Eight Works of Art in Unlikely Places | Travel

Art can be found in some of the most unlikely places. You simply need to know where to look.

In her new book Art Escapes, published by gestalten, author Grace Banks takes readers on a world tour of some of the most unexpected locations to see art, from deep in a jungle in central Mexico to the barren expanse that is the Sahara Desert. As a journalist who reports regularly on culture and the arts, Banks has spent much of her decade-long career crisscrossing the continents in search of a good story, which has enabled her to have a firsthand look at some of the most inspirational artworks found outside the confines of museums and art galleries.

“Whenever I’d visit a new place, I’d always look up the most remote, lesser-known piece of art in the area,” Banks says. “From doing this I found many incredible places…I kept thinking how this would make a great book so people could be inspired by the art and also to travel.”

The result is an art atlas featuring more than four dozen art escapes spread across six continents, including sculptures, installations, murals and light projections. For every well-known locale mentioned (the highly Instagrammable Prada Marfa in Texas, for instance), Banks sprinkles in several other artworks that are off the beaten path (the Steilneset Memorial in Norway and the Red House in England, for example), creating a must-read for art enthusiasts and travelers alike.

“I’d always kept a messy and slightly rambling iPhone Notes list of all the places I’d visited and the tiniest most remote places I’d been…so I referred to that a lot,” she says. “The rest was research, searching high and low for things—it paid off!”

Here are eight art destinations worth visiting:

Desert Breath (El Gouna, Egypt)

To create Desert Breath, a one-million-square-foot artwork smack dab in the middle of the Sahara Desert, artists Alexandra Stratou, Danae Stratou and Stella Constantinides used a medium that was widely available to them: sand. Together, the three artists built hills of sand of different sizes, juxtaposing them by digging out circular holes, all in a spiral pattern. In…