Topiary: A Twenty-Year Project
Prospect Park Wildlife Center
Visitors to the Prospect Park Wildlife Center are greeted at its southern entrance by several larger-than-life topiary sculptures of various animals. Artist Mags Harries (born 1945) designed the steel armature representations of a chameleon, a snake eating a frog, an octopus and five garden eels, which were installed in 1993 along the main court at the entrance to the Prospect Park Wildlife Center. The Korean boxwood plants used in the topiary project are designed to grow slowly over the course of 20 years, lending a dynamic quality to Harries’ creation.
The installation of this piece was sponsored by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs' Percent for Art program. Harries, a Boston-area artist, has works on display at Boston's Museum of Fine Art and the Boston Public Library, and also created a 19-site 35-piece installation along five miles of the Piestewa Freeway in Phoenix, Arizona.
Saturday, Dec 01, 2001