Art in the Parks
Past Exhibits (2008)
Citywide
LEAP, A View From the LunchroomJune 1 to August 29, 2008
Various Locations
Image: Students from PS 79 in front of their work at Marcus Garvey Park, Manhattan (courtesy LEAP)
Description:
This exhibition, entitled A VIEW FROM THE LUNCHROOM: Students Bringing Issues to the Table, is part of LEAP’s Public Art Program. LEAP (Learning through an Expanded Arts Project) brings teaching artists and experts to approximately 300 schools per year in the greater New York metropolitan region. The program uses the arts and hands-on activities to teach the academic curriculum.
As part of the program, LEAP’s instructors challenged the students to explore vital social issues in their communities and to reflect aspects of those issues, using common lunchroom tables as their canvas. In this program, students had the opportunity to meet with and study the works of esteemed artists, including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Audrey Flack, and Tom Otterness. The goal was for students to learn about the historical power and influence of public art and how to incorporate this knowledge in their creations.
Artworks can be found at: St. James and Crotona parks in the Bronx; Herbert von King and Maria Hernandez parks in Brooklyn; Marcus Garvey and Sara D. Roosevelt parks in Manhattan; Marconi and Court Square parks in Queens; and Silver Lake Park and Stapleton Playground in Staten Island.
For more information, please visit the LEAP website.
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.
Manhattan
Mia Westerlund, Battenkill
July 15 to December 4, 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.
Dylan Mortimer, Public Prayer Booths
September – November 24, 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.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Pulse Park
October 24 to November 17, 2008
Madison Square Park, Manhattan
Image: Pulse Park Rendering, Courtesy of the Artist
Description:
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer combines seemingly disparate fields of architecture, digital media, robotics, medical science, and performance art into enormous temporary landscapes of light and rhythm that double as platforms for public participation.
Pulse Park is inspired by Roberto Gavaldón’s film Macario (Mexico, 1960) in which the protagonist has a hunger-induced hallucination wherein individuals are represented by lit candles. In Pulse Park, evening visitors to Madison Square Park will have their systolic and diastolic heart rates measured by one of two sensor sculptures installed at the North and South ends of the Oval Lawn. These biometric rhythms are translated and projected as pulses of narrow-beam light that move sequentially down rows of spotlights placed along the perimeter of the lawn as each consecutive participant makes contact with the sensors. The result is a communal expression of vital signs, transforming the public space into a fleeting architecture of light and movement.
Pulse Park be viewed nightly from dusk until 11:00 p.m.
This project is organized and sponsored by the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Jun Kaneko, Heads
June 21 to November 16, 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.
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.
James Yamada, Our Starry Night
April 21 to November 12, 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.
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."
Richard Deacon, Assembly
May 15 to August 24, 2008
Madison Square Park, Manhattan
Image: Richard Deacon, Free Assembly, 2008 (foreground), Other Assembly, 2008 (background). Courtesy of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Description:
This exhibition consists of seven large, brilliantly-colored ceramic sculptures placed throughout the park’s lawns. Deacon, an internationally recognized sculptor, is known for his experimentation with a wide variety of materials in his exploration form. Recently the artist has been exploring clay and ceramics as materials for sculpture. His new Assembly series, on view in the park, is group of four variations on geometric relationships, each presenting an economy of form crossed with an earthly solidity: large-scale, elegant structures composed of richly glazed and patterned ceramic elements which present a tactile and visual sculptural experience.
Richard Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales in 1949. He has occupied the foreground of British sculpture for the past three decades and has had a major presence around the world as highly respected sculptor. Last summer, he was selected to represent Wales Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. In 1999, he was awarded CBE, Commander of the British Empire. In 1998, he was elected to the Royal Academy, London. In 1997, he received the Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. In 1987, was honored with the Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize.
Assembly is a project of Mad. Sq. Art.
Queens
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.