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​The Art Students League of New York, one of America’s premier art schools, presents the Model to Monument Program (M2M), a collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation that has culminated in the installation of one monumental sculpture, Mask, at Van Cortlandt Park.

The sculpture was created by an international team of seven selected League students during a nine-month program led by master sculptor Greg Wyatt.  The decision to sculpt a theatrical mask grew out the artists’ visits to Van Corltandt. The site is near the Red Steps below the Van Cortlandt House Museum, where public theater events are being introduced by Van Cortlandt Park Conservancy. The artists are: Elizabeth Allison, John Balsamo, Allston Chapman, Akihiro Ito, Selva Sanjines, Noa Shay, and Matthew White.

Model to Monument provides a project-driven program, site-specific for the students that focuses their artistic and professional development and their ability to respond to an environment. The artists’ experience working with the City gives them the ability and background to create new public works for people to contemplate and enjoy in the years and decades to come.

Mask is made possible by the Art Students League’s Model to Monument Program

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​McKerrell’s three sculptures, originally made of reclaimed Styrofoam, have been cast in aluminum, giving them a timeless presence reminiscent of traditional garden statuary. Two sprightly goats and an alert deer will animate this welcoming space. Attracted to the naiveté and purity of animals, McKerrell has focused on them in her recent drawings and sculptures.  A native of Scotland, she frequented local farms as a child and even owned a pet goat, which inspired Goatie Boy. A regular visitor to the Central Park Children’s Zoo, she creates studies from direct observations, as well as historical paintings, and anatomical reference books.  However, her final works are made entirely from memory, working intuitively as she imbues her playful subjects with plasticity, life, and undeniable charm.  McKerrell is attracted to the “freeness and rawness” of her modeling materials, which permit her to work spontaneously, and comments that they enable her to “create textured surfaces suggestive of an animal’s tactile form.”

McKerrell is the recipient of the Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award. Clare Weiss (1966-2010) was the former Public Art Curator for Parks. During her tenure she curated more than 100 outdoor public art installations throughout the city and organized complex, thought-provoking, and visually compelling thematic exhibitions for the Arsenal Gallery. The Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award will be granted annually to one emerging artist. The location will change annually, and will be determined based on the site’s visibility and location within a neighborhood historically underserved by public art.

This exhibition was made possible through generous support by the Claire Weiss Emerging Artist Award and the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership.

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Leonard Ursachi’s sculpture, with its wellhead, lever and bucket, is suggestive of a traditional rural well. “The well is a shared resource and gathering place. Its iconography is mythic—the source from which life and knowledge spring; a receptacle for our dreams and desires. I’m interested in the significance of the well today,” states Ursachi.  “There are still communities that depend on wells, the health of which is affected by conditions that originate both locally and across the globe—pollution, industrial waste, climate change, wars.”

For the wellhead, Ursachi cast blocks in transparent, water-blue acrylic with embedded crushed, empty plastic water bottles. He created the mold for the blocks from an antique cobblestone salvaged from a Brooklyn street when it was being torn up. The bottom surface of the wellhead is mirrored and like a traditional well, viewers will see their own reflections when they peer into the opening. Ursachi made the wellhead’s base, bucket, and lever from wood he salvaged from the East River, a block from his DUMBO studio.

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​To celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the founding of Republic of China, New York’s Chinese-American community has erected a statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution in 1911. Dr. Sun lived in America and visited New York City a number of times before the Revolution. In fact, in the months leading up to the Revolution, he lived in New York City’s Chinatown where he finalized the plans for the Revolution and delivered an important speech at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) in March 1911.

The Republic of China (Taiwan) government donated the statue to the community.  Designed by Mr. Lu Chun-Hsiung, famous Taiwanese sculptor, the statue was manufactured in Taiwan.  The Chinese-American community in New York City graciously contributed donation for the base of the statue, designed by local architect Michael Kang.

This project is proposed and managed by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) of New York.

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​Venezuelan artist Rafael Barrios will exhibit nine monumental sculptures on Park Avenue. Many of these pieces will be exhibited for the first time, created from experimental works that Barrios has kept reserved.

