This article offers an introductory framework for public art that supports an inquiry approach to instruction. "Public art," or for the purposes of this article, "artworks outside museum and gallery walls," is a large and complex subject that lends itself to a variety of categorical divisions. A basic category, for example, includes the various forms that public art can take, including murals (e.g., wall paintings and mosaics), three-dimensional works (e.g., statuary and earthworks), and performance pieces (e.g., Happenings). This article focuses on various orientations to public art, and whatever forms those approaches may take. Of course, the vast array of public artworks and the independent working styles of contemporary artists defy exact categorization. It is important that students see these orientations as generalizations with unclear borders. Thus the categories are meant only as preliminary guides for initiating student inquiry. Students should be encouraged to critically analyze the categories, find exceptions, and note overlaps. The orientations of public art can be divided into three broad classifications corresponding roughly to pre-modernist, modernist, and postmodernist approaches. Indeed, public art is too complex to be wholly accounted for by any typology. Thus these orientations are meant to serve solely as introductory concepts. Although this framework is an oversimplification, it is not simple or simplistic. Students should find it challenging, at least initially. They should be encouraged to find exceptions to and overlaps among these orientations for the purpose of viewing and investigating public art, and then move beyond them.