Category: Weekly Wonder

Alice Mizrachi grew up in Queens and built her art around a radical idea: put ordinary people on the wall. Her large-scale community murals, collaged from neighborhood portraits, turn the faces of grandmothers, teenagers, and elders into forty-foot celebrations of belonging. This is public art made with a community, not just for one.

A miniature bronze bird tucked inside a Staten Island tree stump sparked this look at how scale transforms public art into play. Anne Marie McDonnell’s 1995 sculpture sits alongside giants: Claes Oldenburg’s Spoonbridge and Cherry, Lateral Office’s glowing Impulse seesaws, and David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground. Small or large, the best public art rewards attention and…

Susanne Ussing’s 1980 sculpture I Drivhuset places a towering female figure inside a Copenhagen greenhouse she’s completely outgrown. Built from newspaper, wood, and chimney vents, the work captures what it means to become too much for the spaces designed to contain you.

Enzo Prina builds optical illusion paintings by hand in Salt Lake City, layering acrylic paint and masking tape to create moiré patterns that seem to move. Following in the tradition of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, his Between Lines series demands physical presence in an age of digital flatness.

Hervey Garcia’s Liberation turns a 600-foot wall in Indio, California into a galloping horse that morphs into Pegasus as cars drive past. His kinetic mural technique traces back to Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 horse photography, the same images that launched cinema.

Dave Gatzmer, a St. Louis Park painting contractor known as ‘Phone Banksy,’ mounted nearly 100 vintage phones along Highway 100 in Minnesota. His guerrilla art project WALL TCS went from illegal installation to beloved permanent public art, unanimously adopted by the city council.

Lawrence Argent’s 40-foot Blue Bear peers into Denver’s Colorado Convention Center, a towering symbol of curiosity cast in striking blue. The sculpture’s impossible color connects to Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue and Katharina Fritsch’s cobalt rooster at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Shannon Steven’s ‘Canface’ captures something we all do – seeing faces in everyday objects. It’s called pareidolia, and there’s real science behind why our brains find faces in cat food cans, trucks, and radiators.

Kimiko Nishimoto took her first photography class at 72 and spent 25 years creating hilarious, whimsical self-portraits that charmed over 400,000 Instagram followers. Her playful images prove creativity has no expiration date.

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde sculpts real clouds inside architectural spaces, from cathedrals to coal mines. Using fog machines and water misters, each Nimbus cloud lasts about 10 seconds – just long enough to photograph.