The Internet Says These Are The 5 Best Airports For Public Art - Islands (2024)

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Terms like "bank art" and "hotel art" evoke the kind of bland, institutional imagery used to decorate our public spaces in the most inoffensive and boring way possible. But airport art? That term has come to mean something entirely different. Today, airports are serving as serious venues for both permanent installations and rotating exhibition spaces. Airport technology continues to evolvein new and exciting ways, and, happily, so do the aesthetics, as more and more airports arehiring curators, commissioning work by major artists, and winning awards in the process.

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We scoured newspapers, art journals, blogs, and forums to surface and identify not just the airports with the most art, or even the best art, but the ones that have gotten people talking by creating a palpable sense of place. Below are our picks for the five most inspiring and delightful places to discover art that also happen to be airports. It was hard to choose, and we left off many standouts in order to highlight edginess, novelty, and sense of place over establishment cred — hence no San Francisco International, the only airport that's also an accredited museum. It's a crowded field, as more and more aviation institutions get wise to the fact that their captive audiences find art to be as elevating as any silver bird could ever be.

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This small airport serving California's capital city punches above its weight class when it comes to public art, which may have contributed to Sacramento International being ranked as the least stressful airport in the US for travel. When flying in to embark on a family road trip around Lake Tahoeor any to visit of the area's other attractions, kids and adults alike will point and grin during the escalator ride down to baggage claim as they pass Lawrence Argent's "Leap," a 56-foot long sculpture of a sleek, Ferrari-red rabbit diving through the atrium between floors and into a granite suitcase on the ground. The red geometric rabbit looks a little like it's wearing a Spider-Man costume, earning it the nickname "Spider-bunny."

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The lighthearted whimsy continues down in the baggage claim area with Brian Goggin's "Samson,"twin pillars constructed of vintage suitcases piled to the ceiling. The faux luggage looks realistic enough to cause many passengers waiting for their suitcases to arrive on the carousel to do a double-take. A total of twelve works of art were installed during the terminal's 2011 remodel, but these two gems stole Sacramentans' hearts, as they will yours.

Like Sacramento, TampaInternational Airport makes the list partly on the strength of an oversized animal who takes over the central terminal. In this case, it's a magnificent resin and fiberglass pink flamingo. All we see of the 21-foot tall bird is her feet, neck, and head as she pecks at the sea floor in artist Matthew Mazzotta's "Home." The rest of her body disappears above a shiny, rippling ceiling made to resemble the surface of water being seen from below. Special effects projectors add shimmer and movement, which is reflected on the floor, so visitors really feel they're underwater with the big bird locals affectionately nicknamed Phoebe in a naming contest that drew 65,000 entries. This international award-winning work of art accomplishes something few others have by becoming as much of an attraction as anything in the city it serves. "I've never wanted to go to Tampa," one Redditor wrote when the first renderings of the artwork appeared online. "I do now."

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It's no accident that travel expert and television hostSamantha Brown's favorite airport commissioned a winner from Mazzotta, an artist who is also a Guggenheim Fellow and Smithsonian Artist in Research.After all, the airport's impressive public art collection of mosaics, tapestries, and sculptures holds many other surprises as well. Near TSA security, Daniel Canogar's 2017 "Tendril" consists of curling LED strips that climb the ceiling trusses like vines, displaying images of native plants. And on the way to your rental car, visitors pass "Palimpsest," an extraordinary, 70-foot-long beaded tapestry that happens to be the work of one of the contemporary art world's hottest cutting-edge practitioners, Nick Cave. Your plane might not always be on time, but Tampa is.

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Courtesy Houston

Houston's twin airports, the jointly managed George Bush Intercontinental Airport and William P. Hobby Airport, are the only US airports to have an artist-in-residence program. Local artists are set up with workstations, and curious passengers can look over their shoulders and interact with them while they create. "We get the number of guests in a week than some of the most famous museums in the U.S. will welcome in an entire year," curator Curator of Public Art for Houston Airports Alton DuLaney said in a press release, noting that the program has been wildly popular with passengers and gives the artists great exposure, too. Hey, it sure beats flipping through copies of "Good Housekeeping" and "Consumer Reports" at the newsstand while you wait for your connecting flight.

