Greetings from Los Angeles. My name is Bond Harper and today I'm going to talk to you about what I'm calling open street art. By this I mean art that's viewable from the public right-of-way, so pieces of art that you might be able to see walking down the sidewalk or driving down the street. So part of what prompted this is our museums being closed due to the

pandemic and other indoor places where we might commonly view art with our family. Outdoor art provides a safe way to enjoy visual arts and to share these things with our children and others. So in defining what is public pieces of art, there's a few different ways to do this and some disagreement among folks on how we do this.

There's pieces that are owned by the government, so cities will buy a piece of art or be donated a piece of art. And then there's privately owned pieces that, while they're privately owned, are placed in the public areas so that people can see them. There's also permanent pieces of art, things like sculptures or mosaics that tend to be there for many, many years,

versus things that are painted, like painted utility boxes or murals that might be graffitied over or painted over every so many years. Personally, I've been focusing on government-owned art that's permanent, so mostly things like sculptures and pieces that are mounted outdoors,

mostly because I don't want to constantly have to be revisiting various sites to make sure that the piece of art is still there. If it's a piece of art near where I live, like there's a mural on the road where we live, I add that because I would notice if it got painted over, versus pieces around town where I don't get very often, I don't want to add them because I'm not going to be maintaining it.

So finding this art seems like it should be fairly simple. It's outdoors and it's accessible. But the challenge is usually finding out information about the art and then also finding comprehensive lists so that you can find pieces of art in neighborhoods that you may not visit very often. Some sources that are helpful are your local government websites or open data sites.

These often have lists of pieces owned by the government, but they may not be comprehensive and often don't have things like pictures that help you match up the art. Other sources that are more likely to have pictures and other information to help you find the piece are hobbyists' blogs and websites.

But again, they're often not comprehensive and include pieces that are more noticeable or things that people really enjoy. A third source is Wikipedia. I've found for large cities, they have quite a few pieces that you can use to cross-reference other sources.

So as we're defining what is public art, we have what I am referring to here as unsanctioned art, things that might be called graffiti by some. So these are pieces of art that I think are best enjoyed in the moment as they will often be removed since they are unofficial and not permitted to be in the place.

Once you've found your art and you're ready to add it to OpenStreetMap, in most cases you'll just be adding a point with some simple tags. The most important tag being tourism artwork. So that identifies it as a piece of artwork that folks would go visit.

And then is the artwork type. So there's a few different common ones you'll see in the dropdown if you're using the ID editor. In this case, I'm adding a sculpture. Name is the name of the piece of art, so whatever the artwork is called. In this case, the tinfoil-looking guy with the containers on his head is named Takeaway. And the artist's name, so that's important to give credit where credit is due.

There's several other tags, and there's the wiki link if you would like to look up more information. But these four tags here I think are the four critical ones if you want to add a piece of art. Once you've added your pieces of artwork, they will show up as point symbols with the name of the artwork in the OpenStreetMap tiles.

Like many people, I like to use Overpass Turbo to extract data out of OpenStreetMap. In this case, I'm using that tourism artwork tag to extract all of the art pieces in and around Los Angeles County.

So after you've extracted your art from OpenStreetMap, what might you like to do with it? There's several different ideas of things. I've been using it to create a scavenger hunt for a charity fundraiser. This hunt will provide a list of places to go to participants.

We'll then go to the location and find the piece of art and then answer a riddle about that artwork. If you'd like to connect, here's my contact information. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you and your family get to enjoy some beautiful public art in your city.