Carter Manor (1973) was one of the “City Canvases”—an ambitious civic initiative that resulted in 12 large-scale wall paintings intended to help uplift downtown Cleveland’s struggling urban core.

Detroit's Stickwork sculpture hits all the right notes to make highly successful public art, or what might more meaningfully be described in this case as urban environmental art.

Of the experience of making his mural, John told me, “It was without question the biggest, most important, most public thing I had ever done.”

It's been eight days since the Detroit production of Bliss, the titanic performance installation staged by Michigan Opera Theatre in the ruins of the old Michigan Theatre, and here I am still bobbing along happily in its wake.

As we settle into our new domestic routine, weathering the emotional turbulence that each week (and each new news item) brings, I observe my mind's eye returning, often, to the peace and stillness of Glacial.

We recently ventured to Midland, two hours north of Detroit, to tour the Alden B. Dow Home & Studio, and to Flint, where we visited Lawrence Halprin's Riverbank Park.

I got to know David Rubello after I became obsessed with his 1973 mural Color Cubes, a piece of downtown public art I loved that was lost in 2014.

Frank Stella spent the better part of the 1980s and '90s creating more than 135 abstract works, each titled after a particular chapter of Moby-Dick.