Yazmany Arboleda

Yazmany Arboleda (born May 7, 1981) is a Colombian-American artist based in New York City whose work includes large-scale participatory installations and public interventions addressing social, cultural, and political themes.

Arboleda serves as New York City’s first People’s Artist at the Civic Engagement Commission, where he has described his participatory approach as “Living Sculptures”—projects organized around collective making and shared action in public space. Trained as an architect, he has framed public space as a site for civic participation and community engagement.

Arboleda has been commissioned by institutions including Carnegie Hall, the Yale School of Management, and the United Nations. He has lectured on art in public space, and was named one of Good Magazine’s 100 People Making Our World Better in 2013.

His work has included projects in conflict and post-conflict settings. In 2013, he participated in a Kabul project in which 10,000 pink balloons were distributed across the city as a collective public gesture. In Johannesburg, he used color interventions on derelict high-rise buildings to draw attention to housing neglect and allegations of corruption.

In 2015, Arboleda developed Colour In Faith, a project in which religious communities across Kenya collaborated to paint the exteriors of mosques, temples, and churches yellow as a gesture of solidarity and coexistence. The project was nominated later that year for the Disruption By Design (DxD) award.

Arboleda holds a Master of Architecture degree from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and has completed art and design programs at Parsons School of Design in New York City, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Istituto Marangoni in Milan and London. In 2014, he participated in the Juilliard School’s inaugural inter-arts program.

Arboleda has written for the Huffington Post on art and culture, including interviews with figures such as Anna Deavere Smith, Anish Kapoor, Lauren Hutton, and Marina Abramović.

In 2020, Arboleda was appointed the first Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Civic Engagement Commission. In that role, he helped transform a former Department of Correction bus used on Rikers Island into the People’s Bus, a mobile civic space for art-making, storytelling, and participatory democracy.

In 2023, the People’s Bus was transformed into Tippy: The Tender People’s Money Monster, a large-scale mobile puppet created to promote New York City’s first citywide participatory budgeting initiative, known as The People’s Money.