Nick Geurts is a Denver artist and structural engineer who works with Ryan Elmendorf through the Elmendorf/Geurts public-art practice. His studio biography connects his metalworking and structural background to large interactive works, including an early musical-tree project supported by a Burning Man honorarium. The pair’s civic commissions include Sky Song, which lets visitors trigger light and bell sounds at Denver’s Levitt Pavilion, and True West, an interactive compass at Green Valley Ranch Town Center Park. Their Seesaw Wave Machine links individual movement through a connected mechanical installation, while Light Pond responds to sound with patterns of light across a paved surface in Aurora. This individual profile preserves Elmendorf’s co-authorship; these documented projects are portfolio references and do not establish current artwork availability.
Project details & references
Practice
interactive public art, sculpture, kinetic installation, light and sound installation
Project references
Sky Song (with Ryan Elmendorf) · True West (with Ryan Elmendorf) · Seesaw Wave Machine (with Ryan Elmendorf)
West lawn, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, One Medical Center Drive, Lebanon, New Hampshire
Image: commons.wikimedia.org ↗Photograph by Lothar Wolleh (1970), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ (as credited at source)individual
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) created large figurative sculptures, architectural environments, and sculpture gardens distinguished by color and imaginative forms. Her Nana figures and inhabitable structures brought sculpture into everyday public space. Sun God (1983), a fiberglass bird above a concrete arch, was the Stuart Collection’s first commission at UC San Diego; Robert Haligon’s studio fabricated the bird. Her Tarot Garden in Capalbio developed from 1978 to 1998 as a landscape of monumental figures and buildings. American projects include Coming Together (2001) at the San Diego Convention Center and Queen Califia’s Magical Circle in Escondido. The latter opened in 2003 after her death, with completion overseen by her granddaughter Bloum Cardenas and longtime assistants.
Project details & references
Practice
monumental sculpture, architectural sculpture, sculpture gardens, public art
NiNo Alicea is a Puerto Rican artist whose practice connects public sculpture, community murals and production design. MÚCARO is an enterable owl with reclaimed-wood feathers, an interior staircase and a rotating head; the artist records its presentation in Black Rock City, and Burning Man’s 2017 archive supplies the event year. Múcaro’s Rising takes a different form: a basketball-court mural and refurbishment in Loíza, Puerto Rico, developed with 2K Foundations and participating community members. The project page links it to recovery after Hurricane Maria without giving an installation date. NiNo also describes fabrication experience on works by Pae White, Christian Moeller and Thomas Dambo. Those contributions support his technical background while retaining the other artists’ authorship.
Project details & references
Practice
public sculpture, interactive installation, murals, production design
Project references
MÚCARO · Múcaro’s Rising — with 2K Foundations and community participants
Nobuho Nagasawa is a New York City artist whose site-specific sculpture and installations investigate cultural memory, ecology and people’s relationship to places. Her practice combines community research with architectural and landscape interventions. Ship Shape Shifting Time at Islais Creek in San Francisco evokes a Liberty cargo ship through steel forms, paving, a historic bell and docking cleats. The artist credits site poems to George Quasha, who is also credited in the city’s collection catalog. That catalog dates the work to 2012, while Nagasawa’s project page labels it 2013; these source dates are retained without assigning a precise installation date. Transcendence of Justice, dated 2013 in her portfolio, creates an optical-fiber waterfall in John Jay College’s entrance lobby, with blue pulses synchronized to a Martin Luther King Jr. speech.
Project details & references
Practice
sculpture, site-specific installation, public art, social sculpture, light installation
Project references
Ship Shape Shifting Time — with George Quasha · Transcendence of Justice
Studio founded by Candaş Şişman and Deniz Kader in 2011, developing immersive experiences, audiovisual performance and spatial storytelling across art, design and technology.
Norie Sato is a Seattle artist who develops public artworks from the conditions and meanings of particular sites. Her practice includes individual artworks, design-team collaboration and public art planning for transportation, civic and educational settings. Air Over Under, dated 2011, forms a glass façade at San Francisco International Airport’s Terminal 2. Its layered painted and silkscreened imagery explores clouds and flight; Sato credits production at Franz Mayer Studios in Munich. Unfurling a Gesture (The Nature of Persistence) combines a screen wall and stainless-steel sculpture at Seattle’s Union Street Pedestrian Bridge. A City of Seattle report confirmed installation in October 2022 and credits collaboration with Schemata Architects, James Corner Field Operations and V + M Structural. Ferns and seabirds inform its relationship to the waterfront.
Project details & references
Practice
public art, architectural integration, glass art, sculpture
Project references
Air Over Under · Unfurling a Gesture (The Nature of Persistence)
Numen/For Use is the collaboration of Sven Jonke, Christoph Katzler and Nikola Radeljković. Its practice spans conceptual art, scenography, industrial and spatial design, with immersive installations that turn tape, nets and supporting structures into environments visitors can physically explore.
Olafur Eliasson creates installations involving perception, light, and environmental phenomena. Documented U.S. projects include The New York City Waterfalls, Seeing spheres in San Francisco, and One-way colour tunnel at SFMOMA.
Project details & references
Practice
installation, light art, public art
Project references
The New York City Waterfalls · Seeing spheres · One-way colour tunnel
Documented contexts
Temporary water installations at four waterfront sites; Reflective public installation at Chase Center
Oleg Lobykin is an East Palo Alto sculptor whose practice combines stone-carving experience with contemporary sculptural forms and technology. His biography also describes work in the restoration of landmark architecture and sculpture. Sea Foam at Pacific City in Huntington Beach translates the meeting of ocean air and water into an abstract Carrara-marble form. The artist’s exhibition history records that large version as installed in December 2016; the separate small marble example on the same project page is not treated as the installed object. Talking Heads is documented in his public-art history as an eighteen-foot stainless-steel work at Burning Man in 2019. Together these projects show a practice extending from carved stone in a commercial public setting to large metal sculpture in an event landscape.
Project details & references
Practice
stone sculpture, metal sculpture, public art, architectural restoration
Olga Ziemska makes public and environmental sculpture that connects the human figure with natural systems. Her documented projects combine reclaimed organic materials with fabricated or cast components.
Explore sculptures that physically move: visitor-activated mechanisms, changing forms and wind-driven installations. Compare documented projects, understand how motion shapes the encounter, and identify the site and maintenance questions to resolve with an artist.
Find installations that make listening, musical participation or sound-responsive light part of a place. Compare playable works and spatial compositions, then plan how the experience will share space with visitors, neighbors and everyday activity.
