This thesis explores the concept of public art within a Swedish state agency called Public Art Agency Sweden through ethnography conducted at their virtual meetings from the fall of 2020 to the beginning of 2021. With the analytical tool of assemblages, the concept of public art is explored in terms of becoming and contestation through looking at policies within the agencies in relation to employee’s everyday endeavours. I suggest that this gives an insight into the intersection between ideas and practices within a state agency that strives to make public art a meaningful contribution and integral part of Swedish society under the premisses of the Swedish national cultural political goal. As such the contribution of this thesis is analytical attention to public art in broader governance discourses within an area of the state and culture.

This thesis analyses the public art competitions arranged by the Public Art Agency Sweden (Statens konstråd) 1937-1970 and the discussions about public art competitions in within the art field of the 1940’s, -50’ and -60’s. The main material for this analysis has been the protocols of the Public Art Agency and the annual paper of the Swedish Artists' National Organization (Konstnärernas riksorganisation). The theoretical and methodological framework is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the art field, and institutions as agents within that field. I also use Foucauldian discourse theory as another theoretical tool to understand the power relations between these institutions in the art field. My aim has been to understand why there were competitions for public art commissions – the purposes, the processes, the discussions and how these factors change over the decades. The purpose for public art competition can be understood through the ideology of the Swedish welfare state and the cultural policy of the Social Democratic government in the 1930’s. The public art competitions could support the Swedish artists economically, but was also a way for the Swedish Government, through the Public Art Agency, to control and guarantee that the public artworks were of high artistic quality. This idea of artistic quality became more and more dominant as a purpose for the competitions through the 1950’s and 1960’s.  The artists active in the Swedish Artists' National Organization found the competitions to be of great importance and the competitions were much discussed in the organisations annual paper. Many of the artists that discussed the artist competitions were of the same generation born in the 1910’s or 1920’s and were working with public art commissions to a great extent. For them, the public art competitions gave recognition and a possible income. My analysis also shows that the public art competitions were also connected to the concept of modernism. The status of the competitions changed along with the changing concept of modernism. The competition was at its highest status in the 1930’s and 1940’s, when many artists were engaged in public art commissions. It became less popular among young artists in the 1960’s, when the art field was more politically radical and critical against authorities.

The purpose of this essay has been to investigate the conditions for making the Swedish national public art collections available with the help of digitization. Together with the art owned by the state the municipalities' and regions' art holdings have also been added to the delimitation, and in addition, the interpretation of the concept of public art is made broad by including both traditional framed and easily moveable art together with building-related art. The art collection in the focus of the essay is thus managed in a decentralized structure which is examined with a survey and a case study. The survey provides quantitative data on the size of the art collection and the choice of system. The case study aims to highlight the importance of the organizational form and to describe how digital technology is used today to make art accessible.  A summation of the municipal, regional and state collections of public art amounts to approximately one million works of art. The survey also showed that there is a great deal of variation when it comes to the choice of administrative data system for inventorying and otherwise managing the public sector's art collections. In order to be able to draw conclusions based on the choice of collection systems, a taxonomy was developed where a total of 35 different systems were sorted into five different characteristics. The analysis showed that the large art collections get more appropriate systems than small art collections and that there are rational grounds for these choices.  The case study showed that there is a great deal of variation when it comes to titles and naming of organizational units. The staff who work with art in the case study's small to medium-sized municipalities often have many and widely different areas of responsibility. Among the regions of the case study, there are examples of art being managed by the property administration, but the most common is that the activity belongs to the cultural administration. In the case study, it is not possible to find any connection between organizational form and degree of accessibility. On the other hand, it is expressed that shared premises with a museum provide a richer professional context. The degree of accessibility in the case study is as low as 1% of the collection in most cases. The way that art is made available, via an individual municipality or region's website, or social media, makes it difficult to search widely for works of art owned by the Swedish public sector. This last observation also becomes an essential part of the conclusion that the conditions for making public art accessible via digitization exist, but it is not a work that seems to be progressing successfully today.

Denna undersökning kretsar kring att lyfta offentlig konst och medborgarinflytande. Teorier och tidigare forskning som lagts fram har skapat förståelse för hur konst är ett betydelsefullt verktyg i stadsmiljön, som kan användas för att förbättra människors upplevelse av en plats. Därför är det viktigt att man inkluderar individer i framtagandet av de konstnärliga verken. Denna inkludering har undersökts i uppsatsen genom fallstudier på tre specifika konstprojekt. Två av dessa projekt valdes för att en av författarna hade deltagit i dem och kunde återberätta sin upplevelse. Dessa projekt är Street Art och Närlunda Tunneln, som utfördes av Helsingborgs stad. Det tredje projektet var den statliga satsningen Konst händer av Statens konstråd. I de kommunala projekten hittades ingen dokumentation som utförligt beskrev process och resultat. Därav utfördes intervjuer med deltagare i respektive projekt. Gällande Konst händer däremot, hittades nyanserad dokumentation som redovisade projektets process och resultat. Resultatet av studien visade att alla tre projekt inkluderat civilsamhället på olika sätt. Individerna fick vara en del av gestaltningen i både Street Art och Närlunda Tunneln. Genom intervjuerna gick det även att konstatera hur de kommunala projekten fortfarande inspirerar deltagarna än idag. Däremot är det Konst händer som har inkluderat människor i störst utsträckning, genom att låta dem påverka projektet som helhet fram tills att resultaten var nådda. Den övergripande slutsatsen som dras är att de tre projekten lyckats förhålla sig till forskningen kring offentlig konst och deltagande. Förhoppningen med studien och dess resultat är att uppmuntra till ökad medborgarinflytande i framtidens konstprojekt. / This thesis serves to elevate public art and civic influence. Theories and previous research has created an understanding of how art is a meaningful tool in the urban environment, which can be used to improve people’s experience of a place. Therefore, it is important to include people in the production of these artistic works. This inclusion has been investigated in the thesis through case studies on three specific art projects. Two of these projects were chosen as one of the authors had participated in them and was able to recount her experience. These projects are Street Art and Närlunda Tunneln, which were carried out by the municipality of Helsingborg. The third project was the state initiative Konst händer by the public art agency of Sweden. In the municipal projects, no documentation was found that described the process and results in detail. For this reason, interviews were done with participants in the respective projects. On the other hand, nuanced documentation was found that reported the process and results of Konst händer. The results of the study prove that all three projects included civil society in different ways. Individuals were a part of the design of both Street Art and Närlunda Tunneln. Through the interviews, it was further possible to ascertain how the municipal projects still inspire the participants to this today. Although, it is Konst händer that has included civic engagement to the greatest extent, by letting the people influence the project as a whole until the results were reached. The overall conclusion that is drawn is that the three projects succeeded following the research regarding public art and participation. The ambition of this study and its results is to encourage greater citizen influence in future art projects.