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Jonathan Prince, Shatter Series, cor-ten and polished steel, in situ at Christie’s Sculpture Garden 2019, courtesy of Jonathan Prince Studio
It’s October and there are a flurry of new and exciting outdoor art installations to take in this month, along with annual city-wide art and architectural festivals. In the mix, you’ll find light installations at Rockefeller Center and South Street Seaport, a large provocative equestrian statue right in Times Square, a Halloween pumpkin impalement, new street art, a festival that will take place along the whole length of 14th Street, and many more. We’re very excited about the creative works in New York City this month and hope you are too!
+POOL, the project to create a filtering pool for the East River has been gaining steam, with the city recently putting out a request for proposals for the innovative idea. On October 3rd, the organization will be putting on a unique light installation off Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport in a 50×50 foot outline of the pool. Designed by PLAYLAB INC & Family New York with collaboration from scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), the LED lights will change color based on the quality of water analyzed in real time. According to +POOL, “an algorithm was created that will inform the changing of the lights by predicting swimmable water computed based on environmental conditions and data pulled from sondes placed in the river on site.”
There will be a launch party on October 3rd to launch the installation, sponsored by Heinken and The Howard Hughes Corporation. Tickets are free.
For The City
© 2005 Jenny Holzer, courtesy of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, presented by Creative Time. Text: “Necessary and Impossible” from MIDDLE EARTH by Henri Cole. Copyright ©2003 by Henri Cole. Used by/reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Photo: Charliesamuels.comArtist Jenny Holzer, a long-time partner of Creative Time, will project texts highlighting gun violence and gun safety onto 30 Rock at Rockefeller Center starting at sundown October 10 to 12. This new work, VIGIL, will feature texts come from Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, stories from Moments that Survive collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, and poems by teens who have grown up in the shadow of mass shootings.
These texts come from first-person testimonies and responses to shootings. As Creative Time writes, “These hauntingly sober first-person accounts serve both as an acknowledgement of communities impacted by gun violence.” The images above are from her 2003 and 2005 projections onto Rockefeller Center.
Equestrian sculptures and paintings almost always feature a white man in a position of power and dominance. Women appear infrequently, Joan of Arc, for example, and a few women monarchs like Queen Elizabeth II. But an African American or Black person astride a horse? Now that is a rarity. A new monumental equestrian sculpture, Rumors of War, has just arrived to Times Square, by the artist Kehinde Wiley who painted Barack Obama’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.
Everything about this sculpture is meant to provocate, to question, to upend. The man who sits atop the horse is not only young, but also wearing the garb of present day — a hoodie and jeans — and sporting dreadlocks. The horse, rearing its front leg, is reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Rumors of War is massive, at 27 feet tall and 16 feet wide, and Wiley’s largest work of his career so far. It sits here first in Times Square, at the center of mass consumption and visual stimuli, but will be headed to Richmond, Virginia, the heart of the Confederacy and its accompanying statues, to stand at the entrance of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ entrance on Arthur Ashe Boulevard.
From October 1st to October 20th, a fake upscale deli made of felt will be at Rockefeller Center, made by the artist Lucy Sparrow who previously created a felt bodega at The Standard Hotel. Delicatessen on 6th will be on the corner of 49th Street and 6th Avenue next to Magnolia Bakery and really takes the concept to a whole new level. There is a seafood display with oysters, langoustines, lobsters, prawns, and crabs, “fresh” vegetables like tomatoes and onions, fruits, chocolate, patisseries, and French cheeses like Brie and Camembert.
There will be other displays of Sparrow’s work throughout Rockefeller Center, in glass vitrines that look like aquariums and terrariums with food inside made of felt, lycra, diamante, sequins, and glass beads.
The latest artist to grace the Bowery Mural on Houston is Japanese artist Tomokazu Matsuyama “Matzu” who started working on the mural last week and is close to wrapping up. Matzu was born in Japan but moved to New York City in 2000 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He will be doing a high profile installation for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan, building a 24-foot tall sculpture at JR Shinjuku Station consisting of 316 pieces of stainless steel.
