Urban Gallery

Urban Gallery turns your city into an open-air art gallery.

It maps the public art — sculptures, murals, installations, monuments — across thousands of cities and towns on six continents. Every piece tells you what it is, who made it, and how to walk there. The gallery is free to walk; we don't include pieces behind paid admission.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Browse a live map of public art — your starting city and beyond. Zoom out to see the neighboring cities as dots, then dive in to explore.
• Filter by type (sculpture, mural, installation, monument) or search by artist or title.
• Sort nearby pieces by real distance from your location.
• Tap any piece for the artist, year, materials, and a description. Where Wikimedia Commons has a photo, we show it with credit. Otherwise, "See photos" runs a Google Image search.
• Build a curated walking tour from where you are. Pick a duration, a starting point, and the kinds of art you want. The tour fits the time you have.
• Save tours, mark them as walked, and revisit them later.

WHY WE MADE IT

Most public art lives in scattered city datasets, OpenStreetMap tags, and museum archives. No one has pulled it together into something you can actually use while walking around. Urban Gallery is the "do" tool we wanted — not another museum app. The city is already the museum.

WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM

Each city's gallery is assembled from open-data portals where they exist, OpenStreetMap contributors worldwide, photographs from Wikimedia Commons via Wikidata, and pieces submitted in the field by Patrons (see below). Sources are credited per city in the app's Settings tab.

PATRONS

Free to use, with banner ads on the free tier. A Patron subscription ($4.99/month or $39.99/year — first 100 annual Patrons pay $24.99 for year 1 as the Founding rate, then renew at $39.99/year) does four things:

• Clears the ads from your gallery.
• Unlimited saved tours (free tier saves up to two).
• Unlocks the in-app contributor flow — stand at a piece, take a photo, and it joins the map for everyone.
• First walk through new categories as they ship (architecture and history are coming).

Auto-renews until cancelled. Manage or cancel anytime in Google Play → Account → Subscriptions.

PRIVACY

We collect as little as possible. The app works without an account. Optional sign-in lets you save tours and become a Patron. We use a small set of third-party services (Mapbox for tiles, Supabase for hosting, Sentry for crash reports, Google AdMob for the free-tier banner, Google Play Billing for the Patron pass) — full privacy policy at backroomstrategies.com/urban-gallery/privacy.

FROM BACK ROOM STRATEGIES

Urban Gallery is built by Back Room Strategies Ltd, a small civic strategy operation. Contact: seth@backroomstrategies.com.

Recent changes:
• Browse the map — explore public art around the world without picking a city first.
• Saint Paul's sidewalk poems now have their own "Poetry" category on the map.
• Fixed a bug that could leave the app stuck on the loading screen.