Public Art
Roxy Paine, Conjoined, Defunct and Erratic
May 15, 2007 to February 28, 2008
Madison Square Park, Manhattan
Description:
Roxy Paine’s three works: Conjoined a 40 foot-tall sculpture of two intertwined trees, Defunct, a 42 foot-tall sculpture of a lone tree which appears to be under attack from the shelf-fungus growing on it’s trunk and Erratic a boulder measuring 7 feet high by 15 feet wide, are part of a larger series of works by the artist. These works come out of the artist’s interest in the interactions between humans and nature and specifically from Paine’s examination of nature through the lens of industrial processes.
Presented by Mad. Sq. Art, a program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Angel Orensanz, The Garden Before the Snake
September 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008
Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, Manhattan
Description:
The steel-pipe sculpture group by the artist Angel Orensanz,The Garden Before the Snake, is an expression of the artist’s concept of a "garden." Orensanz has described The Garden "as a utopian horizon for humankind’s endless growth and harmony" with the foil of "the serpent" or the "snake" acting as a representation of the "fragility" and "fragile future" of humankind.
Spanish-born Orensanz is likely best known for his purchase and refurbishment of a circa 1849 unused synagogue on Norfolk Street in New York City’s Lower East Side. Orensanz first used this as his studio, and then in 1992, along with his brother and several other artists, established the Angel Orensanz Foundation. The Foundation now occupies the building.
City Lore, Your Guide to the Lower East Side
September 10, 2007 to February 28, 2008
Seward Park, Straus Square, Manhattan
Description:
Your Guide, a joint project between Place Matters, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Lower East Community Preservation projects, seeks to illuminate small moments in the larger history of the neighborhood. The Your Guide project uses graphically interesting signs to tell first-person stories generated from interviews with current and past neighborhood residents. These signs promote insider perspectives, allowing residents and visitors alike to feel a sense of intimacy and welcome; the project enables viewers to feel as if they are sharing in a story rather than getting a history lesson.
Adam Peachy and James Evans, Mural
October 2007 to October 2008
Baruch Playground, Manhattan
Description:
At Baruch Playground in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, painters Adam Peachy and James Evans organized a team of volunteers to complete a mural of an underwater scene. It is a project of CITYarts. CITYarts is a nonprofit organization that connects children and youth with professional artists to create public art that addresses civic and social issues, impacts their lives, and transforms their communities. Since its founding in 1968, CITYarts has engaged nearly 100,000 New Yorkers of all ages and backgrounds with over 500 professional artists in the process of designing and creating more than 260 murals, mosaics, and sculptures. Special emphasis is given to neighborhoods where access to and participation in the arts is limited.
Robert Indiana, Love Wall
October 1, 2007 to March 30, 2008
Park Avenue Mall at 57th Street, Manhattan
Description:
Robert Indiana’s bronze Love Wall is a reworking of one of the artist’s most iconic images. The "Love" image, the word "love" in all capitals, arranged in a square with a tilted "O," was originally developed by the artist for use as the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card in 1964 and shown as a sculpture in Central Park in 1969. Since its inception, various sculptural incarnations of the sculpture have been installed on Sixth Avenue in New York City, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, in the city of Taipei, Taiwan, as well as in Singapore, Bilbao, Spain, and Vancouver, Canada. There is also another version of the sculpture, spelling out "ahava" (“love” in Hebrew) on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Ahava was shown in Central Park’s Doris Freedman Plaza for a four-month period in 1978, prior to its installation at the Israel Museum.
George Rickey, Two Open Rectangles
October 1, 2007 to April 28, 2008
Union Square, Manhattan
Description:
Two Open Rectangles, a stainless steel kinetic sculpture, is made to move gently in response to any gust of wind. In this way, the sculpture, like other kinetic work in the artist’s oeuvre, translates the transitory nature of the wind’s movement into the more physical form of steel.
George Rickey (1907-2002) began his career as a painter in the cubist style. He later changed mediums and began his career in sculpture, starting with mobiles. Rickey’s mobile work eventually became the large, steel, kinetic forms for which he is most well-known. His work was included in the 1967 exhibition Sculpture in Environment.
Presented by Marlborough Chelsea.
Kenny Scharf, Totemikon
December 6, 2007 to March 30, 2008
TriBeCa Park, Manhattan
Description:
Kenny Scharf’s bronze sculpture Totemikon riffs on the traditional form of a totem pole. As the title suggests, the sculpture explores themes of “totems” and “icons” as seen through Scharf’s aesthetic, which is very much informed by pop and contemporary-culture influences.
Scharf rose to prominence in the 1980s New York art world. The artist was part of a group of dynamic artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf’s work often employs a cartoon or cartoon-like aesthetic, using that seemingly childlike style to comment on adult themes.
Presented by Paul Kasmin Gallery.
Boaz Vaadia, Asa; Ba’al & Yizhaq; Yo’ah with Dog; Asaf
Morningside Park
Boaz Vaadia, Asaf & Yo’ah, Amaryahu
Broadway Malls at 114th and 117th streets, Manhattan
October 1, 2007 to April 18, 2008
Description:
Boaz Vaadia’s group of bronze and bluestone boulder sculptures placed throughout Morningside Park and two locations on the Broadway Malls create collectively, as the artist says, a “contemplative connection between various communities.” The works are site-specific in that the materials Vaadia uses- slate, shingle, bluestone (here cast in bronze)- are all materials that are found in the native geology of the New York City area. Vaadia’s working method of hand-carving and then stacking layers of stone to create his forms recalls ancient methods of stone-carving and construction. For select works, Vaadia then continues the process by casting the original stone sculpture in bronze.