When asked how he felt about getting the opportunity to paint the mural, Matzu told Untapped Cities that this will be his biggest mural and that “it is something great because, as every artist knows, this wall is a significant monument for the world. It almost feels like you are contributing to the New York Arts culture in general. Without SoHo you can’t really talk about the arts in New York and arts in the world in general.”
Billy X Curmano, Portrait of the Artist as Political Prisoner, Photo by Margarita Baumann, courtesy Art in Odd Places
Art in Odd Places will be back from October 17 to 20 all along 14th Street from Avenue C to the Hudson River. This year’s theme: INVISIBLE will feature all 44 artists who over 60 years old, “supported by their intergenerational collaborators: parent/child; mentor/ protégé; partners; lovers; and others from babies to our oldest artist who is 94 years old,” along with Promenade of Visual Flâneurs, with artists sauntering and strolling with their works in costume. This year’s Art in Odd Place is curated by longtime artist LuLu LoLo, who selected artists only based on a phone call and not by submissions — keeping the theme INVISIBLE fully present throughout the process.
Curator LoLo says, “This festival highlights what people choose not to see: the fragility of aging, even the beauty of aging, the homeless, the plight of immigrants, detained children, gentrification, mass incarcerations, lack of compassion, cruelty, and also how the technological cocoon we live in today renders the world around us INVISIBLE. But the festival makes VISIBLE: the indomitable spirit of older artists, the beauty of intergenerational work, with a visual promenade of older artists strolling 14th Street.”
Photo courtesy Jane Greengold
The Halloween Impalement: The Toll of Time, a temporary site-specific art installation on the fence of artist Jane Greengold’s townhouse is back again this year! The artists hopes this year to “impale the most heads ever,” with 274 spikes available. Last year, over 70 pumpkin heads were impaled. After the impalement, the pumpkins are left to deteriorate, leading to a ghoulish aftermath over the course of several weeks.
If you want to participate this year, bring an already-carved pumpkin to the corner of Kane Street and Strong Place in Cobble Hill between 3 pm and 7 pm on October 31.
Governors Island’s first permanent arts space, the LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island, opened to the public in late September. Housed inside a former ordnance warehouse, the 40,000-square-foot space is dedicated to public performances, exhibitions and artist residencies, visual and performing arts studios and the Island’s first indoor cafe.
Currently on display in the ground floor gallery is Michael Wang’s Extinct in New York, a large-scale installation made up of four greenhouses filled with plant, lichen and algae species that were historically documented in New York City but that no longer growing in the wild. Below the historic roof trusses, new art from Yto Barrada with guest artist Bettina investigates issues of ecology, sustainability and history in a site-specific exhibition, The Power of Two Suns.
Photo courtesy Andi Potamkin, of Potamkin Development, one of the sponsors of the Uptown GrandScale art project
Over the course of September, more than 50 artists painted 1,500 feet of construction barriers along three blocks of 125th Street around a construction site. This makes it one of the largest street art installations of its kind in Manhattan’s history, according to Uptown Grand Central, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the 125th Street/Metro-North corridor, who is behind the initiative. Artists who were selected to participate included TooFly, Marthalicia, and Shiro, with priority given to artists from the local community.
It is expected for these works to be up for the long term, as no construction has begun inside the lots surrounded by the fencing. Carey King, Director of Uptown Grand Central, said: “We have learned the power of public art to both uplift the neighborhood and inspire hopes for the future. We are so grateful for the strong community of artists that exists throughout Uptown, and for their dedication to making public space a place that brings us all together.”
Jonathan Prince, Shatter Series, cor-ten and polished steel, in situ at Christie’s Sculpture Garden 2019, courtesy of Jonathan Prince Studio
In Shatter Series, three monumental pieces of cor-ten and polished steel works by artist Jonathan Prince are on display in the Christie’s Sculpture Garden located, within the public courtyard of 535 Madison Avenue. His work has been in other locations within New York City, include Dag Hammarkjold Plaza, Hudson River Park, the IBM Atrium and Building at 590 Madison Avenue. The works are also for sale. Shatter Series will be up until November 10, 2019.
Photo: NYC Parks.
It’s been a while since New Yorkers have seen Keith Haring‘s Crack is Wack mural — it was under protective covering for four years during road construction and has been undergoing a restoration since August. And the version most well-known recently is not the original, which was painted over by the Parks Department back in 1986. Haring was fined but later asked to recreate the mural. It was repainted several times, most recently 2012.
