Art in the Parks

Description:
Autumn on the Hudson Valley with Branches imagines a nineteenth-century Hudson River School landscape painting that has been left outdoors, exposed to the elements. The canvas is tattered and frayed, and its partially exposed stretcher bars appear to be morphing into tree branches, as if reverting to their natural state. The painted portion of the work is based on Jasper Francis Cropsey's Autumn on the Hudson River (1860), a bucolic landscape that shows none of the effects of the Industrial Revolution of its day. Since the nineteenth century, the Hudson River has been associated with both Arcadian beauty and industrial development, despite the contradiction between the two. Today, along Manhattan’s Hudson River, one can view fading remnants of the waterfront as an active shipping port, as well as recent efforts to return it to a more “natural” state through the development of park areas and walking paths, including the High Line. The focus of Hegarty’s work is the collision of nature and culture, past and present.


This is a project of Friends of the High Line. For more information, visit Friends of the High Line's public art page.

Description:
Fritz Koenig's The Sphere, a 45,000 pound sculpture made of steel and bronze, adorned the fountain at the World Trade Center's Tobin Plaza from 1971 to September 11, 2001. Bent and damaged, but still recognizable, the sculpture has been relocated to Battery Park, where it stands as a powerful temporary memorial commemorating the lives of those lost in the World Trade Center attack and in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On September 11, 2002, a dedication was held to officially recognize the artwork as an interim memorial and to light an eternal flame in memory of those lost.

The Sphere is on long-term loan from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Media Advisory
Video: Ceremony to illuminate The Sphere.

Description:

The River that Flows Both Ways is a bank of colored glass windowpanes along the tunnel over Chelsea Market. For his project, Stephen Finch took one day to photograph the Hudson River's surface 700 times, taking one shot every minute. These images have been transferred onto 700 panes of glass and placed onto pre–existing windows, which have been installed in a semi–enclosed tunnel between 15th and 16th streets, above the New York City High Line, from which the river can be seen. The piece, which uses a single pixel point from the photographs for each pane of glass, is a study on the ever–changing color of water. The tunnel itself transforms throughout the day as the levels of light shift with time. The title is the translation for the Native American name of the Hudson River, Muhheakantuck.

Finch was born in New Haven, Connecticut and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. His works constantly seek to unveil the nature of light, color, perception, and memory. This project was organized by Creative Time, Friends of the High Line, and NYC Parks.

Description:
Populating City Hall Park with monumental silhouettes of iconic sculptures, Peter Coffin’s Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes) installation takes the viewer on a journey through the history of sculpture in space and time. Allusions to Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, an Easter Island moai, Louise Bourgeois’ Untitled (With Hand), one of Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes, and Pablo Picasso’s She Goat, among others, hover like apparitions throughout the Park. Ranging in size from eight to ten feet tall, their commanding sculptural presence is somewhat of an illusion; each work is only one inch thick. The sculptures slip in and out of view, similar to the way in which memories slip in and out of one’s mind. The decision to hold the vision in place or let it fade is left to the viewer.

The Sculpture Silhouettes refer to timeless icons drawn from the history of art. In transforming famous works of art into flattened silhouettes devoid of their original volume, Coffin engages the viewer to reflect and expand upon the existing associations each form’s representation evokes. This idiosyncratic sculptural survey creates an environment in which variations on seminal sculptures are experienced in a new and unexpected context. Provoking an interplay of associations, the Sculpture Silhouettes prompt the viewer to project the present onto the past, suggesting that history is constantly being rewritten.

Peter Coffin’s previous projects include constructing and flying a U.F.O. over the Baltic Sea and south‐east coast of Brazil, transforming a greenhouse into a “music for plants” performance space, and designing an elaborate machine that transports a single helium balloon along what could be its own, perhaps wind‐driven natural course. Playfully giving substance to the invisible and sometimes impossible, Coffin’s work invokes art history, fringe and pseudo science, social psychology, and epistemology to explore interpretation and perception.

Peter Coffin was born in 1972 in Berkeley, California; he lives and works in New York City. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2009); Barbican Art Gallery, London (2009); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Centre dʹArt Contemporain, Fribourg, Switzerland (2008); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2008); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007); Le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France (2007); Herald St., London (2007); The Horticultural Society of New York, New York (2007); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris (2007); and has participated in recent group shows including Altermodern: Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2009); Abstract America, Saatchi Gallery, London (2009), Untamed Paradises, MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Vigo, Spain (2008); and Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London (2007).

This is a project of the Public Art Fund.

Description:

The Ego and the Id is internationally acclaimed artist Franz West's newest and largest aluminum sculpture to date. Soaring 20 feet high, the piece consists of two similar but distinct, brightly colored, looping abstract forms, one bubble gum pink and the other alternating blocks of blue, green, orange, and yellow. Each of the forms curve up at the bottom creating stools that invite passersby to stop, take a seat, and directly engage with the artwork.

This is a project of the Public Art Fund.

Description:
On September 4, 400 years to the month from when Henry Hudson and some 20 seamen sailed their ship the Halve Maen (Half Moon) into New York Harbor, City Lore and NY 400 opened Birth of a City: Nieuw Amsterdam and Old New York, celebrating the city’s colonial Dutch heritage with illustrated signs throughout lower Manhattan. A stencil on the sidewalk maps out the historic waterline, and demonstrates how the village of Nieuw Amsterdam was nestled within what is now the bustling Lower Manhattan cityscape.  An informal stroll along the marked pathway of Birth of a City shows how Dutch traditions of commerce, government, religious tolerance, and ethnic diversity helped shape the rise of New York and the United States.

Two of the twelve signs in the tour are in city parks, at Bowling Green and City Hall.

Description:
Native New Yorker and former prizefighter Paolo Corvino has experimented with many artistic styles. His recent sculptures, geometric abstractions like Tempo # 5, have presented brightly–colored, minimal forms. This work is made from painted aluminum.

Description:
In this exhibition, a new series of five large-scale, striated cast stone sculptures by New York-based sculptor Mel Kendrick run down the center of Madison Square Park’s oval lawn.  Kendrick’s abstract sculptures are cast in black and white stone from molds carved from EPS foam. This series of new works constitute a significant evolution in the oeuvre of a sculptor who has been exhibiting his work to critical acclaim since the mid-1970s. While they continue to reflect Kendrick’s career-long focus on the creative process and investigation of the relationship between materials and form, these bold and imposing new works (standing nearly 12’ tall) will be among his largest, as well as some rare works in cast stone from an artist renowned for his use of wood. This is a project of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

Description:
​Socrates Sculpture Park’s annual emerging artist exhibition is the fruit of the fellowship program, in which up-and-coming artists make outdoor sculpture, many of them for their first time, with the assistance of Socrates staff. This year’s highlights include a pile of cakes by Aaron King and a “Master Station” subway entrance by Brina Thurston. The full list of artists includes: David Brooks, Pilar Conde, Zack Davis, Christian de Vietri, Aaron King, Zak Kitnick, Lynn Koble, Tamara Kostianovsky, Mads Lynnerup, Wyatt Nash, Navin June Norling, Andrea Stanislav, Brina Thurston, Kon Trubkovich, Lan Tuazon, and Erik & Ninh Vysocan.