Art in the Parks
Current Exhibits
Bronx
Henry Moore, Moore in America: Monumental Sculpture at The New York Botanical Garden
May 24 to November 2, 2008
The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx
Image: Henry Moore, Reclining Nude, bronze. Photo by David Finn.
Description:
This exhibition is the largest outdoor presentation of Henry Moore's sculpture ever presented in a single venue in the United States. The 20 colossal works are displayed throughout the Garden's 250 acres and among its 50 gardens and plant collections, providing for an impressive interaction of nature and art such as Moore envisioned. Henry Spencer Moore (July 30, 1898–August 31, 1986), born in the coal-mining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, in England, is one of the world’s most known and beloved 20th-century sculptors.
Moore began studying sculpture as an art student in 1919. Today, his distinctive bronze works are displayed around the world. His subject matter is often a reclining woman, a mother and child, or a relationship in nature. His sculpture makes reference to the landscape and flowing hills of the countryside. Moore intended that his monumental works be presented in expansive landscapes where their mass and size could be seen from many angles, in a great variety of light, and in differing seasons. He wanted people to get up close and touch them.
Brooklyn
Wiktor Szostalo and Agnieszka Gradzik, Tree Huggers Project
September 1, 2008 to August 1, 2009
Person Square (Myrtle and Carlton avenues), Brooklyn
Image: "Mohawk Girl," Tree Huggers Project
Description:
The Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, NYC Parks & Recreation (Parks), and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) have collaborated to inaugurate the Partnership's new Myrtle Avenue Public Art program with the 11-month installation of pieces from the Tree Hugger Project at the park triangle at Carlton and Myrtle, and on NYCHA Ingersoll housing development grounds near Myrtle and Prince.
Tree Hugger Project artists Wiktor Szostalo and Agnieszka Gradzik's ongoing public art project combines sculpture made of natural, found, and free materials such as twigs, vines, and tree branches with a simple environmental message. The Project is an ongoing work of Environmental Art designed to help us rediscover our relationship with nature at a very personal and intimate level.
These art installations are part of the larger Myrtle Avenue Arts & Enterprise Initiative which represents a multi-faceted effort to establish the retail corridor as an access point to visual art and cultural activities for community members of diverse socio-economic backgrounds. The Tree Hugger Project serves as a kick-off for the Partnership's new public art program, launching both an open call for proposals for temporary sculpture pieces for locations along Myrtle Avenue as well as a request for sponsors to support future artists and their installations. Seed funding for the new program was provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation and Myrtle's Business Improvement District.
Samuel Nigro, The Strategic Placement of Stone
June 26, 2008 to May 15, 2009
Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn
Image: Samuel Nigro, The Strategic Placement of Stone
Description:
This sculpture is a 9-ton block of granite that has been split in two and then recombined. The work encourages visitors to think about the way massive pieces can come apart and fit back together.
It is the artist's largest stone sculpture to date. Rough, polished, and beveled surfaces provide a contrast of textures.
Nigro lives and works in DUMBO, and he hopes to bring to his neighborhood a "fresh look at an old medium" while contributing to the vibrant artistic culture there. His work has been shown in numerous national and international venues, and he has benefitted from residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and The Vermont Studio Center, and grants from Artist's Space, The Sculpture Center, and Socrates Sculpture Park.
Roxy Paine, Erratic
September 2008 to March 2009
Prospect Park, Litchfield Villa, Brooklyn
Image: Roxy Paine, Erratic. Courtesy of the Prospect Park Alliance.
Description:
Internationally acclaimed artist Roxy Paine’s Erratic is a stainless steel boulder measuring 7 feet high by 15 feet wide, part of a larger series of works by the artist. In geology, the term “erratic” refers to a rock that has been carried by a glacier hundreds of miles away from its original geographic location. Erratic’s slick exterior leaves its origin unexplained. It is a boulder displaced from somewhere between a mountain and a steel factory. The work reflects the artist’s interest in the interactions between humans and nature and specifically from Paine’s examination of nature through the lens of industrial processes. The work was previously seen in Madison Square Park. The current installation was organized by the Prospect Park Alliance and James Cohan Gallery.