Now, artist Louise Hunnicut has been working to strip the mural down, locating parts of the original mural under multiple layers of paint, and recreate the work. NYC Parks tells us that the mural restoration should be completed “soon” but no official date has been set yet.
Where Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture was in Midtown until earlier July has been replaced by a temporary sculpture of a man in business suit shushing passerby. The sculpture by Jim Rennert, who has similar work previously in Union Square, is twelve feet tall, as reported by Gothamist. It’s on display thanks to the Cavelier Gallery, located on 57th Street, who is also behind the Hippo Ballerina (which appears later on this list).
Image courtesy Leonard Ursachi
A new sculpture by Leonard Ursachi, who previously had the work Fat Boy in Prospect Park, in Tribeca Park, and a piece under the DUMBO Archway, will be located located in front of Long Island University in the triangle plaza along Flatbush Avenue from October 10, 2019 to October 9, 2020. Bunker Head, a one-ton sculpture of a head wrapped in actual medical gauze is made of foam witha coating of a concrete-like material called Styrocrete. The work features Ursachi’s signature window cut outs, with mirrors inside. In a press release, NYC Parks states “The highly stylized nature of its face references iconic heads from myriad cultures, from shaman to soldier, poet to prophet.”
According to BKLYNER, Ursachi explained “It’s basically about a closed mind, not being welcoming, not being open. It’s a little negative but it’s positive because it has two recessed windows with mirrors, like all my work, so it invites contemplation on the idea of rejecting others. It’s a pretty personal piece.”
Photo by Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts.
Every month a new video installation takes over the screens of Times Square at midnight for Midnight Moment, the world’s longest running digital art exhibition. This month from 11:57 PM to midnight, the screens will be taken over by artist Christian Marclay in a very New York City work.
According to Times Square Arts, Marclay “created a series of short, stop-motion videos documenting categories of trash he encountered on the street, including cigarette butts, cotton swabs, plastic straws, and chewing gum. As Midnight Moment, Marclay’s Chewing Gum (2016) elevates garbage to new heights, finding beauty in the crude and ubiquitous gum that blots the pavement. Sequencing countless still photographs into hypnotic animation, squashed gum wads divide, unite, and dance across sidewalk cracks. Marclay takes a playfully literal approach to street photography by portraying his chance encounters with the street itself.”
Other art exhibitions and events that are not free to the public or installations (therefore not making it onto this list but worthy of note) include the opening of the redesigned Museum of Modern Art, Archtober throughout this month, Open House New York October 19 and 20, an exhibition of LEGO versions of world’s most famous pieces of art at the New York Hall of Science, a retrospective of the work of Agnes Denes who transformed Battery Park into a wheat field in 1982, and the opening of street artist JR’s multimedia installation JR: Chronicles at the Brooklyn Museum.
Next, check out the art installations still up in New York City from previous months!
A series of four recycled steel sculptures by Brooklyn-based artist Fitzhugh Karol are located at Front Street at York Street, in front of Bridge Street on the corner of Prospect and Jay Streets, Clumber Corner, and Bar and Grill Park. All four pieces come from one large structure, and as the DUMBO BID describes, Karol’s “process of creation in the studio involves playing with parts and shapes to create visually poetic combinations.” Previously Karol’s work has been seen in Prospect Park and Tappen Park on Staten Island.
The Hippo Ballerina, a work by Danish artist Bjorn Okholm Skaarup that was previously at Dante Park across from Lincoln Center back in 2017 is now at Flatiron Plaza as part of the NYC DOT Public Art installation program. The 15-foot tall, two and a half ton Hippo is made of bronze with polychrome patina, and takes inspiration Edward Degas’s Little Dancer of Fourteen Years and Walt Disney’s Fantasia. She’s been nicknamed “Henrietta’ by the Flatiron/23rd Street Partnership.
On September 4th, you can join an event to welcome “Henrietta” the Hippo from 10 to 2 PM at the Partnership’s booth. Henrietta will be at Flatiron Plaza until Thanksgiving.
