In this Monday, Oct. 8, 2018 photo, a car is parked by the mural entitled "JFK" by Desiree Kelly in Royal Oak, Mich. Thousands of murals and metal, sculpture and stained glass have sprouted up as public art in metro Detroit and Michigan, in an effort to add beauty, honor history, spread conversation and culture, attract visitors and boost economic growth. (Kathleen Galligan /Detroit Free Press via AP)

DETROIT — A mural of President John F. Kennedy wearing multicolored sunglasses pops on the side of a cement-block building in Royal Oak.

A rusted-brown metal horse sculpture, its mane blowing in the breeze, stands in the grass at Mount Clemens’ southern gateway.

A giant pigeon with shades of purple and blue graces one side of an old barn in a farming area near Port Austin.

While they are distinctly different, these exhibits are among the thousands of murals and metal, sculpture and stained glass that have sprouted up as public art in metro Detroit and Michigan.

A menagerie of color, shape, texture and size are found in big cities, such as Detroit — which has a range of public art from the Heidelberg Project to the City Walls mural project that is expanding to 60 locations as a way to address sites frequently targeted by illegal graffiti taggers — and in small ones, such as Baldwin, home to the world’s largest brown trout sculpture.

It’s all in an effort to add beauty, honor history, spread conversation and culture, attract visitors and boost economic growth, including through art tourism.

Murals in the Market in Detroit has been an annual event that attracts thousands of people to the city’s Eastern Market district to view newly painted murals every fall.

“(Public art) can make our 1-square-mile universe a much better place. It looks better, it feels better,” John Bracey, executive director of the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, told the Detroit Free Press .

The influx in public art in Michigan is keeping in line of with a growing interest in public art nationally — showing up everywhere from on manhole covers to buses to sidewalks to alley walls. It’s also a measure of a town’s coolness.

The Americans for the Arts, the nation’s leading nonprofit for advancing the arts and arts education, conducted a survey last year that identified 728 public art programs in the United States — twice as many as were identified in a Fiscal Year 2001 report.

Bracey said while public art has been around for decades — 41 post offices in Michigan have significant works from the Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression era — it continues to be created on professional and community scales around the state, bringing educational programs to students, telling a community’s story and allowing people to gather and connect.

“I feel public art displays are a really important part in not just defining a community, but generating civic pride in what a community identity would or could be,” said Phil Gilchrist, executive director of the Anton Art Center in Mount Clemens, which is home to least a dozen pieces of public art — from sculptures to a mural — for years in its downtown area.