The pieces range in form, shape, color and dimension and are all representational of  Barrios’ forty-plus years of creating art that alters our perception and state of mind. Barrios experiments with volume and mass in his sculptures—at a distance they appear to have significant volume, but as you approach the pieces, they reveal their slimness.   As Barrios states, the sculptures are about “dislocating our perception in such a way that our mind’s eye will insist that you are seeing something that you are not.”

This exhibition was made possible by Art Nouveau Gallery. Exhibitions on Park Avenue are presented under the auspices of New York City’s Department of Parks & Recreation and The Fund for Park Avenue Sculpture Committee.

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​Artist Sarah Sze is world-renowned for her intricate installations that shape space with hundreds or thousands of interconnected sculptural elements.

For the High Line, Sze will create an elaborate metropolis of perspectival architectural models that will be bisected by the High Line path itself. The sculpture forms an open archway that visually frames the views to the north and south, as well as allows park visitors to physically enter and pass through the space it outlines. The architecture, complex and dynamic, will act as a bird, butterfly and insect observatory, with perches, feeding spots and birdbaths throughout.

Emerging from the shooting perspective lines of the landscape of the High Line, the sculpture will extend through space like a perspective drawing in three dimensions. The structure will climb, spin and accelerate emphasizing the open trajectory of the High Line and modeling systems of development and growth. The artwork is simultaneously an observatory, an experiment, and a metropolis, evoking urban construction, scientific models, and attempts to capture nature in situ.

This High Line Art Commission is presented by Friends of the High Line.

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​Julianne Swartz's sound installation, Digital Empathy, will greet High Line visitors with a variety of messages. At some sites, computer-generated voices will speak messages of concern, support, and love, intermingled with pragmatic information. In other sites, those same digitized voices will recite poetry and sing love songs to park visitors.

Installed in 11 different locations throughout the park, the sound will be transmitted through the park's bathroom sinks, water fountains, and elevators. These sites are not only unexpected places in which to encounter public art, they are places designed for individuals or small numbers of people, allowing for intimate encounters within an otherwise sprawling, communal space. The locations for Swartz's sound interventions will be indicated by graphic—based signage created by the artist that mimics standard public information signs.

Digital Empathy plays on the notion that, in our culture, we turn to technologies like online social networking, blogs, and instant messages to meet our basic human need for friendship and personal connection.

This High Line Art Commission is presented by Friends of the High Line.

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The Art Students League of New York, one of America’s premier art schools, presents the Model to Monument Program (M2M), a collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation that has culminated in the installation of seven sculptures on view along Riverside South from 59th to 72nd Streets.
 
The sculptures were created by an international team of seven selected League students during a nine-month program led by master sculptor Greg Wyatt.  The pieces, one by each artist, range from abstractions conjuring New York City’s past and future, to a life-size bronze of a girl and her dog looking out on the Hudson River. The exhibition includes: River Gazers by Elizabeth Allison, The New Age by John Balsamo, Looking Up by Allston Chapman, Forever by Akihiro Ito, Flight: Past to Future by Selva Sanjines, Wish by Noa Shay, and Seiren by Matthew White.

A collaborative sculpture created by the team is also on concurrently on view in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The artwork, a monumental mask, was inspired by the regular performances programmed behind the Van Cortlandt House Museum.

This work was made possible by the Art Students League’s Model to Monument Program.

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Placed in Manhattan’s Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, the historic “Gateway to the UN” and designated protest site, this piece is composed of dissembled parts from two replica "kit" military Hummer shells, recomposed and welded together in a monumental pyramid-shaped stack. Sprayed with metallic icy-white paint, the piece also evokes the form of an iceberg. Additional parts welded between the two create a more cohesive form and refer to extra armaments that American soldiers have recently added to their own Hummers and equipment.

The moody songs of whales will emanate from the speakers – the haunting sounds act as a universal cry. In accordance with this soundtrack, the headlights of the cars will be set to dim and brighten.

With its rearranged parts, Inveterate Composition also places itself in recent art history dialogue. The crashed car has become an iconic form of the violence and excesses of contemporary culture as seen in work from John Chamberlain's car part sculptures and Andy Warhol’s infamous Death and Disaster series, to Charles Ray’s Untitled sculpture and Jeremy Deller’s Conversations about Iraq. Summoning references from the political strife and conflict overseas to our planet’s general discord, Rachel Owens’s latest sculpture continues this discourse, while adding focus on environmental distress to the pile of ruins. However, her abstract, melodious form also has a hulking beauty and calming presence that speaks to an undertone of optimism and the potential for change and renewal.

