Public art’s accessibility to a broad audience and its potential to bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds have granted it a unique power to make strong, enduring impacts on cities, places and people’s lives. The impacts warrant a systematic review and categorization, the results of which will provide insights that contribute to justifying the integral place of public art in society. As no such systematic review has previously been carried out, this article seeks to provide a qualitative synthesis of original articles selected from four major databases of international journals using a combination of keyword searches and filtering procedures. The 839 articles retrieved from the initial searches were screened by title and abstract. The remaining 132 articles were read in full, with 50 studies eventually being selected for analysis and synthesis. The public art impacts identified were organized into eight categories, in terms of placemaking, society, culture, economy, sustainability, wellbeing, wisdom and innovation. Implications were then drawn with respect to future research on the impacts and evaluation of public art.