From September 21 to November 17, a site-specific art installation will be inside the Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs by contemporary artist Janine Antoni. The piece, entitled “i am fertile ground” uses religious iconography “to pay homage to the body’s wisdom,” according to the cemetery, with each work enshrining a gesture. Antoni says, “I gild the active embodiment of the spirit, paying reverence to the knowledge of the boy itself, burned in muscle memory.”
The catacombs will be open to the public, for free, every Saturday and Sunday during the exhibition run with additional public programming to take place including a meditation class, film screening, and artist talk.
Artist Shantell Martin already covered the exterior of the military chapel on Governors Island, Our Lady Star of the Sea this summer. Starting September 8th, the interior of the church will be opened up so that visitors can see a new work by the artist, The May Room. This will be the first time the public will be able to access inside the church in over 20 years. Martin will be painting the flors walls, and install custom furniture of her own design to create an immersive environment. The exhibition will be on view daily through October 31.
Our Lady Star of the Sea chapel is a former military chapel that was built in 1942 as part of an expansion of the former U.S. Army base on Governors Island. Martin’s work will be the first installation to activate the space which is located in the Island’s Historic District.
The gender balance between male and female statues in New York City is little more even now thanks to a large scale sculpture installation. Created by the husband-and-wife team of the award-winning public artists Gillie and Marc, Statues for Equality aims to remedy the fact that less than 3% of statues in New York City are dedicated to females by creating ten larger than life-sized bronze sculptures of famous women from astronaut Tracy Dyson to actress Nicole Kidman. The new statues honor the important contributions women have made to society and they make their debut today, on Women’s Equality Day 2019.
Recently moved from Sixth Avenue to 32 Old Slip in Lower Manhattan, you will find bronze representations of Oprah Winfrey, P!nk, Nicole Kidman, Jane Goodall, Cate Blanchett, Tererai Trent, Janet Mock, Tracy Dyson, Cheryl Strayed and Gabby Douglas. The subjects of the statues were chosen by a public vote. Each woman is standing atop a blooming flower of her choosing which represents her personality, beyond her technical and social accomplishments. With the addition of these ten figures, the percentage of female statues in the city rises to 9%. The statues will be on display until August 2020.
JMikal Davis aka Hellbent, keep chopping (dinosaur jr.) at 131 Varick Street Photo: Ryan Muir for the Hudson Square BID © 2019
Hudson Square Business Improvement District (BID) has launched a new public art initiative, Hudson Square Canvas, to reflect the neighborhood’s transformation from the functional Holland Tunnel entrance/exit area to a lively community. There are five large scale pieces to take in, all completed in late August.
Greg Lamarche’s “Game Inside Game” features colorful vintage letter forms on the facade of S.O.B’s that reference the neighborhood’s printing press roots. Katie Mertz has painted the columns on 161 Varick Street and the Manhattan Mini Storage at 181 Varick Street in urban hieroglyphics. Brooklyn-based artist Hellbent (aka JMikal Davis) has created a colorful blocky piece at 131 Varick Street, and Claudia Ravaschiere and Michael Moss have a colorful prism of translucent glass at Freeman Plaza East. See a map of the pieces here. The works will be on display until Summer 2020.
Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY
Public Art Fund returns with another striking installation at the entrance to Central Park. On September 11th, three whimsical aluminum equine sculptures will be on display by French artist Jean-Marie Appriou. The works, ranging in size from 16 feet tall to 16 feet long, will be inspired by the site and the history of horses here, including the gold leaf statue of William Tecumseh Sherman just across the way and the horse-drawn carriages that still ply the park and pick up at this entrance.
“Jean-Marie Appriou’s unconventional approach to sculpture is almost alchemical,” says Public Art Fund Associate Curator Daniel S. Palmer. “His craftsmanship is informed by a deep knowledge of the historical lineage of sculptors that have preceded him. At the same time, Appriou’s equine sculptures are otherworldly, evoking the silent majesty of horses with nuanced sculptural details that flicker between narrative and poetry.”