This work was originally developed with the enthusiastic support of the late Clare Weiss, curator for the New York City Parks Department, who passed away in January 2010 after a long battle with breast cancer. This piece is dedicated to her.

This project was completed with ZieherSmith Gallery.

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​Barcelo’s immense Gran Elefandret, balances upright on its trunk, its four massive legs outspread searching for equilibrium. At twenty-six feet tall the sculpture brilliantly portrays an extraordinary, if not impossible physical and cultural feat; this contemporary monument believably captures with humor, scale and Spanish courage the essence of what a public monument can be today.

To further communicate the gravity-defying feat beyond the surprisingly slim trunk and large body, Barceló imparts the mass and weight of the creature through the downward sag of the heavily wrinkled skin, the off-kilter positioning of the huge legs, and the complete overturning of the floppy ears. The highly textured surface of the elephant recalls the artist’s tactile paintings, in which he creates rich topographic, sculpted surfaces on canvas.
 
Barceló, born in Mallorca in 1957, has spent considerable time in West Africa, and his paintings and sculptures often are often concerned with the natural life cycle.

This is a project by Marlborough Gallery, in cooperation with the Union Square Partnership.

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Meant to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11, the Lexeme Series began as a way for Barrett to process and talk about the heartbreaking events of September 11, 2001. It includes works in fabricated bronze, stainless steel, and an 11-foot-high Carrara marble piece that was carved in Carrara, Italy, and shown in Zell, Germany. In their own unique way, all of the Lexeme sculptures incorporate the presence of the World Trade Center.  With this particular sculpture, Barrett aims to present the idea that life, and positive and creative energy continue to prevail.

Bill Barrett has been a member of the Tribeca community for over 40 years. His studio is just blocks from the installation site. He has exhibited widely throughout the country.

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Peter Woytuk on Broadway brings to the Broadway Malls the vigorous yet endearing sculptures that Woytuk is known for worldwide. This is the artist’s first outdoor exhibition in New York City. The exhibition begins in Columbus Circle at 59th Street, the start of the Broadway Malls, with the monumental, life size Elephant Pair. A bronze Woytuk menagerie of sheep, ostriches, crows, hens and other fanciful sculptures continues at intervals along the Malls, concluding at Mitchel Square at 168th Street with two 2,500-pound seated Bulls.

Peter Woytuk (American, b. 1958) is recognized internationally for his sculptures of animals. Woytuk cleverly reduces their shapes to essential forms, allowing the power and elegance of his subjects to become both graceful and whimsical expressions of mass. Using a style that is at once descriptive and expressive, Woytuk also enjoys altering the scale of everyday objects such as tools or fruit, which in his hands are transformed into animated participants in the composition.

Sculptures can be found along Broadway at: 59th Street, Columbus Circle;  64th Street Dante Park; 67th Street; 72nd Street, Verdi Square; 73rd Street, Verdi Square; 75th Street; 79th Street; 86th Street; 96th Street; 103rd Street; 107th Street; 114th Street; 117th Street; 137th Street, Montefiore Park; 139th Street; 157th Street; and 168th Street, Mitchel Square.

The ambitious exhibition is a collaboration by the Broadway Mall Association, the New York City
Department of Parks & Recreation, and the Morrison Gallery of Kent, CT.

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​La Montagne (The Mountain) was modeled in 1934 by American Modernist sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935). The sculpture is the culmination of a series begun in 1913 by Lachaise in New York, where he lived and worked from 1912 until his death in 1935. The work represents at once a landscape and the figure of Isabel Dutaud Nagle, the artist’s muse, model and eventual wife. Lachaise envisioned a piece that was “great and solemn.” He later admitted, “You may say the model is my wife. It is a large, generous figure of great placidity, great tranquility.” Some recognize in Lachaise a revival of the feminine ideal that had flourished for centuries in the voluptuous stone carvings on Hindu temples. Lachaise’s wife inspired virtually all of Lachaise’s sculptures of the female form. “You are the Goddess I seek to express in all my work,” he wrote to her in 1915-16.

This exhibition was made possible by The Lachaise Foundation and The Frelinghuysen-Morris Foundation.

