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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​McKerrell’s three sculptures, originally made of reclaimed Styrofoam, have been cast in aluminum, giving them a timeless presence reminiscent of traditional garden statuary.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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Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space at the Old Stone House is an exhibit and event series that brings together 19 artists and arts groups to consider the history, politics, and planning surrounding public parks and recreation spaces in Brooklyn and beyond. Exhibiting artists tackle issues such as parks’ relationship to eminent domain and gentrification, the process behind public space design, and debates involving the use of public/private space raised by the recent Occupy protests. Projects in all media include abstract “utopian” maps, whimsical visions of imaginary play spaces, a virtual reality park design smartphone app, a text-based public art installation, and photo and video journaling Brooklyn’s lesser-known natural environments. The exhibit corresponds with re-opening of the newly renovated Washington Park/J.J. Byrne Playground.

Exhibiting Artists: Stephanie Beck, Lynn Cazabon, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Tamara Gayer, Christine Gedeon, Groundswell Community Mural Project, Rebecca Hackemann, Husk, Bettina Johae, Karen Kaapcke, Jess Levey, Cheryl Molnar, Will Pappenheimer, Marina Zamalin

Please see below and visit http://brooklynutopias.wordpress.com for more information!

And be sure to join us for our Park Space, Play Space events!

• Saturday, April 28, 5 – 8 pm: Circle Rules Federation brings you a new kind of football
• Saturday, April 28 , 5-7 pm: Collective sky-gazing with Kat Shchneck
• Saturday, April 28, 5-7:30 pm: Public Voice/Public Dream mural workshop with Triada Samaras and CORD
• Saturday, May, 19, 12 pm: Eminent Domain Bike Tour with Bettina Johae
• Saturday, May 19, 5-10 pm: Interactive Games with Gigantic Mechanic
• Saturday, May 19, 5-7 pm: Augmented Reality Workshop with Will Pappenheimer
• Saturday, June 16: 5 pm: Pining For You – a collective wedding ceremony celebrating queer culture with artist Tracy Candido
• Tuesday, June 19: 7 pm: A closing reception and discussion with the Old Stone House, Groundswell Community Mural Project and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Project Director and Curator: Katherine Gressel

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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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​Kate Newby’s work is often developed as an intervention in public space. All parts. All the time. engages two sites, Olive St. Garden and Cooper Park, both within blocks of ISCP in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Using semi precious and industrial materials to create an embedded concrete puddle in the center of Cooper Park, as well as hanging porcelain chimes and a concrete rock bench Olive St. Garden, Newby engages with the conditions of lived space, intervening in these specialized locations. ​

As with past works, Newby’s installations are developed in response to everyday built environment; carpets, windows and curtains, steps and passageways. Each gives evidence to the space as an inhabited or occupied site, but can also be used to interrupt, reconsider or challenge the unspoken norms of an environment or situation.

This exhibition is presented by the International Studio & Curatorial Program.

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Lilliput will reflect on the traditional role of public art by offering a counterbalance to the monumental scale often employed for plaza sculptures and other outdoor installations in public spaces. As the first project in the HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS series for spring, 2012, Lilliput will feature miniature sculptures installed in unusual and unexpected places at the High Line – amongst the vegetation and along the pathway – to create an art treasure hunt for visitors. Lilliput takes its title from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, conjuring a magical world populated by fairy tale creatures, mysterious idols, and dreamlike landscapes.

Lilliput will feature installations by six artists from around the globe:
Oliver Laric, Alessandro Pessoli, Tomoaki Suzuki, Francis Upritchard, Erika Verzutti, llyson Vieira

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line.

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For the High Line, Uri Aran presents a sound work that explores how we use personification and animal metaphors to define human behavior in our daily conversations. Working with a professional voice actor who uses a formal, slightly affected pronunciation, Aran has created a sound track that will emanate softly from the planting beds below the elevated pathway on the High Line between West 25th and West 26th Streets. The sound track features the actor reading a list of creatures, from common ones, like the household cat and the spider, to more wild ones, such the platypus and the shark, each described as “good” or “bad.” Serious and at times comical, the expressionless tone of the actor’s voice will clash with the definition of these creatures as either “good” or “bad,” sparking dialogue about the arbitrary nature of classification in language.

“Uri Aran’s imaginative works have always amazed me,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator and Director of High Line Art. “I look forward to watching visitors experience this installation and how they react to it as they walk along the High Line.”

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line.

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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.