A series of display cases on Lenox Avenue and 125th Street in Harlem contain an exhibition by Brooklyn artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, a Black/Iranian visual artist who is the New York City Commission on Human Rights’ Public Artist in Residence. The series, Stop Telling Women to Smile, is a continuation of a movement started by the artist in 2012 that can be found on walls all across the world. Her artist residency here in New York City aims to “present the experiences of anti-black racism and sexual harassment experienced by New Yorkers through public art.”
Stop Telling Women to Smile showcases portraits of women on each display case, with captions on the back that speak directly to street harassment offenders. One of the cases shows actual written responses on postcards Fazlalizadeh placed in locations around the city, with questions like “What assumptions to people make about you because you are black?” and “What do you want to say back to your harassers on the street?” As Fazlalizadeh writes on the website about the project, “Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project takes women’s voices, and faces, and puts them in the street – creating a bold presence for women in an environment where they are so often made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe.” Fazlalizadeh also has another exhibition, Respecting Black Women and Girls in St. Albans, in Queens at the Daniel M. O’Connell Playground.
Photo of current exhibition on The High Line, En Plain Air
On September 26th, a new exhibition on the High Line will showcase posters from 25 artists or artist groups envisioning monuments —both possible and impossible to build— that question the role of monuments and imagine the future of the built objects. According to the High Line, these proposals include new monuments in a traditional style, revisions to historical statues, new imagined ways to commemorate, and come in many forms: “drawings, photographs, renderings, ‘missing pet’ posters, Wikipedia pages, bold text-based statements, collages, and more.”
The submissions were sourced from a process that brought the exhibition to multiple cities that have repurposed rail infrastructure — Buffalo Bayou, in Houston, Texas, Waller Creek, in Austin, Texas, The 606 in Chicago, Illinois, The Bentway in Toronto, Ontario — and each location chose five local artists or groups to create proposals.
At the back of the Hudson Theater in Times Square, you will find a recent work from JR in his signature black and white “Inside Out” project style that features some well-known faces: Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge, both of whom are starring in the play “Sea Wall/A Life.” In fact, the JR did a piece there because Gyllenhaal personally asked him to, as Frances Doods of Architectural Digest reports, and the stars of the show helped paste the work up which has over 100 faces.
Gyllenhaal felt that JR’s work would be a nice tandem to the play, which often involves the audience. He tells AD that JR’s “art is messy and imperfect and demands us to look at ourselves, to forgive ourselves, to be kind with each other. It allows us to be vulnerable and feel part of a whole; it makes us feel big and loved at the same time.”
Photo by Christopher Stache
Park Avenue Departure by Alex Katz is a series of seven colorful, cut-out sculptures that, at first glance, resemble the backs of passersby that you might see while strolling down the street. But the works appear differently to the observer from different vantage points, adding an extra level of perceptive depth, similar to an optical illusion. With 200 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibits under his belt, including appearances at the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, and the Guggenheim, Katz’s work has become a New York classic.
Park Avenue Departure will close September 10th. The work sponsored by the Fund for Park Avenue and NYC Parks’ Art in the Park program is also co-produced by Lococo Fine Art Publisher and Kasmin Gallery.
Photo courtesy Julie Stein/NYCEDC
Groundswell NYC and NYCEDC have unveiled a new community painted street art mural entitled Making the Sun Rise at Sunset at the Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market that stretches 2,400 square feet and is over 150 feet long. Groundswell murals incorporate community input from visioning sessions, and this mural addresses a theme on quality jobs in the industrial zone of Sunset Park. The mural is then designed by the Groundswell Mural Team, with lead artist Raul Ayala, and painted with the help of over 100 community participants. This is the second mural produced in partnership between NYCEDC and Groundswell.
Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY
This August, 100 bus shelters across the city will feature a series of photographs, titled From Sun to Sun by Elle Peréz, to inaugurate Public Art Fund’s new partnership with street furniture company JCDecaux. This collaboration with the JCDecaux exhibition series further extends Public Art Fund’s history of transforming the city’s advertising spaces, with the intent to showcase photographers in the public realm. In June, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising and WorldPride, Public Art Fund re-installed a piece it put up for the 20th anniversary of the uprising — Untitled, a black and white billboard created by Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, above Village Cigars and across from the historic Stonewall Inn bar, where it first appeared in 1989.
