About ArtAround

ArtAround is a nonprofit archival project connecting people to the art around them through an open community database, an online magazine, and educational resources.

At the core of ArtAround lies the map — our sustainable web platform that allows for the shared social documentation of art in public spaces around the world. Through the map’s transparent, rigorously applied taxonomy of tags, categories, and artists, you can search the entire database for all red [tag] Murals [category], or all work from the 2000s [tag] by Swoon [artist], allowing for a comparative analysis of public art from different centuries and on opposite sides of the globe.

Surrounding the map is ArtAround’s magazine, the Arrow — an editorial exploration of how our understandings of public art and space are evolving in the twenty-first century — and our educational resources, which take the form of print and digital publications as well as audio guides, including meditations and readings created specifically for art-viewing.

ArtAround is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas. You can help make ArtAround possible by donating today.

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Dedicated to the preservation of public art through documentation, ArtAround utilizes web applications to share knowledge and encourage interaction with art outside in communities all over the world. Harnessing the people power of user-submitted data, alongside comprehensive inquiry into artworks, artists, and commissioners, ArtAround is both a tool for sharing the art around you and a resource for understanding it.

We believe public art is a gift that belongs to all of us. We also believe that what constitutes “public art” is something each viewer, and each community, gets to decide for themselves. We recognize the negotiations of power that take place within the public space — and art’s inherited, and often inherent, role in maintaining existing power structures. But in a post-capitalist twenty-first century plagued by overwhelming levels of inequity, we also understand art’s history of subversion and graffiti’s legacy of reclamation which resist the authoritative monument and the commercialization of public space through advertising.

ArtAround archives all forms of public art together, recognizing both guerrilla and commissioned works within the public space equally, as art.

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ArtAround is currently based in New Haven, Connecticut and has previously been situated in the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C. Our founder, Laurenellen McCann, first worked with the DC Commission for the Arts and Humanities to make ArtAround a reality in 2010.

Anna Bloom joined Laurenellen as Director in 2011 and expanded, bringing ArtAround to the Bay Area. As a Code for America fellow, Anna previously worked with the cities of Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia to build mobile websites that let people discover art in those cities. With Anna, ArtAround became an international community of art-lovers photographing street art and public art, building a free, accessible resource online together.

In 2014, Anna handed the reins to Lindsey Mancini, a digital strategist and arts accessibility activist who created WanderArt, a research-oriented public art database. Lindsey spent two years photographing and researching art in San Francisco, and she brought WanderArt’s editorial vision to ArtAround through her founding of the Arrow and the implementation of a new tagging system alongside festival aggregation endeavors on the map.

From 2019-2021 ArtAround went offline, but in May 2021 it relaunched as a sustainable, responsive web platform complete with a website that allows for easy navigation of the database through its guides and collections.

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The team

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Credits

ArtAround’s graphic identity and logo were designed in 2012 by Shawn Cheris, Senior Design Manager at Adobe.

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