Art in the Parks

Description:

El Anatsui, the celebrated contemporary artist based in Nigeria, is known for his monumental wall tapestries, which are intricately composed of metallic bottle caps culled from discarded Nigerian liquor bottles and woven together with copper wire. For High Line Art, the artist will present a newly-configured installation of Broken Bridge, a monumental drapery made of pressed tin and mirrors, which will hang on an outdoor wall adjacent to the park. Composing a stunning visual of wave-like patterns and folds, the work will reflect the surrounding landscape and mark the artist’s first outdoor installation in the United States.

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

Description:

Alexandre Arrechea’s No Limits, a new site-specific installation transforms New York City’s famed Park Avenue with 10 large scale sculptures embodying New York’s most prominent buildings. Iconic landmarks represented include: Chrysler Building, Citicorp Center, Empire State Building, Flatiron building, Helmsley Building, MetLife Building, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, Seagram Building, Sherry Netherland, and US Courthouse. The sculptures, which will appear to roll, wind, and spin their way down Park Avenue from 54th to 67th Street, reach towering heights of up to 20 feet.

No Limits by Alexandre Arrechea is presented by Magnan Metz Gallery in conjunction with New York City’s Department of Parks & Recreation, and the Fund for the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee.

Description:

In its second consecutive year, The Art Students League of New York’s “Model to Monument” program will return to Riverside South with seven new sculptures designed by its students. These accomplished artists, though quite varied in their chosen themes and media, are addressing the over-arching theme of flux.  This emerged naturally during the course of discussions about what the participating artists find unique and inspirational in the public space of Riverside Park. Included in the exhibition are Sequoya Aono, Roberto Franzone, HakSul Lee, Damien Armondo Vera, Olga Rudenko, Michael Cloud Hirschfeld, and Renata Pugh.

A collaborative installation created by the team is also on concurrently on view in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The sculpture titled, Mask, by M2M’s previous roster, has been altered- revamping the object into a new work they call, BioMask- a more tree like version of last year’s monumental sculpture.

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

Description:

Times Square Arts, the public arts program of the Times Square Alliance, welcomes French artist JR’s global initiative INSIDE OUT PROJECT, a large-scale participatory art project he started in 2011, to Times Square from April 22 to May 10, 2013. For INSIDE OUT NEW YORK CITY, JR and his team invite New Yorkers and visitors to take self-portraits in a specially designed photo booth stationed in Times Square, the site of the world’s first ever photo booth almost 100 years ago. The black-and-white self-portraits will be overlaid on a backdrop designed by JR and printed on the spot as a 3’X4’ poster. The posters will be pasted on Duffy Square in Times Square, or in the home community of the portrait’s subject. The goal of the project is to allow each portrait-taker to express through his or her face a message to the world.

The project will activate Times Square as a creative hub—engaging the boroughs of New York as the photo booth truck makes early visits to the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn. The initial portraits will feature community members from New York City neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy—the Staten Island waterfront, the Rockaways, Red Hook, and Coney Island.

This exhibition is presented by Times Square Arts

Description:

Donated by the Government of the State of Veracruz, this stone and dust temporary sculpture is a replica of the first majestic Olmec head to be uncovered in San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan in 1964. The symbolism of its carvings shows an inverted jaguar paw with a circle, possibly referencing chalchihuitl- a green stone representing water and everything precious. Standing over ten feet tall, the facial features of “The King” correspond to what was considered beautiful at the time: a slight strabismus, deformed cranium, and ear covers. The State of Veracruz hopes that this sculpture will be enjoyed and admired by the city and its visitors.

Description:
Katherine Daniels highlights the park’s eclectic, though largely overlooked, history through a series three contemporary weavings on the park’s basketball court fences. On the southern end of the park, the chain link fence hosts an abstract vine design based on Native American textiles and recounts the Indian path Weekquaeskeek, which passed along what is now St. Nicholas Avenue. The central installation of crosiers, or hooked shepherd staffs, references the park’s namesake and the three churches that border the park. Located near the Hamilton Grange, home of founding father Alexander Hamilton, the northernmost court is adorned with a zig-zag pattern of “quilt squares.” This monumental brocade represents the park’s early American history as a military campground during the Battle of Harlem Heights, where General George Washington positioned himself during the Revolutionary War in 1776.

Description:
Robert Sestok spent most of his career living and working in downtown Detroit, Michigan, which greatly influenced his artistic methods. As part of Detroit’s Cass Corridor arts community, a vibrant movement of artists, musicians, poets and writers during the 60s and 70s, Sestok frequently used found objects and other non-traditional materials, tearing things apart and reconstructing them. This deconstructivist process reflected the reality of the city at the time, and can still be seen today.  Though hailing from the Motor City, Sestok frequented New York throughout his life and stated that First Street Iron is “a tribute to my past associations with the city of New York.”

This ten-foot-tall, welded steel sculpture will be placed in the formerly inaccessible property at 33 First Street acquired by New York City’s Parks & Recreation the in 1935. Since 2008, First Street Green (FSG) has worked with Parks Department to revitalize the fallow lot adjacent to First Park—with the goal to remove the rubble and create a plaza and cultural space. The lot was fully renovated with a newly stabilized and paved plaza, landscaping and cast-iron fencing in 2011 when the park hosted the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a three-month temporary pavilion and public forum in which a varied range of cultural activities occurred.  During this period 55,000 visitors attended—reinforcing First Street Green’s original observation of a strong need and broad interest in an ongoing cultural space open for public use.

This exhibition is presented by First Street Green.

Description:

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.

Description:

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.

Description:
​This installation of One-Two-Three, created in 1976, is part of a series of exhibitions commemorating the artist’s centennial.  Consisting of three geometrical modular painted steel black units weighing a total of 2,700 pounds, One-Two-Three asserts a presence that requires viewers to respond to the work in physical terms as well as visual. Smith found his sculptures most appreciated and “accepted” in an environment involving nature, as opposed to the confining walls of an institution or gallery.

This is Tony Smith’s second public art installation in Bryant Park. His 1967 installation in Bryant Park inaugurated the public arts programming in New York City parks. Tony Smith (1912-1980) was born in South Orange, New Jersey. A leading figure of American Minimalism, his work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at prestigious museums including a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1998.

This exhibition is presented by the Art Production Fund and the Bryant Park Corporation.