Art in the Parks

The Randall’s Island Park Alliance (formerly the Randall’s Island Sports Foundation), The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Made Event are pleased to present FLOW, a two-part environmental art exhibition on view during the summers of 2011 and 2012 along the shoreline at Randall’s Island Park. The project is aimed at fostering appreciation of the shoreline through artistic expression, while calling visitors to interact with and care for the Park’s island environment. FLOW features ten site specific art projects, five each summer, by participants in the Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists.

FLOW.11 was a great success, fostering a coalition of environmental, musical and artistic partners. Summer park visitors and concertgoers visited the artworks alongside the river, looking out across the city’s skyline. FLOW.12 – this year's exhibition – will be open to the public from June-September, and will feature five new site-specific installations, all reflecting and encouraging interaction with the Park’s history and environment. FLOW.12  includes Gabriela Bertiller’s Glamorous Picnic, Nathan Gwynne’s Famous Faces of Randall’s Island, Michael Clyde Johnson’s Untitled (Two Viewing Rooms, Offset), Laura Kaufman’s Meters to the Center, and Sean Wrenn’s Awakening Asylum.

FLOW has been made possible through a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund (CIF) and through support from Made Event, proud producers of The Electric Zoo Festival, NYC’s largest electronic dance music festival, held annually at Randall’s Island Park.

The FLOW exhibitions express the confluence of art, music and environment at Randall’s Island Park, in the midst of one of the world’s greatest cities.

This exhibition is presented by Randall’s Island Parks Alliance, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Made Event.

Petrosino Park offers respite from the heavily trafficked streets and sidewalks of New York City and Feuerman works to achieve a similar effect in her sculpture by capturing peaceful moments that are universally appealing. This tranquil swimmer resting in a dripping inner tube offers the public the opportunity to pause, even just for a moment, engaged and inspired by what stands before them. Survival of Serena seems like a moment frozen in time and exceeds the bounds of mere mimicry to become a larger than life symbol that invites us to consider our physicality and our own stories and commonalities.

Originally debuted in painted resin at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Survival of Serena was named in honor of Venice’s former name La Serenissima, which literally means 'the most/very serene’, a theme which transverses much of Feuerman's body of work. The sculpture went on to win first prize in the Beijing Biennale the following year. The artist has Petrosino Square to unveil her new bronze Survival of Serena for the first time given its proximity to many cultural institutions and diverse neighborhoods. 

One¹¹ and 103 is made up of the film One¹¹, the eleventh work in the Number Pieces series, and the sound composition 103. In this combined piece, abstractions of light travel across and into space created by Cage. Shot entirely in black and white, a camera pans across the blank wall of a Munich television studio, illuminated by soft cloud-like patches of light which drift across the view of the camera. To describe One¹¹ Cage wrote, “One¹¹ is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity which is nonetheless communicative, like light itself, escaping our attention as communication because it has no content to restrict its transforming and informing power.”

Of the sound composition 103, Cage wrote, “10 is an orchestral work. It is divided into seventeen parts. The lengths of the seventeen parts are the same for all the strings and the percussion. The woodwinds and the brass follow another plan. Following chance operations, the number of wind instruments changes for each of the seventeen parts." On the High Line, Cage's arrangement in light, darkness, and probability will illuminate the High Line’s passageway at West 14th Street and initiate a series of chance encounters with visitors to the park.

One¹¹ and 103 is presented  by the Friends of the High Line, Electronic Arts Intermix, in coordination with the John Cage Trust.

Pet Sounds is an interactive, large-scale, mixed-media installation by acclaimed California-based artist Charles Long. Sited on Madison Square Park’s expansive Oval Lawn, Pet Sounds introduces a snaking network of vibrantly colored pipe railings creating new paths as they wind across the urban oasis. As these railings converge around a common seating area, each railing begins to grow into a unique fantastic form. While the shape of each blob suggests a different set of associations, their uncanny semblances remain wonderfully elusive. As viewers smooth their hands over the undulating biomorphic surfaces, the act of touching produces a variety of sounds and vibrations coming from within the sculptural forms.

The exhibition is presented by Mad. Sq. Art.

Abakanowicz is recognized as one of the most potent and unique voices in contemporary art with a distinct sculptural vocabulary that expresses a philosophical quest. The sculptures exhibited at Dag Dag Hammarskjold Plaza are titled Walking Figures, 2009. This group of ten headless, armless bronze figures, each approximately 8 1/2 feet tall, stands facing in one direction, with one foot forward, giving the impression of an advancing and forbidding army. The figures are all unique, as the intricately rippled surfaces differ on each, imparting individuality. Viewed from behind, the skin-like texture gives way to a smooth, concave surface, reminiscent of an empty husk. Dag Hammarskjold’s notable quote, “Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road” seems a perfect conceptual foundation for the Walking Figures which are at once beautiful and unsettling, a reminder of the fragile nature of the human condition.

This is exhibition is presented by Marlborough Gallery.

Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry presents a new commission for the 25-by-75 foot billboard next to the High Line.

Over the course of his career, Elad Lassry has investigated the history and power of images through different mediums, such as photography, film, sculpture, and performance. His small-scale photographs, usually presented in frames that take their color from the main hue of the photograph, are still lifes of mundane objects or portraits depicting individuals and animals from vintage magazines, film archives, or original images shot at Lassry’s studio. Lassry’s photographs are highly staged, intense in their vivid colors, and, at times, puzzling in their visual openness. Removed from their visual context, they question the tradition of photography while investigating – at times ironically – the power of the image and our contemporary engagement with them.

Invited by High Line Art to present on HIGH LINE BILLBOARD, Lassry has created an alluring new image of two young women, both dressed alike, gazing out of two small portholes into a sea of green. Detached from any visual history or context, the image is both mesmerizing and elusive, familiar and remote. It allows the viewers to create their own conceptual space and visual context for the image.

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line and The Kitchen

According to a famous anecdote, three pioneers of modern art­–Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger–are said to have visited the 1912 Paris Air Show. Observing a propeller, Brancusi said, "Now that is what I call sculpture!" A hundred years later, Paola Pivi’s How I Roll suggests that the modernist romance with industrial design lives on. Pivi’s sculpture incorporates an entire six-seat plane that has been specially modified, enabling it to rotate through 360 degrees while held aloft on its wing tips. The artist’s transformation allows this 1977 Piper Seneca to be seen in an entirely new way. Airborne but flightless, its steady circular movement is mesmerizing. The shift of context from airport hangar to New York City plaza is equally dramatic. It creates the striking and surreal experience of a familiar object seen in an unexpected place doing a very unfamiliar thing. Like a child’s dream come to life, How I Roll is typical of the artist’s bold and playful imagination. This exhibition is presented by the Public Art Fund.