Taking a flexible approach to site-specificity is essential to making rent and entering museum collections. But this strategy has more than pure practicality on its side, some artists say. Even the most seemingly unmovable pieces can benefit from a change of scenery. Tom Burr initially created 2017’s “The Railings (May, 1970)” as one part of a larger site-specific installation inside a gutted Marcel Breuer building in New Haven. The piece was shaped by the conditions of that space (code compliance required Burr to cordon off a depression in the floor with some kind of barrier), New Haven history (the railing is inscribed with the speech Jean Genet delivered on the town green defending the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale) and local references (its X shapes echo those of the railings on Yale’s campus). When the installation closed, the Art Institute of Chicago acquired “The Railings” and installed them outdoors in a different configuration. As Jordan Carter, a curator at the Art Institute, pointed out, Genet first met the Black Panthers in Chicago amid the protests and violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Changing sites allows the piece, as Burr wrote in an email, to be “forever finding new points and places of reception, new things to bump up against.”

Kelly was an early champion of this nimble approach. Several of his most important site-specific commissions have moved, including “Color Panels for a Large Wall” (1978), which was originally conceived for a Cincinnati bank, where it hung in two rows of nine monochromatic canvases. When the company anticipated corporate changes in 1992, the artist went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, but he didn’t like the space. Kelly got the panels back in exchange for two smaller pieces. The work was then installed at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it replaced a site-specific tapestry by Joan Miró. To fit the space, Kelly reconfigured the panels into three rows of six, an arrangement he reportedly preferred to the original.

Kelly thought deeply about how his work interacted with architecture — an early epiphany occurred in a Paris museum, where he was more inspired by the windows than the masterpieces on the walls — but he enjoyed seeing it in different spaces. According to Jack Shear, Kelly’s widower and the executive director of his foundation, not one of the artist’s site-specific works could be conceptually destroyed by moving it, as “Tilted Arc” was.

In fact, Kelly would have been more upset if certain site-specific works didn’t move. “Sculpture for a Large Wall” (1957), a major early commission for the Philadelphia Transportation Building, barely survived the defunct bus hub’s decline. Shear recalled the night he and Kelly visited the abandoned building and peered through the windows to check on the piece, Kelly’s largest at the time of its creation. A grim scene greeted them. Pigeons had moved in, the work was filthy and the porous metal panels were falling apart. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen aluminum furniture that’s been left out in the elements — it gets pretty funky pretty quick,” said Shear. Devastated, Kelly expressed as much to his gallerist Matthew Marks, who bought the work and, after extensive restoration done by Kelly himself, sold it to Ronald and Jo Carole Lauder, who in 1998 gave it to the Museum of Modern Art.