Paine was born in New York in 1966 and is currently based in Brooklyn and Treadwell, NY. His work has been shown internationally and is included in major collections.
Tom Otterness, Large Covered Wagon
April 15, 2008 to January 4, 2009
Clumber Corner, Brooklyn
Image: Nelson Hancock Photography
Description:
A large, humorous bronze sculpture with historical references, Tom Otterness´s Large Covered Wagon depicts a smiling, pipe–puffing pioneer woman steering a covered wagon with the assistance of her yoked bull. Located at Clumber Corner at the entrance to DUMBO, Large Covered Wagon will be on view through January 2009. The installation was made possible by the Walentas Foundation LLC, Two Trees Management Co. and the DUMBO Improvement District.
Tom Otterness has exhibited widely and completed commissions in the U.S. and abroad. His stylized bronze figures combine into sculptural ensembles that explore the range of human experience, from grand ambition to common foibles, plucking imagery and themes from popular culture and subtly transforming them into humorous commentary.
Manhattan
James Yamada, Our Starry Night
April 21 to November 29, 2008
Doris Freedman Plaza, Central Park, Manhattan
Image: James Yamada, Our Starry Night, 2008.
Photo by Seong Kwon, courtesy of Public Art Fund.
Description:
Built from powder-coated aluminum and punctuated with 1,900 colored LED lights, Our Starry Night is a 12-foot-tall sculpture that acts as an interactive passageway to Central Park. When visitors walk through the portal, they trigger a metal detector hidden inside the structure's casing that activates the LED lights on the exterior of the sculpture. The sculpture is only illuminated while the participant is standing within the passageway, and therefore he or she is not able to see the light patterns being created on the exterior surfaces. Instead, the lighting is visible to passersby on the street corner and in the park.
In this work, Yamada calls our attention to the expanding, yet increasingly subtle, presence of surveillance in the contemporary world. It also points towards such philosophical and political considerations as the loss of privacy in the name of greater safety and the use of personal information.
This is a project of the Public Art Fund.
Tadashi Kawamata, Tree Huts
October 2 to November 20, 2008
Madison Square Park, Manhattan
Image: Tadashi Kawamata, Tree Huts
Description:
Tadashi Kawamata creates complex and chaotic architectural growths of raw lumber, found objects, and construction scraps that bloom around the park’s trees. His artistic practice is finely attuned to the site’s physical characteristics and is organic and improvisational.
Kawamata has made an international reputation by fashioning humble materials and found objects such as untreated lumber, chairs, barrels, and construction scraps into poetic and transformative interventions into public space. His “Project on Roosevelt Island” (1992), in which Kawamata surrounded the island’s derelict Smallpox Hospital building with a massive and complex web of simple wood scaffolding, remains one of the most well known and highly regarded solo public art works in New York City’s history. Tadashi Kawamata was born in 1953 on the Japanese island of Hokaido, and he currently lives and works in Japan.
This project is organized and sponsored by the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Sui Jianguo, Mao Jacket
September 8 to November 15, 2008
Park Avenue at 70th Street, Manhattan
Image: Sui Jianguo, Mao Jacket
Description:
Coinciding with the exhibition Art and China's Revolution, Asia Society and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation present a 10-foot high Mao jacket sculpture created by Sui Jianguo (b. 1956, China), one of the most important contemporary Chinese sculptors working today. The Mao jacket is part of the series "Legacy Mantle" for which he is best known. The 4-ton metal jacket is 3 meters high, 2.5 meters wide, and 1.5 meters deep.
Since the late 1990s, the artist has adopted two motifs for which he is now widely known: dinosaurs and the Mao jacket. The iconic Mao jacket, emptied of its signature occupant appears in monumental fiberglass and in smaller-sized versions made of aluminum and other materials. At times, Sui Jianguo combines the two motifs, as in Sleeping Mao, in which a fiberglass sculpture of the legendary leader reclines on thousands of tiny dinosaurs. Sui Jianguo has exhibited internationally. He is based in Beijing, where he heads the sculpture department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Dennis Oppenheim, Tumbling Mirages
June 12 to November 9, 2008
Union Square Park, Southeast Triangle, Manhattan
Image: Dennis Oppenheim, Tumbling Mirages. Photo by Clare Weiss, NYC Parks.
