August brings some exciting new outdoor art installations for all New Yorkers. In honor of the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop music, exhibits like The Brooklyn Library’s Tribute to Jay-Z, or the teen-produced mural from The Children’s Museum of the Arts, are guaranteed to inspire young city residents and aspiring music artists. If you’re looking for something more relaxing and nature-based, the city’s crochet garden or altar-building event is right up your alley! Finally, if your goal is to interpret a visual social, and political statement, look no further than the city’s own plastic chandeliers and performance pieces. Keep scrolling for your final summer art installations itinerary of 2023!
1. Penetrable at The Hispanic Society Museum & Library
On the west side of Broadway, between 155th and 156th Streets, The Hispanic Society Museum & Library shows Penetrable, the final work and interactive sculpture by artist Jesús Rafael Soto. Its installation celebrates the 100-year anniversary of the artist’s birth and the first time a sculpture from Soto’s Penetrables series is being showcased outdoors to be experienced by New York City’s diverse audiences.
The yellow “cube” of plastic hoses that hang from a “floating” ceiling has journeyed across the Americas, being loaned and viewed for two decades in cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and more. Fans of Soto will be able to spot his strengths in the piece, like the sculpture’s use of physics, geometry, human perception, and space. Made of painted iron, aluminum, and yellow plastic tubes, the structure exists for you to explore and change it from within. Viewers will notice from the interior that the boundary between the structure and themselves is blurred and that from the outsider’s perspective, they are the art. Penetrable was the first piece he created that used his audience as a tool and a collaborator, encouraging active participation.