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In 2023, Skytrax World Airport Reports awarded Houston the first ever award for Best Art in an Airport. Artist Janavi Mahimtura Folmsbee'sAquarius Art Tunnel, a 240-foot pedestrian tunnel made to resemble an aquarium, complete with sound and light, was endorsed by UNESCO for its educational and scientific importance. The project cost more than $325K to create.

"Houston, can you hear me?" isn't a call from space, but the title of Hana Hillerova's installation of cheerful origami-like florets (pictured), which appear light as air but are made of powder coated steel. Just the thing to get you in a sunny mood for a tour ofthe Space Coast. Andthose are just two of the350 works of art the airport owns, in a collection valued at $28 million.

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If someone blindfolded you, put you on a plane, flew you to this airport, and told you to guess where you were without leaving the premises, you'd look around and say, "Easy. This has to be Miami." That's how perfectly the Miami-Dade International Airport's collection of art installations captures the essence of the Magic City. ArtistJohn David Mooney's"Miami Wave," aset of beachy, deco-inspired "waves" cast in the concrete pavement and rendered in "Miami Vice"-era pastels, welcomes you to the airport's Toll Collection Plaza. Meanwhile, Christopher Janney's "Harmonic Convergence"turns the corridor connecting the terminal to the people mover into a vivid, enveloping rainbow where thunder roars and tropical birds screech.

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Jen Stark's psychedelic mural "Meltdown" (pictured) is designed to poke fun at a too-common airport state of mind. Then along comes the calming presence of Michele Oka Doner's award-winning "A Walk on the Beach: Tropical Garden," which litters the mile-long, sand-colored terrazzo floor of Terminal I with thousands of inlaid shells, seeds, and leaves made of cast bronze and mother-of-pearl. You almost can't help but slow to a languid, relaxed pace as you stroll along this gleaming beach.

Barbara Neijna's "Foreverglades" turns the South Terminal's Concourse J into a temple, embedding 65,000 square feet of black terrazzo floor with words fromearly environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas' 1947 book "River of Grass," the book that inspired the formation of Everglades National Park. Walls of colored glass throw light on the subject, while bas relief castings contain fossils, shark teeth, beads, and grasses all originating from the Everglades. You'll wish for a longer layover as you explore this serene and sprawling creation.

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You could call Singapore's Changi Airport a work of art in its own right. It's a wonderland, with features like the Discovery Garden, where undulating sky paths weave between sculptured trees covered with real vines; the Jewel Changi entertainment complex, with theWalking Netthat allows you to bounce, suspended in the air like a trapeze artist in the circus; and the tallest indoor waterfall in the world, the Jewel Rain Vortex, raining water down from seven stories above the floor.

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But the actual, commissioned artworks on display stand out even among so many jaw-dropping attractions. Kinetic Rain (pictured), hanging in Terminal 1's central atrium, consists of shiny, coppery metal droplets suspended on invisible wires that move in choreographed concert, much like a fountain or a flock of birds. The movement is soothing, graceful, and just what you need when you're standing in line waiting to check in for the world's longest non-stop flight– a little dose of nirvana.

In Terminal 3, Christian Moeller's"Daisy," a towering sculpture of a robotic red propeller that resembles a flower, responds to the movements of passersby by whirling and turning. In Terminal 4, "Chandelier" is an award-winning 50-foot tall sculpture, a collaboration between Norwegian design firm Snohetta and Playpoint Singapore, in the form of a giant, inverted mesh dome of rope and steel full of chutes, ladders, and slides. It's an artwork that doubles as a play structure for kids and adults to work out those middle-seat kinks.

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When it came to determining which airports to showcase here, surprise and delight were as important to our admittedly subjective selection process as prestige, scale, and budget. We gave extra weight to airports where the art really spoke to the experience of travel or served as a particularly compelling introduction to the city the airport serves. That's why colorful Miami, with its hyper-local installations, edged out Chicago, despite the Windy City's impressive, iconic multi-million dollar installations.

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Honorable mention has to go to Hamad International Airport in Doha, Qatar,for its commitment to bleeding-edge modern art. The decision to feature Urs Fischer's "Lamp Bear," a giant, slumped-over yellow teddy bear (pictured), its head stuck inside a lamp, took nerve. Describing its impact, one thoughtful Redditor writes, "Despite how creepy it is, the piece is pretty profound. The idea of childish innocence being impaled by the rigor and stress of a career-based adulthood is pretty relatable for most people." That's some heavy baggage, and not the kind you can check at the gate. Respect.