Cracks in the Pavement: Gifts in the Urban Landscape was a multi-phased, interactive project that called attention to liminal spaces encountered throughout everyday life. The project focused on details within the urban landscape and encouraged close inspection of social space. Artists based in locations around the world responded to their own urban environments by making art objects designed to be placed and left in sites meaningful or intriguing to them - at bus shelters, in alleys, under bridges, in libraries or post offices, or deep in park bushes. Members of the public were then invited to search for these site-specific works using maps and clues provided at a website, and to keep whatever works they found. Art that went undiscovered simply remained in the landscape indefinitely to be encountered by chance, displaced, or transformed by the very environmental forces that defined each piece's context.
The project was started in Austin, Texas, in June 2004, initially featuring the works of 15 Austin-based and international artists who placed works at sites in Austin and London, UK, and was presented as part of the London Biennale 2004 (a biennial art festival founded by the late David Medalla in 2000). In 2005, Cracks included works by over 60 artists at multiple locations in countries around the world, including Australia, Israel, Germany, Canada, England, Norway, France, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Mexico, and the United States.
