Art in the Parks

Her Nuclear Waters, an 11' x 28' image by artist Chitra Ganesh, is the newest installment of the Park’s ongoing Broadway Billboard series. Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice seeks to excavate buried narratives typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art. Her installation, text-based work, and collaborations dissect mythologies and layer disparate visual languages, inviting the viewer to consider alternate narratives of femininity, sexuality, and power as untold stories rise to the surface. Ganesh’s works harness a broad range of visual referents, drawing equally from German expressionism and Japanese woodblock prints, and contemporary visual idioms such as psychedelic print culture, anime, and comics. Her projects are also shaped via an engagement with literary narrative in its many forms: folk and fairy tales, song lyrics, science fiction, and mythology. In this process, the figures is fractured, multiplied, obscured, and distorted, offering points of rupture as potent sites of social and sexual transgression, contemplation, and transformation.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park

After making stops in Times Square and DUMBO, Situ Studio’s Heartwalk is returning to the Rockaways.

Heartwalk- the 30-foot heart constructed from Hurricane Sandy salvaged boardwalk in the Rockaways and Atlantic City- embodies the collective experience of Hurricane Sandy and the love that binds people together during trying times. Whether it was the radically reconfigured landscapes, the compromised infrastructural networks, or the temporary solutions that emerged in the days and weeks that followed the storm, Hurricane Sandy confronted all New Yorkers and New Jerseyans by transforming the familiar. Heartwalk was originally commissioned by the Times Square Alliance and the Design Trust for Public Space for the Times Square Annual Valentine Design Competition.

Brooklyn-based sculptor Heather Rowe investigates the transitional space between architecture, sculpture, and installation through perspectival framing, formal inversion, and material deconstruction. Rowe's latest work, Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo), is a site-specific installation of mirrors, corridors, and spatial slices presented at Socrates Sculpture Park; it is her first outdoor public artwork.

Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo) inverts the routine relationships we have with our surroundings by restructuring the familiar and reimagining architectural experiences. While many experience architecture in a state of distraction, Beyond the Hedges invites us to focus beyond our current space. Rowe interprets the traditional gazebo or trellis—structures typically placed within a park to frame picturesque views—as a sliced and cropped dimensional space that, sandwiched between pieces of plywood, becomes the framed view. Inspired by Peter Joel Harrison’s illustrated book Gazebos and Trellises, the plywood shapes suspend fragile moments of the garden pavilion, frozen in precarious states of decay or undoing. Complicating the internal network of latticework are mirrored insertions, offering an active relationship to the natural surrounds and Park visitors.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park

In collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), Socrates Sculpture Park presents do it (outside), an exhibition conceived of and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. With historical antecedents in Dada and Fluxus, do it (outside) is a selection of artists' instructions interpreted by other artists, performers, community groups, and the public. In the last 20 years, versions of do it have been presented in over 50 venues worldwide, giving new meaning to the concept of the “Exhibition in Progress.” do it (outside) at Socrates Sculpture Park will be the first presentation of the exhibition in New York City and the first to be presented completely outdoors in a public art venue.

The instructions and resulting works will be presented in and around a site-specific design by Christoff : Finio Architecture, the NY-based architecture and design studio of Taryn Christoff and Martin Finio. Their design includes 587 linear feet of sidewalk bridge that stretches across the grounds to create a pergola, corridor and courtyard within the park.

This 20th-anniversary show premieres a significant number of new instructions along with those from the fir), and have been interpreted by: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Jesus Benavente, Jane Benson & Ajay Kurian, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Daniel Bozhkov, Christoff : Finio Architecture, Alison Dell & Rob Swainston, Tamar Ettun, Rachel Fainter, Cathy Fairbanks, Lars Fisk, Luz Fleming, Linda Ganjian, Elissa Goldstone, James Haddrill & Daniel Roberts, Charles Harlan, Rachel Higgins, Chelsea Knight & Jonathan VanDyke, Kat Kohl, Rainy Lehrman, Shaun Leonardo, Marie Lorenz, Katie Mangiardi, Julie Ann Nagle, Rhiannon Platt, Jory Rabinovitz, Birgit Rathsmann, Grayson Revoir, Andrew Ross, Becky Sellinger, Sabrina Shapiro, Nataliya Slinko, Chris Sollars, Jennifer Sullivan, Leonard White, Carmen Winant, Jody Wood, Brian Zegeer, and XXX Coffee, among others.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park

As part of EXPO 1: New York, MoMA PS1, in partnership with Volkswagen and the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, is providing a temporary geodesic dome that serves as a center for culture, education, and community in the Rockaways. As a flexible space, the dome provides a venue for a library, lectures and conversations, rotating art exhibitions, film and video screenings, performances, and community events. Programming will be undertaken in partnership with local organizations in the Rockaways and Queens County.

This exhibition is presented by MoMA PS1

Watch It's My Park: VW Dome 2

Opie has created a mise-en-scΑne of epic scope, drama, and mystery. Nature and artifice, light and darkness are just some of the contradictory elements of Opie's image that create an ominous tableau for us to contemplate. Neither a warm hearth, nor regenerative forest fire, we discover it is liquid, not wood, which is ablaze. The log stumps in the foreground are Opie's own handmade clay sculptures, which further heightens the surrealism of the scene. The image hovers between an apocalyptic figment of our imaginings and the possibility of nature run amok. What is clear, however, is that all is not well within our environment or psyche. Untitled (Stump Fire #4) is from a series of new work and will be part of an exhibition at Regen Projects, Los Angeles in 2013.

Catherine Opie is one the great photographers of this generation and documentarian of our American landscape and people. A graduate of CalArts, she currently teaches in the studio program at the University of California at Los Angeles. Select solo exhibitions include Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010), Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008), Catherine Opie: Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2006). Opie was a 2009 recipient of the President's Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women's Caucus for Art and was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

Recipient of the third annual Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award, Karlis Rekevics is drawn to the overlooked part of our urban landscape that we regularly see but rarely register: bridge supports, store facades, guardrails, signs, and scaffolding. After documenting notable forms and architecture around the park, Rekevics created a series of wooden molds that combine recognizable elements in altered scales. The monumental All-Too-Familiar Tangle references the wooden bollards that line the coast near the Staten Island Ferry, as well as the neo-classical limestone columns and rounded portico entryway of the landmarked Staten Island Savings Bank located at 81 Water Street. Further investigation reveals the dormer window details from the park’s historic Village Hall conflated with the defining form of the sculpture—a wall-like structure with three peaks and low windows that echoes the distinctive pink design that covers the face of 7 Beach Street.

More information on the Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award or Park Art in the Parks program