Description:
Tumbling Mirages consists of three spheres 15 feet in diameter, made of steel and fiberglass. Oppenheim's new work follows a long trajectory from his early rejection of the gallery space in favor of the outdoors and even his own body as sites for art. His first earthworks in 1967 "brought the land and the soil into the work itself." Oppenheim has shown extensively in major galleries and museums around the world.
"Tumbling Mirages are a hybrid sculpture, combining the characteristics of tumbleweed with the optical illusion emanating from a desert mirage," says the artist. "Although these works are shown in New York City at Union Square, they are conceived to operate on the desert floor of Arizona, where they can tumble, reflecting and distorting the desert landscape through their reflective surfaces."
Dylan Mortimer, Public Prayer Booths
September – November 2008
Tramway Plaza, Manhattan
Image: Dylan Mortimer, Public Prayer Booths
Description:
Dylan Mortimer’s work deals with how private faith functions in the public realm. The interactive Public Prayer Booth is a synthesis of a telephone booth and a prayer station. The viewer can flip down a kneeler and engage in prayer.
“My goal is to spark dialogue about a topic often avoided, and often treated cynically by the contemporary art world,” says Mortimer. “I employ the visual language of signage and public information systems, using them as a contemporary form of older religious communication systems: stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, church furniture, etc. I balance humor and seriousness, sarcasm and sincerity, in a way that bridges a subject matter that is often presented as heavy or difficult.”
The artist is based in Kansas City, and is a recent graduate of NY’s School of Visual Arts Masters (MFA) program.
Jun Kaneko, Heads
June 21 to October 31, 2008
Park Avenue Malls, Manhattan
Image: Jun Kaneko, Head. Photo: Takashi Hatakeyama.
Description:
Jun Kaneko is an internationally renowned artist known for his large ceramic sculptures. Three of the artist's largest sculptures, each entitled HEAD (2004 to 2007), are on view in the landscaped medians at 52nd, 53rd, and 54th streets.
Japanese-born Kaneko has been based in Omaha, Nebraska since 1986. His artwork appears in numerous international and national solo and group exhibitions annually, and is included in more than seventy museum collections. He has realized over thirty public art commissions in the United States and Japan and is the recipient of national, state, and organization fellowships.
Mia Westerlund, Battenkill
July 15 to October 31, 2008
Thomas Paine Park, Manhattan
Image: Mia Westerlund, Battenkill (detail)
Description:
Mia Westerlund's Battenkill is an urban oasis at Thomas Paine Park. The sculpture, named for a river in Vermont, is formed by an open circular stucco wall that beckons park visitors to the ample seating area along the inside of the wall. Running water bubbles along the curving rim of the sculpture's wall. The fountain is a first for the artist, and a second will be shown this fall indoors. This project is supported by Betty Cuningham Gallery.
Mia Westerlund has been exhibiting since the early 1970's. She has received several prestigious awards, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and at the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY, where her work is permanently installed. A native of New York, Mia currently divides her time between New York City and her studio in upstate New York.
Eleanora Kupencow, The Arrows of Time
July to October 2008
Dag Hammarsjold Plaza, Manhattan
Image: Eleanora Kupencow, The Arrows of Time
Description:
Eleanora Kupencow’s colorful figures are made from cut, painted steel. For the title, the artist borrowed a term from natural science. Coined in 1927 by British astronomer Arthur Eddington, an “arrow of time” specifies the direction of time on a four-dimensional relativistic map of world.
Adam Peachy and James Evans, Mural
October 2007 to October 2008
Baruch Playground, Manhattan
Image: Mural in progress
Description:
At Baruch Playground in Manhattan's Lower East Side, painters Adam Peachy and James Evans organized a team of volunteers to complete a mural of an underwater scene. It is a project of CITYarts.