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Six painterly animations by acclaimed Dutch artist Jacco Olivier is the final presentation of Mad.Sq.Art’s  2011 season.  Mad. Sq. Art celebrates the artist’s first public art commission in New York City, which features both new, site-specific and existing works displayed throughout the Park. Olivier’s series of stop-motion animations brightens New York’s winter landscape with moving images exemplary of the artist’s characteristically rich color palette and lavishly textured style. The exhibition is on view daily in Madison Square Park from December 15, 2011 through March 12, 2012.

Beginning with a single image, Olivier introduces subtle alterations with each additional layer through his process of over-painting.  After he paints and re-paints his images, Olivier photographs each stage of the process as stop-motion animation until an original no longer exists. The resulting work reveals a history of the painting process that captures scraps of narrative and visual iconography brought to light as a moving painting.

According to the artist, Jacco Olivier, exhibiting in Madison Square Park provides “an opportunity to go totally abstract and see things on a molecular level, to change perspective[…] to show an animation in the ground, you really have to look down to see it, which creates a little private moment for the viewer that is free of narrative, subject or meaning.”

This is a project of Mad.Sq.Art.

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​This arresting sculpture is the first public commission in the United States by Berlin-based artist Michael Sailstorfer. It is a powerful response to the attributes of the site, for which it was conceived, and to the epic scale of New York City.

Rising more than 30 feet to meet the treetops of Central Park, Tornado brings together a series of opposite terms. It combines lightness and weight, with looming black “clouds” made from inflated truck tire inner tubes that gently shift in the breeze. Its muscular steel armature zigzags from top to bottom while the ballooning rubber forms that hang in bunches from its spiraling arms are knotted together in bulging clusters. Like a tornado, which is violently powerful but also literally made of air, Sailstorfer’s towering work provides a visceral experience of sculptural form and materials in tension, massive but also vulnerable.

Tornado is the largest in a series of the artist’s sculptures that draw on rubber tires, inner tubes, and ideas of movement and velocity. Much of his work engages with natural forces and the way we perceive them through form and physical space. At the same time, there is often a hint of whimsy in Sailstorfer’s art, conjuring a sense of playfulness, backyard experimentation, and visual wit.

This is a project by the Public Art Fund.

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​Awning Studies: SOCRATES, 2011 by Washington DC-based artist Patrick McDonough, is the culmination of a three-month Public Art Residency (PAR) Program, established in partnership with the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA).

A collaboration between Socrates and the WPA was initiated in 2010, to introduce artists from the District of Columbia area to the practical and conceptual issues related to the creation of public art. McDonough is the second recipient of this award. The PAR Program is an extension of the Park's ongoing OPEN SPACE series, a forum for single artists and collaborative projects.

Awning Studies: SOCRATES, 2011 continues McDonough's exploration of the awning as a key architectural adornment that is central to the domestic vernacular of the northeastern United States. His project takes the form of a series of fabricated awnings without buildings: some installed in tress, some arching over the water and others rising on a combination of steel and clear acrylic supports.

This is an exhibition by Socrates Sculpture Park.

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The EAF11 exhibition launches a year-long celebration of the Park's 25th Anniversary. After a five-year expansion of two additional artists per year, the EAF11 exhibition also marks the first annual initiative to support twenty artists. The 2011 fellows are: Cecile Chong, Joy Curtis, Nadja Frank, Ben Godward, Darren Goins, Ethan Greenbaum, Jesse A. Greenberg, Rachel Higgins, Roxanne Jackson, Hong Seon Jang, Jason Clay Lewis, Saul Melman, Jo Nigoghossian, Nick Paparone, Don Porcella, Jessica Segall, Walter Benjamin Smith, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Nicolas Touron, and Nichole van Beek.

Fellowship artists are awarded a grant and a residency in the Park's outdoor studio and are also provided with technical support and access to tools, materials, and equipment to facilitate the production of new sculptures for exhibition in the Park. The artists develop their projects throughout the summer in the open studio and on site in the landscape, offering visitors the opportunity to experience the creation of the works that are then installed in the Park. Representing a broad range of materials, working methods and subject matter, the diverse sculptural works in this exhibition are presented against the spectacular waterfront view of the Manhattan skyline.

This is an exhibition by Socrates Sculpture Park.