The featured photographs in the bus shelter installation are a continuation of Peréz exploration of representation, identity and heritage of her Puerto Rican community in the Bronx. They often reveal intimate everyday moments highlighting the beauty of the individual in connection to their environment, and highlight the relationship between people and places. Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Katerina Stathopoulou explains that from sun to sun is a chance to exhibit Perez’s photography “within the diverse communities where the images were made, making this a deeply personal project,” and that Public Art Fund is thrilled for Peréz work “to inspire individuals to embrace points of similarity and humanity among the seemingly disparate people that comprise this city.” The works will be on view until November 24, 2019.
Next, check out the exhibitions that are still up from previous months!
Socrate Sculpture Park in Queens is a great place to take in art and the views of Manhattan along the East River. A new large-scale work is in process by artist Rafael Domenech. Las Palabras son Muros [Pavilion for Astoria] (The Words are Walls [Pavilion for Astoria]) is made of scaffolding and construction mesh, with “pages” hanging that show graphically dynamic laser-cut texts that rotate throughout the exhibition.
The text comes from actual visitors to the park who submit words, phrases and stories, which then get selected by a digital algorithm. You can also submit a message online at laspalabrassonmuros.info. When the 16-week exhibition is over, Domenech will make a book that will incorporate the texts.
Las Palabras son Muros [Pavilion for Astoria] will be up until November 3, 2019.
Photo courtesy NYC Parks
A new public art installation by Queens-based artist Yvonne Shortt, has just been unveiled in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Shortt’s immersive installation, titled Pavilion Landing, is clearly inspired by shape of the iconic New York State Pavilion (aka Tent of Tomorrow), which was painted in “American Cheese Yellow” color in 2015 as part of a restoration effort. Created in response to the theme “Flushing Meadows Corona Park: A Park for the Future,” it tells the story of intergalactic children whose spaceship has landed in the park. The artist worked with park visitors to create sculptures of children out of clay, which she then cast in concrete.
Funded by the Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park in collaboration with NYC Park’s Art in the Parks program, Pavilion Landing is part of an effort to bring contemporary public artworks to the city’s parks. The goal of the program, as announced by NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver, is to “promote the less frequented core of our parks and support local artists.” Pavilion Landing can be found at the 111th Street and 49th Avenue Park entrance, located on the lawn alongside David Dinkins Circle. It will be on display until June 2020.
Visit this installation while on either our next tour of the Remnants of the World’s Fairs or on an Untapped Insiders special visit inside the Queens Museum with the new President of the museum.
Photo of a mural designed by Keith Haring in 1986. A NYC Health + Hospitals facility has not received a mural since then. Photo: NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull
In 1986, Keith Haring designed a mural for Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, but no NYC Health + Hospitals facility has received a mural since then. That is changing this month, as NYC Health + Hospitals’ Arts in Medicine program embarks on a community-based mural projects across New York City with nine selected artists. The process is expected to be completed by the end of December 2019. These collaborations between artists, patients, staff, and local community residents are intended not just to promote the work of local artists, but to also build trust and engagement between hospitals and their communities.
Supported by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund and the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, the murals will be created both inside and outside NYC Health + Hospital facilities. Eric Wei, MD, MBA, Vice President and Chief Quality Officer of NYC Health + Hospitals, and Chair of the Art Advisory Council, has in particular emphasized how “it is clear from decades of research that arts promote healing in many important ways.” The idea for the collaborative mural process was developed in the belief that art would be more than just an installation, and that the art would also promote healing and create emotionally nourishing spaces.
The artists and their assigned NYC Health + Hospital facilities are: Patricia Cazorla & Nancy Saleme (Bellevue Hospital), Peach Tao (McKinney Hospital), Yvonne Shortt (NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens), Carla Torres (NYC Health + Hospitals/North Central Bronx), Oscar Lett (NYC Health + Hospitals/Kings County), Kelie Bowman (NYC Health Hospitals/Coney Island), Priscilla de Carvalho (NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan Hospital), and Sophia Chizuco (NYC Health + Hospitals/Carter Hospital).
Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY
Estructuras Monumentales is a current exhibition in City Hall Park composed of five aluminum sculptures. It is designed by Cuban-born, New York based artist Carmen Herrera, and presented by Public Art Fund in celebration of her first major outdoor exhibition of sculptures. These works are to enliven City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, where three new sculptures based on historic designs and two sculptures never before seen in the United States will be revealed.
