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The artist has a very specific role in the creation of public spaces. While architects and landscape engineers figure out how to construct their designs safely, often it falls to the artist to express the community's ideas about the new structure-their perspectives, values, or sense of place.  At the turn of the 20th Century, modern artists altered tradition by contributing to public spaces monumentally sized works expressing their own values, rather than the community's.  Today, as we move into the 21st century, public art is again being redefined, notably by contemporary artists who specialize in public art as a genre.  It is the role of the public artist to discern what is meaningful to a specific community and to express that meaning in conjunction with the artist's own ideas, through materials and in a format that admires the adjacent architecture and contributes to the overall design and use of a public space.