INGLEWOOD, CALIF.- Art in the wild — that is, in public spaces outside of museums and galleries — will succeed or fail depending on its capacity to speak meaningfully and surprisingly to its environment. A sublime Alexander Calder sculpture can look inert if plunked in a corporate plaza. A flippant Banksy mural, on a dreary back street, can be just the thing.

When several thousand Bruno Mars fans streamed toward Intuit Dome, the Los Angeles Clippers’ new stadium in Inglewood, California, for sold-out concerts Thursday and Friday last week, competing for their attention were six public artworks.

Some performed better than others.

The artworks are part of an $11 million package of new commissions for the semipublic plaza in front of the stadium.

“It had to be something that would be meaningful to the community, and it had to be something that made sense for this specific location,” said Ruth Berson, an independent consultant and former deputy director of curatorial affairs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who curated the collection.

All the artists in Berson’s program live in Los Angeles. Michael Massenburg lives in Inglewood itself, a city close to LAX, the Los Angeles International Airport. Inglewood’s population is majority Hispanic or Latino and Black, and Massenburg — an artist, teacher and community organizer — reflects its diverse heritage in a 100-foot-long mural “Cultural Playground,” which runs along a building outside the plaza.

In Massenburg’s mural, best admired from cars inching down Prairie Avenue, a mariachi guitarrón, a djembe, a soccer player, a dunking basketball player and a folklórico dancer all meld blithely together. Aesthetically, the piece is hardly progressive, but Berson says that it has already drawn more positive feedback from local people than any other work.

Arriving across a bridge from the parking garage, visitors can spot not only “Cultural Playground” on the street below, but also Refik Anadol’s “AI data painting,” as he terms it, presented on a giant LED screen that looms over a public basketball court in the plaza.

Anadol’s artwork is antithetical to Massenburg’s: It is technological rather than traditional; abstract rather than figurative; politically ambivalent rather than socially embedded. Blandly titled “Living Arena,” the digital piece consists of four distinct “chapters,” each four minutes long. Two are recognizable as Anadol’s trademark trays of colored churn and sploosh. Though mesmerizing, they convey almost nothing about the data that feeds their algorithms — images of California’s national parks and live weather information. Two others are more self-evident: graphic representations of the court positions of Clippers players in past games and live flight data from nearby LAX.

The problem is that, despite its spectacular impact, “Living Arena” resembles the kind of thing we are used to seeing on digital billboards in malls or airports. So we tune it out; as people thronged in the plaza before Bruno Mars’ concert, it was remarkable how few seemed even to notice it, let alone pause to contemplate it.

Also unmissable, though in an ambient way, was Jennifer Steinkamp’s “Swoosh,” by far the largest piece here, probably anywhere in the city. Steinkamp’s lighting design for the exterior of the Intuit Dome — which was built with color-changing LEDs integrated into its carapace — recalls her earliest video works from the 1980s and ’90s, she told me, when “pixels were the size of quarters.”

I was unable to experience “Swoosh” from a window seat on a plane descending into LAX, perhaps its optimal vantage point. From the top floor of the adjacent parking garage, I still felt too close, the changing lights coming off as nervously twinkly rather than cohesive and undulatory. The illuminated stadium may be glimpsed, however, from high points across the city.

The smallest artwork, “Same Boat,” greets visitors entering from the street, with a neon sign announcing, “We may all have come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” The piece, by Patrick Martinez, offers a salutary sentiment, but sophisticated art it is not. It’s a bumper sticker. (The quote is often misattributed to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; in fact it was a motto of Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League.)

Martinez’s neon is sandwiched between a loud red sign for the Clippers’ merchandise store and Kyungmi Shin’s subtle glass and steel mosaic, “Spring to Life.” Her title is an unsubtle pun on the leaping basketball players she depicts in outline and the abstracted topography of the springs that have fed this area for generations. Irregular pieces of handmade glass, in a muted palette, intricately fit together to describe an undulating ground. In this noisy visual context, you might expect such delicate beauty to get drowned out.

As I admired it one morning, however, a security guard approached me and told me that this was her favorite artwork in the plaza. Her comment reminded me that the setting must mean different things to different people, at different times: those who work here, those who come here for entertainment and those who call the neighborhood home.

There is just one outright dud: a sculpture by Glenn Kaino of a clipper ship, with basketball backboards instead of sails. It fails both aesthetically and conceptually. Large as it is, the sculpture, titled “Sails,” is still too small to compete with the stadium just behind it. And though it was apparently inspired by a story of King and Andrew Young using pickup games to recruit youngsters to the civil rights movement, it’s a flimsy idea that comes off as a one-liner.

A seventh artwork, for now, remains absent. Charles Gaines was approached late in the commissioning process, so his piece — which will occupy a large wall by the stadium’s entrance — is still in development. Gaines told me that it will depict a 127-year-old fig tree, a well-loved local landmark. He expressed his belief in the “social, cultural responsibility” of art, and his ambition to pursue “rigorous conceptual ideas” while also honoring the community. His unrealized piece may achieve what few other works here have: It may succeed in this unconventional setting and be a good work of art in its own right.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.