Art in the Parks

Description:

The Lower East Side Waterfront Alliance & Lower Manhattan Cultural Council invited artists and design professionals to participate in a community-driven, site-responsive design process for the temporary activation of Pier 42 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Artists and designers were asked to propose ideas for cultural activity including temporary public art, small-scale interventions, programming and event spaces that directly engage the site and community in which the pier is located.

Chat Travieso is a Brooklyn-based artist and architectural designer born in Miami, Florida. Travieso creates interactive installations and urban interventions that engage the public and encourage people to question their assumptions of the everyday built environment.

Chat’s project “On a Fence” transforms the fence surrounding Pier 42 into an interactive structure incorporating seating, play, exercise, and signage (done in collaboration with graphic designer Yeju Choi). The project seeks to invert the function and meaning of the fence from a physical barrier to a place of inclusion. On a Fence is in collaboration with Yeju Choi, (Signage, Graphic Design and Identity)

For more information on the project please visit Paths to Pier 42.

Description:

The Randall’s Island Park Alliance, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Made Event are pleased to present FLOW annual summer art exhibitions along the shoreline at Randall’s Island Park in New York City. FLOW 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. Each year, FLOW features site specific projects by participants in the Bronx Museum’s Artists in the Marketplace (AIM) program for emerging artists.

Raphael’s work at Randall’s Island Park investigates the category of the ornamental and decorative, and the idea of an architectural “folly” in contrast to functional structures. Specifically, inspired by the Island’s early use for farming by Dutch settlers, Raphael’s folly will be based on the form of a split rail fence, typically used for agriculture, in romantic and nostalgic homage to the Island’s past and to the beginning of its ongoing and complex historical transformations. FLOW.14 also includes Dean Monogenis’ City Pillars, Jessica Sander’s Ground, andKant Smith’s Ghost House.

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

Description:

For the High Line, Ringgold has reinterpreted a historical work titled Groovin High (1986), a colorful and paradigmatic story quilt, one of the many that inspired a revival of the medium in the late 1970s. Depicting a crowded dance hall bordered by quilted hand-dyed fabrics, Groovin’ High is evocative of Ringgold’s interest and activism in the African American communities of her native Harlem. Her style reflects formal treatments of shape, color, and perspective reminiscent of many painters whose styles defined the Harlem Renaissance, an immensely productive and creative cultural movement of the 1920s that erupted out of the African American community living in the eponymous New York neighborhood.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the Highline.

Description:

The Art Students League of New York, one of America's premier art schools, presents the Model to Monument Program (M2M), a collaboration with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation that has culminated in the installation of eight sculptures on view along Riverside Park South from 59th to 72nd Streets. The sculptures were created by an international team of selected League students during a nine-month program led by master sculptor Greg Wyatt. The pieces explore "The Function of the Public Square: Role and Responsibility of the Artist Relative to Riverside Park South." The artists are: Sherwin Banfield, John N. Erianne, Reina Kubota, Beñat Iglesias Lopez, Anna Kuchel Rabinowitz, Anne Stanner, and Morito Yasumitsu.

This work was made possible by the Art Students League’s Model to Monument Program and the Riverside Park Fund.

Description:

Herb Alpert finds inspiration in the diverse cultural associations of totems, especially the ones unique to the tribes in the Pacific Northwest. These ancestral totems have been the essence of family and tribal identity. Alpert’s totems, first modeled in clay and then cast in bronze, read abstractly but also suggest recognizable, organic forms: an eagle form seems to emerge from the top of one, and human shapes surface in others. These sometimes sensuous, abstract structures and the artist’s creative process are fluid like jazz, making intangible compositions physical. Alpert, a leading musician, composer, and music producer makes connections between the fluid nature of his sculpture and his intuitive approach to music.

