Creating an Artistic Buzz, One Real Estate Development at a Time

By Dave Montgomery

Sept. 3, 2024

Artwork has been part of urban projects for decades, but a new push from developers looking for ways to drive foot traffic has created a boom for the art world.

On Kilroy Realty’s website, the developer declares that it “has a love affair with great art.”

These days, many builders do.

The 36-story Indeed Tower in downtown Austin, Texas, among Kilroy’s projects, has a suspended sculpture of neon lighting by the Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans. The $6 billion Miami Worldcenter, the second-largest urban mixed-used development in the United States behind Hudson Square in New York, has a sprawl of brightly colored artwork and sculptures. At Industry City, a 16-building multipurpose campus in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a rotating display shows the works of hundreds of creators, including the French designer Camille Walala and the sculptor Dan Lam.

Emily Eisenhart, who has produced murals in San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, New York and her hometown, Austin, said developers had become her “patrons of the arts.”

“The canvas just happens to be the side of a building,” she said.

Growing interest in public art for private projects is altering the face of city centers across the country. The presence of art in real estate developments “drives traffic and engagement,” provides an amenity for office employees and increases sales for retailers, said Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown, an international real estate firm and creator of the rotating art program that includes the display in Industry City.

Artwork has been integrated into urban development for decades to help stimulate economic recovery, exemplified by the Depression-era pieces of Works Progress Administration artists that are still visible in many buildings. But in more recent years, some builders in states like Florida and California began to pull back when local governments threatened to require them to put a percentage of their development budgets toward art projects, a mandate that landlords said would drive up construction costs.

Now, postpandemic, sentiments have changed yet again, as developers, in a bleak office market, are adorning their projects with art of all shapes and sizes as they look for ways to attract people who might want to shop, eat, live or work in the area.

A recent study by the University of Cincinnati found foot traffic in areas of the city featuring murals and sculptures increased three times when compared with Cincinnati neighborhoods without art displays. Specifically, in areas with commercial amenities, such as cafes and restaurants, foot traffic is 43 percent higher in locations with murals than in those without.

Lee Brodsky, chief executive of BEB Capital, called the current office market “the hardest office market, at least in my lifetime.” Consequently, he installed a 15-foot mural outside the company’s building in Port Washington in New York, in an attempt to boost “curb appeal,” he said, and attract more office tenants looking for a neighborhood with cultural cachet. The mural features a white lighthouse with a yellow beacon meant to symbolize the company’s properties throughout the East Coast.

“I believe that if we didn’t have art, people would walk in and say, ‘This is very nice, but I’d rather either work from home or stay where I am,’” Mr. Brodsky said.

Reaching consumers through culture and community programming is a move that luxury brands have long made: Gucci stores, for example, are essentially art spaces with valuable works on their walls, and Miu Miu has a book club.

At Music Lane in Austin, art has helped to bring in more customers and keep them inside stores, said Andrew Joblon, founder and managing principal at Turnbridge Equities, which developed the shopping and entertainment complex on South Congress Avenue.

“Rather than looking at a blank wall or brick or glass or concrete, they’re seeing some beautiful art, and it’s aesthetically pleasing,” Mr. Joblon said. He hopes that shoppers will stay and make purchases after admiring the art.

The art-in-development surge has ignited a boom among artists, consultants, galleries and related endeavors. A recent study by CODAworx, which works to connect artists with projects and commissioners, found that public art commissions last year totaled $4.4 billion from corporations, cities, airports, hospitals, churches and other organizations. Forty-one percent of those commissions were from government agencies, and 59 percent from commercial, nonprofit and private organizations. And more than 40 percent of those who commissioned art in 2023 expected to purchase even more art this year, according to the CODAworx study.

“There’s been a huge shift,” said Tze Chun, who started Uprise Art gallery in New York in 2011 and now works with at least 150 artists. “In the beginning, we would really have to convince developers that it was worth investing in original art by emerging artists.”

The trend has not only enhanced developments but also raised the fortunes of artists. “They’re giving us the means and platform to truly express our artistic vision,” said J Muzacz, an Austin mosaic artist who chronicled his city’s eclectic street art scene in the book “ATX Urban Art.”

A mural can cost building owners more than $400,000, and one-of-a-kind art objects, such as sculptures and designed light works, can push costs even higher. Chris Heimburger, executive vice president of development at Kilroy Realty, the developer behind the Indeed Tower, said each piece of art at Indeed was worth “many thousands of dollars.” And, he said, at Kilroy’s 30-story 350 Mission Street Tower in San Francisco, which opened in 2015, expenses for a 40-foot-by-70-foot digital media wall, as well as other art, ran into the millions.

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Developers have also increasingly installed art in residential buildings as a popular amenity to help draw tenants. Steven Charno, president of Douglaston Development in New York, said art had become a “significant investment” in his company’s portfolio, including at 3Eleven, a 60-story residential property that opened in Manhattan in 2022.

“From Day 1, we set aside money in the budget for artwork, and we hadn’t done it before to this scale, but we’re really glad we did,” Mr. Charno said, noting that artwork “helps to differentiate us” from competitor buildings in the same neighborhood. “We think it makes a big difference.”

Jonathan Rose, founder and president of Jonathan Rose Companies, which co-developed Sendero Verde, a three-building residential project that opened recently in East Harlem, said artwork helped establish “a deeper connection” to the culture and history of the neighborhood. Sendero Verde, which includes more than 700 affordable housing units, features two outdoor murals by the Hispanic artists Maria Dominguez and Betsy Casañas portraying the native plants and history of the area dating to the Indigenous Lenape people.

Ms. Eisenhart, the Austin artist, said she typically conducted meticulous research and interviews before climbing atop a scaffold. On a terrace at Symphony Square, a mixed-use development near downtown Austin, is a large abstract mural that Ms. Eisenhart painted as a tribute to the city’s music scene and Waller Creek, a 6.7-mile tributary that cuts through the heart of downtown. Her artwork depicts an array of musical and ecological touches, including a xylophone and trumpet, flora and fauna, salamanders, limestone banks and other features.

Symphony Square’s developer, Ivanhoé Cambridge, also has a high-rise in the musically rich neighborhood Deep Ellum in Dallas. That building, called the Stack at Deep Ellum, displays an 8,500-square-foot mural depicting the guitarist and Dallas native Stevie Ray Vaughan; the blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, who once performed on the streets of Deep Ellum; and other musical and civil rights icons.

Mr. Rose said he did not think art always “has to be about increasing the bottom line.”

“It can actually be about increasing the quality of life,” he said, “and that’s what we think this does.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/business/real-estate-public-art.html