Hans Van de Bovenkamp, Cloud Kicker
October 1, 2007 to March 16, 2008
Dante Park, Manhattan
Description:
Like many of his works, Van de Bovenkamp’s Cloud Kicker was inspired by organic forms—in this case, the sky. The sculpture was made from stainless steel, a material the artist likes for its strength and contemporary appearance, as well as its reflective quality that modifies the work’s appearance as the light changes throughout the day.
Born in 1938 in Garderen, Holland, Van de Bovenkamp trained first as an architect and then studied sculpture at the University of Michigan. Upon graduating from college in 1961, Van de Bovenkamp moved to New York City in order to pursue his dream of becoming a sculptor. Select one-person shows and group exhibitions include the Arlene Bujese Gallery, East Hampton, NY; New Leaf Gallery, Berkeley, CA; Kouros Sculpture Garden, Ridgefield, CT; Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York, NY; and Sagaponack Sculpture Fields, Sagaponack, NY. Additionally, Van de Bovenkamp’s works are featured in numerous corporate, museum, university, and public collections.
This project was organized by the Louis K. Meisel Gallery.
Melora Kuhn, Monument
October 3, 2007 to March 30, 2008
Fort Tryon Park, Manhattan
Description:
Kuhn’s sculpture for the Cloisters Lawn is a monumental wooden cut-out in the silhouette of a grand, equestrian memorial statue. The artist recasts this classic image of the hero into an examination of what has been left out or forgotten in our histories. It forcibly reinterprets the idea of the vanquisher. Kuhn chose Fort Tryon Park for Monument in part because its physical geography—high on a hilltop—enhances the association of the conquering figure. In addition, the proximity of the Cloisters lends further connection to the history of Western regimes (including the advent of the American industrialists who took as their “spoils” the art and architecture of past European empires). Finally, the artist adds that the diverse communities of the surrounding neighborhoods speak to the many cultures whose histories are often overlooked in the narrative of the subjugating Western men that still dominates our textbooks.
Kuhn was born in 1971 in Boston and now lives in Brooklyn and works in Long Island City. She has a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and has trained in Italy at La Cipressaia, Montagnana, and Scuola Lorenzo di Medici in Florence. She has had solo exhibitions of her work in New York, San Francisco, and Boston, with a show in Seoul, Korea scheduled for October 2007.
This project was organized by ZieherSmith Gallery and made possible by the Fort Tryon Park Trust.
Tony Smith, Free Ride (1962, refabricated 1982)
October 31, 2007 to March 31, 2008
Carl Schurz Park, Manhattan
Description:
Tony Smith’s (1912-1980) painted steel sculpture Free Ride is a study in planes and angles. The geometric work, in some ways a simple black structure, becomes complex through its range of views. Each vantage the sculpture is viewed from offers a different angle and a different shape to the form. Smith’s work is not a sculpture for passive viewing; instead it invites engagement and thought—provoking a response in the viewer.
Tony Smith was trained and spent a good portion of his life as an architect. His introduction to art was through painting, and he did not begin his career as a sculptor until he was 44, in 1956. Smith was highly influenced by other minimalist, monumental sculptors, such as Barnett Newman, and first exhibited his sculptural work in 1964. He was the first artist to exhibit work in New York City Parks with his 1967 show in Bryant Park.
On loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sarah Lucas, Perceval
November 15, 2007 to May 15, 2008
Doris Freedman Plaza, Central Park, Manhattan
Description:
Perceval is a life-sized horse and cart, a replica of the sort of china ornament that have had pride of place on many British mantelpieces. Scaled up, the horse is majestic in his power but offers an unthreatening sense of stolid comfort in his benign reliability. In the proudly fashioned cart are two concrete cast squashes, outsize and off-scale, fertility symbols implicating a competitive rural contest to rival the ritual of the maypole. These giant vegetables are cast in cement, one of Lucas’s favored materials, and take the replication of the horse and cart knick-knack away from kitsch, the crudeness of this signature Lucas gesture thrown into sharper relief by the high finish of the bronze sculpture.
Perceval reflects a fascination for Englishness evident in much of Lucas’s work. The title is borrowed from the name of one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table: raised in a forest by his mother, the virtuous and noble Perceval meets the knights as they pass and goes off the join them, later becoming involved in the quest for the Holy Grail. The story has been reworked in various contemporary versions, notably Eliot’s The Wasteland and Wagner’s opera Parsifal, in which version the eponymous hero is the one to recover the spear used to pierce Christ during his crucifixion.
Sarah Lucas is one of the most significant contemporary women artists working in London today. She is among the group of artists who are credited with being a catalyst for the Young British Artist (YBA) movement, which has brought to light the likes of artists including Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Tracey Emin, and others. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums, including Tate Modern in London, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein Hamburg, and others.
This installation is a project of the Public Art Fund.
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