Herrera’s Estructuras series was originally conceived in the 1960s, and featured bold monochromatic colors that are to complement the civic environment. According to Public Art Fund Associate Curator, Daniel S. Palmer, the series “will harmonize with the natural surroundings of this civic setting – City Hall Park serves as the ideal environment for this important exhibition in Herrera’s long career.”
Estructuras Monumentales will be on view from July 11 to November 8, 2019 in Lower Manhattan’s City Hall Park.
Simone Leigh, Brick House, 2019. A High Line Plinth commission. On view June 2019 – September 2020. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the High Line
For about two months, Simone Leigh’s Brick House has been admired from afar as it loomed over 10th avenue. This month, visitors can get an up close look at the giant sculpture when the Spur, the newest section of the High Line opened on June 5th. It is the first sculpture to be displayed in the new space, which will host a series of rotating exhibits.
Brick House, a sixteen-foot-tall bronze bust of a black woman. Her head is adorned with an afro and cornrow braids along her hairline. The figure sits atop the Plinth, a new exhibition space at on the plaza of the Spur. Brick House is the first work in the series Anatomy of Architecture by Simone Leigh. The series of sculptures will intermingle architectural forms from West Africa to the American South with the human body.
Brick House will be up until September 2020.
A new sculpture in Duarte Square Park commemorates one of the most intense natural disasters New York City has faced. Inspired by the destruction of Superstorm Sandy, Robert Lobe’s sculpture takes the shape of the storm’s wreckage. Superstorm is made up of hammered metal in the shape of a tree and boulder that were blown apart during the storm. The form was captured by actually taking a cast of the tree and boulder in the forest.
The tree once stood in the forest along the Appalachian Trail in Northwest New Jersey at Harmony Ridge Farm and Campground. During the storm, the tree was blown over and Lobe said “it had become a majestic horizontal sculpture with a flat circular root pattern spiraling vertically into the air, evidence of the shallow yin and yang sloping surface of its former boulder home.” The art piece shows “the unfriendly side of nature” and how superstorms are becoming a more intense and frequent problem as our climate changes. Superstorm can be found at the intersection of Avenue of the Americas and Canal Street until June, 2020.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission has a new work for the season. Parapivot, by Alicja Kwade is a duo of works made out of steel and stone to capture a miniature solar system. Kwade is a Berlin-based artist who seeks to “heighten both the mystery and absurdity of the human condition in order to enhance our powers of self-reflection.”
This piece will be on display on the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden until October 27, 2019. Parapivot is Kwade’s first solo exhibition at a museum in the United States.
“En plein air” refers to the 19th century practice of painting outdoors, something inspired by, and a reaction to, the extreme changes happening in urban areas during the Industrial Revolution. The High Line, being a remnant of New York City’s industrial era, is the perfect place to reexamine and re-explore the tradition of outdoor painting, and with the involvement of several international artists, En Plein Air is an annual installation that challenges conventional sculptures and murals with freestanding, outdoor paintings that explore and restructure the relationship between art, nature and the modern urban city.
The first work above at 20th Street is by Firelei Báez, she depicts a Haitian Sans-Souci Palace ruin that looks like it is collapsing into the High Line. As High Line Arts describes, “In this ongoing body of work, Báez examines incarnations of Sanssouci: the 18th century Rococo palace built by Frederick the Great, the palace of Haitian Revolution leader and proclaimed first King of Haiti Henri Christophe, and Haitian revolution leader Jean-Baptiste Sans Souci, who was assassinated by Henri Christophe.” The second work, a series of four resign paintings, above is by Ryan Sullivan, embedded into the rail lines and plantings at 29th Street.
At 26th Street. Japanese artist Ei Arakawa has created two LED light paintings of fish, an interpretation of French painter Gustave Courbet’s 1872 and 1873 paintings, both titled La truite (The Trout). Other works include hundreds of striped flags at the Western Rail Yards by French artist Daniel Buren (known for his columns at the Palais Royal in Paris), ceramic archways by American artist Sam Falls embedded with fossilized plants from the High Line, life-size portraits on reclaimed doors from Georgian townhouses by Tanzanian artist Lubaina Himid, a large-scale sculpture at The Spur by Lara Schnitger, and a series of unstretched canvases inspired by an artist Vivian Suter Argentian home greet visitors at the southern edge of the park.
