Milton Keynes in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

has a collection of modern art, primarily sculpture, in its public buildings and open spaces.

Public art

The

Milton Keynes Development Corporation Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC) was a development corporation operating from 1967 to 1992 oversee the planning and early development of Milton Keynes, a new town midway between London and Birmingham. Establishment MKDC established o ...

had an ambitious

public art Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically acce ...

programme and over 50 works were commissioned, mostly still extant. This programme also had two strands: a populist one which involved the local community in the works, the most famous of which is

Liz Leyh The ''Concrete Cows'' in Milton Keynes, England are an iconic work of sculpture, created in 1978 by the American artist Liz Leyh. There are three cows and three calves, approximately half life size. The ''Cows'' are constructed from scrap, s ...

Concrete Cows The ''Concrete Cows'' in Milton Keynes, England are an iconic work of sculpture, created in 1978 by the American artist Liz Leyh. There are three cows and three calves, approximately half life size. The ''Cows'' are constructed from scrap, ...

, a group of concrete Friesian cows which have become the unofficial logo of the town. There is also a tradition of abstract geometrical art hanging in the Midsummer Arcade of the Shopping Building,

Central Milton Keynes Central Milton Keynes is the central business district of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England and a civil parish in its own right, with a town council. The district is approximately long by wide and occupies some of the highest land in Mi ...

. One such piece is Lilliane Lijn's "Circle of Light", though its mechanism has not worked for many years. In Netherfield Park, Peter Codling's 2003 "Alphabet Artworks" are based on the 26 letters of the English (Latin)

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

.Alphabet Artworks, Netherfield Park, Milton Keynes
, Artist: Peter Codling, accessed 28 September 2008

External links

References

Milton Keynes Arts in Buckinghamshire {{UK-art-display-stub