This exhibition is presented with ACA Galleries

Description:

In the community spirit of Earth Day, Nathan Sawaya utilized the recycled bricks that guests were asked to individually sign when they visited The Art of the Brick exhibition at Discovery Times Square. Nathan used more than fifty thousand bricks over the course of 100 hours to create three multi-colored human figures that warmly embrace the trees in the park. “I hope these splashes of color made from recycled LEGO bricks inspire people to explore found art and bring awareness to using reclaimed objects in their everyday lives.”

As the artist behind The Art of the Brick®, one of the largest and most popular art exhibits touring the globe, Sawaya has had an opportunity to leave his creative mark in each city the exhibition visits. Sawaya has installed his street art Hugman sculptures around the world, such as Singapore, Melbourne, Brussels and most recently, Dublin. For his first NYC Parks installation, he has created three larger-than-life Hugman.

Description:

The Love & Peace Global Sculpture Campaign is a series of 15 monumental glossy 15-foot high floral sculptures which are exhibited in galleries, museums, and public spaces around the globe from 2012-2017. These fiberglass poppies, collectively titled Love, have travelled to numerous cities including Rome, Prague, New York, London, Singapore, Shenzhen, and Venice during the 55th Biennale. The driving force behind Tzarev’s Love & Peace Global Sculpture Campaign is her belief that art is the bridge by which the world can be connected.

This exhibition is presented by  Ana Tzarev Gallery

Description:

Fanny Allie, a French artist based in New York, has created a site-specific public artwork for Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan’s East Village. The sculpture, titled Serendipity, is a life-size, steel silhouette of a formerly homeless man who spent much of his time in the park. The exhibition will be located near the western entrance at St. Mark’s Place and Avenue A and is on view through November 2013.

Allie visited Tompkins Square to prepare for the exhibition and find a regular park visitor to serve as the model for her piece. Instead the model found her. Christopher Gamble approached Allie and struck up a conversation. They later met for coffee where he revealed he was previously homeless for 28 years and frequented the park. Gamble agreed to model for the sculpture. The steel figure stands with its face looking up to the sky, shoulders and arms outreached, preparing to take flight. Allie interprets the piece as a symbol of hope and the desire to strive for something greater. In a series of recent works, she has focused on the human body, with a particular interest in its outline. By removing the center of the figure, she plays with ideas of memory and the mark we leave on places and others.

Description:

Visible to Roosevelt Island Tram riders, Queensborough Bridge commuters, and pedestrians, Hosea, a 15 foot tall steel and iron sculpture, features an enormous railroad gear that is supported by a tripod of wavy steel legs. This gear refers beautifully to the working yellow gear in the mechanical section of the tram, clearly visible from the park. Eisner found the gear in a scrap yard and placed it at the apex of the sculpture to “celebrate its form and strength,” rather than its industrial past. The three legs straddle the decorative paved element in the center of the park and allow ample space for viewers to perambulate under and around the sculpture.

This exhibition is presented by Susan Eley Fine Art.

Description:

Two 15–foot–high steel models of the largest equine sculptures in the world are on view in Bryant Park as part of the launch of Scotland Week in New York City.  The larger–than–life installation, known as The Kelpies, was created by Scotland’s leading public artist Andy Scott.

Creating a majestic, awe–inspiring atmosphere in Bryant Park, The Kelpies are the original 1:10 scale design models of Andy’s 100–foot–tall sculptures located in the heart of the new 900 acre Helix Parkland in Falkirk, central Scotland.

With one horse rearing up and the other at rest, a dramatic sense of motion is created.  The sculptures are made from hundreds of small pieces of steel plate painstakingly welded to create the forms. The Kelpies were then galvanized, a process that involves dipping the sculptures in baths of molten zinc.   The full scale sculptures are now among the largest equine artworks in the world.

Inspiration for this work came from the Clydesdale horses that, for centuries, pulled boats and cargo along the towpaths of the Forth & Clyde and Union Canals in Scotland. 

This exhibition is presented by the American Scottish Foundation and Bryant Park Corporation.