NEW YORK— When Gabriel “Specter” Reese says public art is “all about the community,” he means it literally. The artist interviewed more than 800 senior citizens in Flatbush, Brooklyn, while he was making his latest large-scale work, A Collection of Local Memories. His interview subjects’ reminiscences — about neighborhood characters, houses, and storefronts, many of them long gone — are brightly painted onto the freestanding, three-sided mural in a plaza at Ocean and Parkside avenues.

“It’s a community-based message,” Reese says.

Along with its local theme, the mural also fits into the neighborhood visually. Reese has his roots in street art, rising through the ranks in Toronto and Montreal before becoming a regular on the New York scene, and his public pieces reflect that urban sensibility. A Collection of Local Memories, like much of Reese’s other art, juxtaposes an edgy city style with polished, detailed figurative work.

The mural, which went up early this month, is the second in a new series of five installations from the New York City Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program. The program partners with local nonprofit organizations to commission public artworks as part of the DOT’s World Class Streets initiative. Launched in October 2008, the art program, which has done several one-off projects during its kickoff year, is now coming into its own with its first series and its most ambitious installations.

New York chooses public artworks much like other cities — an art advisory committee helps decide on proposals from nonprofits — but the Urban Art Program differs from other such programs because all of its installations are temporary, going up for 11 months or less. A temporary program involves fewer regulatory hurdles than traditional public art programs do, and, according to the DOT’s assistant commissioner for urban design and art, Wendy Feuer, “it creates an opportunity to keep the city looking fresh and for us to keep trying new things.”

That’s not to say the New York program doesn’t have its challenges. Because it is part of the DOT, whose main focus is on transportation, planning can be complicated. “Our primary responsibility is to make sure the streets and sidewalks work safely and efficiently, and putting art there can be a delicate balance,” Feuer says. “Every time we use a resource, we are taking it away from something else, so we have to be very sensitive.”

At the same time, she adds, public art is an integral part of the city’s goal to create “world-class streets” — a plan for putting New York at the forefront of urban development worldwide by creating vibrant public spaces — so the program justifies itself.

Partnering with nonprofit organizations also eases some of the financial burden, as those nonprofits take over the maintenance of artworks, and many of the artists and organizations donate their own resources. And because the program was designed to be financially modest, it has weathered the economic downturn well, with no complaints heard from the public, according to the DOT.

Choosing artworks for the public realm is yet another balancing act. Feuer says that beyond safety, site, and durability, planners have to balance concept and function. “There was a tendency for a while in public art to totally integrate the art,” she says. “Artists ended up creating doorknobs or grates, and I started to feel like you were losing the art.” At the same time, she adds, “there’s a big difference between public art and art for a museum.”

Reese says he solves the problem by making work that has a straightforward message. “It’s a different approach. You don’t dumb it down, but you make it relatable for a wide variety of viewers by adding hints in the form of visual language.”

Diego Medina, an artist who recently erected the abstract, three-dimensional wood sculpture Aurora at East Tremont Avenue and Boston Road in the Bronx, combines the esoteric with the practical. Aurora, a looming, geometric work that’s startling in its precision and clean simplicity, is based on a “La Aurora,” a Spanish poem about 1930s New York by Federico Garcia Lorca. The sculpture hints at darker, more intricate themes, but it also invites passers-by to touch and rest on the piece.

“It has to be interactive,” Medina says. “I also want it to create a dialogue between the artist and the public. This sculpture is to sit on, to reunite around it and to talk about life, this life in New York. The intention of my work is to share my interest in being conscious of the present time and space and to respond to them in a relevant way.”

Feuer says her main goal for the Urban Art Program is simply “to improve the public environment,” but she also hopes installations like Aurora and A Collection of Local Memories add an element of serendipity. “One of the greatest things about public art is the idea of putting artworks in places where people don’t necessarily expect them,” she says. “That’s the most rewarding part.”

In addition to A Collection of Local Memories and Aurora, the Urban Art Program’s new series includes Welcomed Guests, 10 outdoor seats made from barrels that also support birdhouses mounted atop 14-foot poles, on Columbia Street and Halleck Street near Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Two additional installations are Urban Garden, a sculpture made from recycled bike parts that went up in mid-September at Queens Plaza South on Vernon Boulevard (under the Queensboro Bridge), and Dream Outside the Box, a representation of the American flag that features quotes by elementary school students, which goes on display in October at West 97th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues.