When legions of sports fans converge on Vancouver this month for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the city will be prepared to grab their eyes with more than just dazzling world-class athleticism. To complement such enormously popular attractions as figure skating, short-track speed skating, and hockey, Vancouver will be presenting a bevy of dramatic art and cultural events that are varied enough to be a draw in their own right.

Public art, in particular, will be on widespread display. Visitors disembarking at Vancouver International Airport will be greeted by a striking new artwork by New York-based artist Dennis Oppenheim, a iridescent loop-de-loop of steel and lexan acrylic that was first unveiled last October as part of the Vancouver Biennial. Then, in City Center, Chinese artist duo the Gao Brothers have installed the attention-grabbing (and provocative) Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head, a 20-foot-tall, polished stainless steel statue that satirically depicts Mao Zedong as a bare-breasted female trapeze artist balancing atop the head of Vladimir Lenin.

Other intriguing artworks, installed specifically for the Games as part of the Olympics cultural programming, dot the city. The most spectacular of these, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Vectorial Elevation, will literally fill the sky. An interactive light sculpture consisting of 20 robotic searchlights arrayed at the opening of Vancouver's English Bay, the piece will allow visitors (or anyone, really) to design lighting configurations, via a dedicated Web site, that will be rotated from dusk to dawn. Commissioned by the 2010Cultural Olympiad and Vancouver’s Olympic and Paralympic Public Art Program (the Paralympics will take place there in March), the resulting light display will be visible for a nine-mile radius. The work was originally designed for Mexico City's millennium celebrations.

For another sprawling installation, Toronto artist Natalie Noonan has curated "Endlessly Traversed Landscapes," a show of provocative site-specific poster art — such Canadian artist Sandy Plotnikoff's beautiful Italian landscape overlaid with the words "Holidays Canceled," which is posted in Vancouver’s gritty downtown East Side — that has been spread across the city's billboards and bus shelters. In the spirit of going big, Taiwanese artist Michael Lin has also draped a 6,000-square-foot hand-painted mural over the northern façade of the Vancouver Art Gallery, which overlooks the Georgia Street Plaza, the city’s largest square.

There's art to see inside, too. Aside from Lin's mural, the Vancouver Art Gallery will be presenting a special exhibition of Leonardo da Vincis anatomical drawings on loan from Britain's Royal Collection. The museum is also notable as being home to a major collection of works by Canadian painter Emily Carr, and other homegrown talent will be on view at galleries around the city. Catriona Jeffries Gallery, located in a converted warehouse in Vancouver's East Side False Creek area and known for showing emerging as well as top-ranked Canadian and international contemporary artists, is highlighting Vancouver artist Geoffrey Farmer with a solo exhibition titled “The Surgeon and the Photographer,” on view though March 6. For those looking for art of an older vintage, the Inuit Gallery of Vancouver in the city’s bustling historic Gastown neighborhood has an exceptional collection of indigenous Canadian art.

In addition to the visual art throughout the city, an abundance of cultural offerings in other mediums will be present as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad, a programming series that began in 2008 and will culminate during the Games. Running from February 16 to 21, Laurie Anderson will debut "Delusion," a phantasmagorical new piece that will combine electronic puppetry, music, and characters ranging from nuns to elves and golems. Then Québéçois director Robert Lepage is presenting "The Blue Dragon," a lushly visual production at Simon Fraser University’s new Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre from February 2 to 27. The sequel to "The Dragons’ Trilogy" that helped launch Lepage’s international career, "The Blue Dragon," set in contemporary Shanghai, features the return, after 20 years, of the principal character in the 1985 production.

Rounding out the cultural schedule, R&B artists India.Arie and Raphael Saadiq will be giving performances, as will Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, the Moscow State Chamber Choir, and STREB Extreme Action, a New York-based dance company known for its incredible jumps and live-action stunts. All told, making one's way through the arts offerings in Vancouver this month will be an Olympic event of its own.