huge flip-book style mural. The massive 890-foot long illustration engulfs a stretch of highway in the city and features a reindeer entering a forest. When you drive by at enough speed the images appear as a flip-book style animation as shown in the video. See the video here.

Atlantic Cities, by John Metcalfe June 12, 2013

How do you fill 800 condoms with water and light bulbs in one day? Simple: Enlist the nimble little fingers of kids.

The Spanish street-art group Luz Interruptus proved the feasibility of a child-labor assembly line for making public art for a recent installation in Madrid called "Lluvia Profiláctica Eue No Moja" ("Prophylactic Rain That Doesn’t Wet Anything"). The anonymous artists, who have a history of dealing out licks of political commentary in the form of light art, were upset that the government had dismantled a public swimming pool to make way for a posh shopping complex. So they decided to bring the memory of water to the neighborhood in the form of liquid-filled contraceptives, chosen apparently for their likeness to fat raindrops.

The Luz crew were partly into setting up their screen of pendulous rubbers, which were mood-lit in blue from internal LEDs, when they found themselves surrounded with children curious about what was going down in their neighborhood. The artists swiftly enlisted the wee ones in injecting and tying the swollen condoms while attempting, unsuccessfully, to prevent them from lobbing the things at each other like water balloons. At the end of the afternoon, the group had transformed a public square from drab concrete expanse to glimmering galaxy of floating prophylactics, a picture stolen straight from a pounding downpour in a parallel universe built on the dreams of Ron Jeremy.

Here's the artists describing the magic in the air that day (the text is a translation from the original Spanish):

To give them shape we used condoms, yes, condoms, extra large and extra strength, to which we added blue colored water, to turn them into big drops, with feel and form of silicone breasts, very pleasant to touch and squeeze. With them we created a square space, delimited by suspended droplets in which one could immerse themselves and touch them, listening to the gentle sound of the moving water.

Thanks to the magic of light and water, we were able to convert 800 common condoms, into a sensory and relaxing refuge, suitable for all audiences. Read more