En Plein Air will be on display at several locations on the High Line from April 19, 2019 to March 30, 2020.
In partnership with New York City Audubon, Broadway Mall Association, New York City Parks Department, and Gitler & Gallery, artist Nicolas Holiber presents, “Nicolas Holiber: Birds on Broadway, Audubon Sculpture Project”. The National Audubon Society posted its Birds & Climate Change Report in September 2014, which cautioned that half of all North American bird species will be endangered over the coming decades as a result of global warming.
Artist Nicolas Holiber chose 12 out of the 145 species of birds that reside in New York City to include in the Audubon Sculpture Project. The twelve sculptures will be made out of reclaimed wood sourced from the city itself and located between 64th and 157th Streets. The project seeks to bring “attention to the plight of birds threatened by climate change while simultaneously bringing beauty to the urban landscape.” This installation will on display until January 2020.
Ruth Ewan’s large-scale, double-sided clock, visible from the street, is based on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union’s illustrations; the clock was once one of the many images used on “stickerettes,” otherwise known as “silent gators,” and distributed by union members as they travelled from job to job. The clock was an homage to the round-the-clock work of the union, as well as a callout to factory owners and how they divided public and private time. Ruth Ewan’s work now serves as a call to action for today’s labor struggles and the fight for diminishing labor rights, including the five-day work week and eight-hour work day.
Ruth Ewan’s Silent Agitator is the artist’s first public installation in the United States and will be on display on the High Line Park at 24th Street from April 3, 2019 to March 31, 2020.
In Battery City Park at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, an actual artifact from the early twentieth century is now on display. This freight car is not a replica and was actually used by the German National Railway during World War II to transport soldiers, prisoners of war, and then Jews to killing centers.
The freight car is an element of the upcoming exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. will be on view until January 3, 2020 and include over 700 artifacts from World War II never before seen in the United States.
To mark the 38th commission of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York-based artist Leonardo Drew was chosen to create a monumental installation on the park’s Oval Lawn. Drew’s City in the Grass will present a topographical view of an abstract cityscape atop a multi-patterned, undulating and layered panorama. The installation stretches 100 feet long.
City in the Grass is made of varied materials that spread across the lawn and, at various points, ascend into tall rising towers. The sculptures are set in a patterned surface that mimics Persian carpet designs and reflects the artist’s interest in East Asian decorative traditions and global design. The sculpture mixes domestic and urban motifs, spurring viewers to contemplate our relationship to the city we will in. City in the Grass will be on view from June 3, 2019, through December 15, 2019.
Photo courtesy of Yvonne Shortt
Rabbits are invading MacDonald Park in Forest Hills, Queens. Forest Hills resident and artist Artist Yvonne Shortt worked with her studio team and students from York College, Queens College, International High School of Health Sciences, and Academy of American Studies to cast and paint clay sculpted bunnies for her new installation Rigged?. The installation is a maze with stairs and windows that the bunnies are trying to navigate to get to the bunch of carrots on the top level.
A sign on each level leads to the next staircase, until the level just before the top. It is impossible to complete the maze. In a secret entrance at the bottom of the piece, one rabbit hoards a stash of carrots. The rabbit maze is a commentary on the social, economic, and political system. It will be on display from July 10th, 2019 through July, 2020.
Harold Ancart, Subliminal Standard at Cadman Plaza Park presented by Public Art Fund, 2019. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY
In May The Public Art Fund unveiled Subliminal Standard, an interactive commission by Belgian artist Harold Ancart. Set up in the northern end of the Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn, Subliminal Standard is a large painted concrete sculpture inspired by the handball courts made popular in the 1900s by U.S. immigrants. The installation will be a place of play and interaction, inviting the viewers to immerse themselves in the piece and consider the relationship between handball courts, playgrounds and abstraction.
Subliminal Standard is Ancart’s first public art commission in the United States, and will be on display until March 1, 2020.
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