Intuit Dome: Where Art Competes With Hot Dogs, Beer and Busy Fans

Art in the wild — that is, in public spaces outside of museums and galleries — will succeed or fail depending on its capacity to speak meaningfully and surprisingly to its environment. A sublime Alexander Calder sculpture can look inert if plunked in a corporate plaza. A flippant Banksy mural, on a dreary back street, can be just the thing.

When several thousand Bruno Mars fans streamed toward Intuit Dome, the Los Angeles Clippers’ new stadium in Inglewood, Calif., for sold-out concerts on Thursday and Friday last week, competing for their attention were six public artworks.

Some performed better than others.

The artworks are part of an $11 million package of new commissions for the semipublic plaza in front of the stadium.

“It had to be something that would be meaningful to the community, and it had to be something that made sense for this specific location,” said Ruth Berson, an independent consultant and former deputy director of curatorial affairs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who curated the collection.

All the artists in Berson’s program live in Los Angeles. Michael Massenburg lives in Inglewood itself, a cityclose to LAX, the Los Angeles International Airport. Inglewood’s population is majority Hispanic or Latino and Black, and Massenburg — an artist, teacher and community organizer — reflects its diverse heritage in a 100-foot-long mural “Cultural Playground,” which runs along a building outside the plaza.