CITYarts is a nonprofit organization that connects children and youth with professional artists to create public art that addresses civic and social issues, impacts their lives, and transforms their communities. Since its founding in 1968, CITYarts has engaged nearly 100,000 New Yorkers of all ages and backgrounds with over 500 professional artists in the process of designing and creating more than 260 murals, mosaics, and sculptures. Special emphasis is given to neighborhoods where access to and participation in the arts is limited.
Queens
Socrates Sculpture Park, Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition
September 7, 2008 to March 1, 2009
Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens
Image: Jason Bailer Losh, If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride. Photo by Jonathan Kuhn.
Description:
This exhibition features new works by the Socrates Sculpture Park’s current resident artists: Martin Basher, Chelsea Beck, Kim Beck & Osman Khan, Michael Berens, Sari Carel, Adriana Farmiga, Kimberley Hart, Rajkamal Kahlon, Jason Bailer Losh, Matthew Lusk, Jong Il Ma, Ted McCann, Juniper Perlis, and Harriet Salmon.
Fellowship artists are awarded a $5,000 grant and a residency in the Park’s outdoor studio and are provided with technical support and access to tools, materials, and equipment to facilitate the production of new sculptures and installations for exhibition in the Park. The fellows develop their projects throughout the summer in the open studio and on site in the landscape, offering visitors the opportunity to experience both the creation and presentation of their works. Representing a broad range of materials, working methods, and subject matter, the diverse sculptural works in this exhibition are presented against the Park’s spectacular waterfront view of the Manhattan skyline.
Socrates Sculpture Park is open 365 days a year from 10:00 a.m. to sunset and is located at the intersection of Broadway and Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City.
Mike Estabrook, The Adventures of La Coronita
September 8 to October 12, 2008
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens
Image: La Coronita at the Unisphere (rendering) by Mike Estabrook
Description:
Mike Estabrook asked community members to submit a favorite location in Corona and what they like to do there. Once a week, Estabrook publishes a short animation, depicting the character La Coronita doing the things inspired by the stories of community members. At these locations, a small painted wooden cut-out of La Coronita is installed (look for her at the Unisphere and other locations around the park). The animations are on view in the project room at the Queens Museum, where a new edition is added each week. The comics will be published in a local, bilingual newspaper.
Estabrook is based in Brooklyn, NY. He uses drawing, animation, video, and painting as a means of embodying a political imagination that can be both cute and grotesque. His work has been shown at ABC No Rio, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Queens Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum, PPOW, Esso, and other spaces in New York and abroad. In 2005-6, he participated in the Artists in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum, in 2007 at Elsewhere Artists Collaborative residency in Greensboro, NC, and in 2007-8 at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program. He received his MFA from Queens College in 2005.
vydavy sindikat, Spectacle Path
August 18 to October 12, 2008
Linden Park, Queens
Image: vydavy sindikat, Spectacle Path
Description:
Spectacle Path invites visitors to become part of a new visual experience, one in which familiar and mundane views will be multiplied, magnified, and distorted with Fresnel lenses and kaleidoscopes installed in a storefront and on a park’s fences. The path is installed in storefronts throughout the neighborhood and on the fences of the park.
Vydavy in Russian literally translates to "you and you." Paired with sindikat, the name loosely translates as “you collective.” The collective's activities include video, performance art, poetry, and architecture. In recent years, vydavy sindikat initiated a number of community-based projects such as Public Gathering (2005), a Russian-English children’s paper (2005-present), and Commuter’s Dream (2007- present). Work by vydavy sindikat has been exhibited at the Center for Architecture of the American Institute of Architects (2003), as part of Float at Socrates Sculpture Park (2005), in Slow Revolution at Rotunda Gallery (2006), in their solo exhibition Computing the Social at LMAKprojects (2006), and the Second Moscow Biennial (2007).
Spectacle Path is on view at Linden Park, between 103rd and 104th streets and 41st and 42nd avenues; Tulcingo Restaurant at 40-19 National Street; Western Union at 103-16 Roosevelt Avenue; and Antioqueña Bakery at 40-07 National Street. This temporary artwork was commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art as part of "The Heart of Corona" initiative.