Abstract

This thesis examines the Public Art Fund’s eight-year long public art project Messages to the Public (1982-1990). Located on the since-removed Spectacolor lightboard at One Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, each month Messages to the Public integrated the work of a different artist into the lightboard’s advertising cycle. Building upon existing scholarship on the project, this thesis emphasises the activism and social issues participating artists responded to in their works, with a particular focus on issues related to public health, housing, and wealth inequality. Drawing from cultural theory and sociology, this thesis examines Messages to the Public within its historical and urban context to better understand how public art can become a tool for community outreach and education amidst moments of political and social uncertainty. Moreover, this thesis draws on primary source and archival research to better contextualize the project and the motivations behind it. Through an analysis of the project’s lightboard medium, engagement with advertising conventions, boundaries between public and private space, key activist issues, and questions of funding and censorship, this thesis aims to demonstrate how artists used the restrictions and possibilities that the Spectacolor lightboard provided to share text and images that responded to and engaged with some of the decade’s defining social issues and crises.