Introduction

This introduction reflects on the experience of editing the Let's Go Outside: Art in Public reader amidst the COVID-19 pandemic crisis that unfolded over 2020 and 2021.The author notes the introduction was written in October 2021, as Melbourne emerged from the last lockdown of 2021 which lasted seventy-seven days. Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, the author along with other Melbournians, had endured more than 250 days in lockdown—the longest period anywhere in the world. The introduction reflects on the experience of writing and thinking about public art from the context of this prolonged lockdown, where the public was unable to experience art or be outside in the same ways that they usually do. It describes the experience of attending Let’s Go Outside: Making Art Public symposium presented in Melbourne by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and Monash Art Projects in August 2019, which in hindsight was a momentous and auspicious gathering given that the COVID-19 crisis would profoundly limit the capacity to travel and assemble in person a mere six months later. Taking up debates from that symposium, the Let’s Go Outside reader reflects on the growing interest in making and presenting art outside of conventional gallery contexts and explores the opportunities and complexities of realising art in the public realm. The introduction describes how these debates are lent further force in the context of COVID-19, with the reader arriving at a timely moment as the public begins to anticipate, renavigate and rethink what is wanted and needed from public spaces, proximity with art and experiences of communality.