Art in the Parks

Public Walks Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays
Free admission. Advance reservations required, RESERVE ONLINE!

High Line Art presents Caterpillar by artist Carol Bove, a HIGH LINE COMMISSION featuring seven sculptures that punctuate the wild landscape on the High Line at the Rail Yards, the third and final section of the High Line. Bove’s commission is the last opportunity to see this section of the elevated railway in its natural state before it opens as public parkland in 2014. The commission will be viewable during public walks on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays until May 2014. Advance reservations are required. Admission is free and reservations can be made online.

For the High Line, Bove continues her research on the role and function of art in the public space, by creating seven new sculptures which are installed within the self-seeded landscape on the High Line at the Rail Yards. Bove’s site-specific installation highlights the uniqueness of its location and opens a magical environment for viewers. Installed along a 300-yard stretch of the untouched terrain of the High Line, Bove’s sculptures reveal themselves among the unruly vegetation, like mysteriously pristine ruins of a lost civilization or a contemporary version of a Zen garden. Abstract shapes and enigmatic forms are carefully placed along the High Line, creating a unique viewing experience surrounded by the wilderness of the High Line and the stunning views of the Hudson River.

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line

Image credit: Carol Bove, Celeste, 2013. Part of the HIGH LINE COMMISSION Caterpillar. On view at the High Line at the Rail Yards. Photo by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy of Friends of the High Line.

Ivan Navarro’s site-specific installation presents three water towers inside of which neon reflections repeat infinitely. The sculptures merge a staple of the New York skyline with the street-level landscape of the Park. The artist takes the exhibition’s title from the beloved 1940 Woody Guthrie folk song, which is both an American anthem and a vocal pull to the freedoms offered in this country for an immigrant population. The towers are elevated to a height above visitors’ heads, allowing them to walk underneath and look up into each sculpture to view the content within.

Navarro’s water towers—each measuring approximately seven feet in diameter and standing on roughly eight-foot-tall supports—will function as vessels for a vocabulary of the political and personal experience of immigration. The interior of one tower will feature the words “me” and “we”, another will feature the word “bed”, and a third will display the image of a ladder—all of which will be composed of neon light. An internal arrangement of mirrors will enable each word or image to repeat perpetually through a seemingly endless vertical space.

This exhibition is presented by the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars is part of a progression from a series of smaller sculptures Henricksen made out of porcelain. The porcelain series started in 2010 with a show at John Connelly Presents in Chelsea and the Brooklyn Museum acquired one of these sculptures in 2011. Awry and gnarled, Henricksen’s tree trunks are riddled with arborglyphs, delivering messages that speak of human behavior, while conveying both distress and conviction. The quote “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars is found in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere's Fan.

Cheryl Farber Smith’s Mellow Yellow is as fun as its name. The nine-foot tall aluminum sculpture is a playful piece that juxtaposes the most basic of all visual elements –geometric shapes. Painted a brilliant yellow, the sculpture is comprised of suspended circles, cylinders and cubes that take part in an animated dance. Centrally located in Tribeca Park (also known as Beach Street Park), this sculpture will brighten the heavily canopied plaza. Smith, who exhibited her sculpture Leaning Firm in Brooklyn’s Columbus Park in 2007, also explores similar themes in her photographic prints.

High Line Art is pleased to announce Busted, the HIGH LINE COMMISSION that includes figurative sculptures, celebratory portraits, and commemorative monuments installed on and around the High Line. Featuring nine acclaimed international artists, Busted will be on view from April 2013 to April 2014.

Drawing its inspiration from the dedicatory sculptures that punctuated the streets of ancient Rome, Busted plays with the popular tradition of urban monuments and civic landmarks that have defined public spaces for centuries. Who are today's heroes and who does the public expect to see memorialized in monumentsΑ Busted will raise some of these questions by bringing together a group of artists who are questioning the tradition of commemorative sculpture and the format of the celebratory monuments. The invited artists will touch upon – at times with levity and sense of humor – issues of democracy, taste, and representation of the self in the public space.

Busted will feature nine international artists including: Frank Benson, Steven Claydon, George Condo, Mark Grotjahn, Sean Landers, Goshka Macuga, Ruby Neri, Amalia Pica, and Andra Ursuta.

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line

Analogia is an epic new public outdoor art installation making its worldwide debut at Bryant Park. The largest free-standing structure of its kind, Analogia is an overlapping of painting, architecture, and sculpture and will feature a performance component, soundscape designs and a lighting design.

A massive 60-foot edifice comprised of an overlapping tower and pyramid create a temporary gateway to Bryant Park. The imagery, inspired by sculptures from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, captures the inherent tension and similarity of world cultures in a Babel-like structure that juxtaposes Western and non-Western traditions.

Brooklyn–based design studio Young Projects was selected to design the 2014 Valentine Heart,Match-Maker, and to oversee its construction in collaboration with Kammetal. Over the last six years the Times Square Alliance has invited architecture and design firms to submit proposals for a romantic public art installation celebrating Valentine’s Day in Times Square. For the 2014 competition, Times Square Arts, in collaboration with Van Alen Institute, selected Young Projects’ Match-Maker out of six design proposals.

Match-Maker cosmically connects people this Valentine’s Day. Guided by their zodiac signs, visitors arrange themselves at twelve viewing points around the heart-shaped sculpture. Peering through colorful, interwoven periscopes provides glimpses of each viewer’s four most ideal astrological mates, offering potentially novel connections between lonely souls or settled lovers. The form of the sculpture is elusive, complex and symmetrical, and changes as viewers experience it from different vantage points throughout Times Square. From many points of view it forms a perfect and iconic heart; from other perspectives the sculpture is tangled and perplexing.

This exhibition is presented by the Times Square Alliance and the Van Alen Institute.

One of Brazil’s most highly regarded contemporary artists, Iran do Espírito Santo (b. 1963) is known for his austere yet sensuous drawings, wall paintings, and sculptures. Playground is his first public work in the United States. At first glance it looks like a massive cube made from large stone blocks – but with a number of blocks missing at the corners. On closer examination it becomes evident that the work hasn’t been constructed out of individual elements but rather cast in stone-like concrete as a unified form. We see that the “mortar” is exactly the same as the “block” itself and that the entire sculpture is consistent in color, texture, and finish. The “missing” corner elements were never there but are instead deliberately composed openings that allow transparency and access to the interior space.

Do Espírito Santo speaks of the work as a kind of “idealized ruin” that is also a metaphorical playground. As a child the artist loved to play with building blocks. Given its architectural materials and oversized scale, Playground is a bit like a blown up cartoon image of a child’s fantasy building. At the same time, the artist has created a subtle and elegant play between perception and reality, construction and destruction, and between idealized form and everyday objects and materials.

This exhibition is presented by Public Art Fund.

Three 30-foot tall bronze trees by renowned Italian artist Giuseppe Penone are now installed in Madison Square Park. Ideas of Stone (Idee di pietra), featuring Penone’s signature manipulation of the trees’ natural forms, will interact with the park’s lush landscape to highlight the relationships amongst man, sculpture and nature. The installation will remain on view daily from September 26, 2013 through February 9, 2014 in Madison Square Park.

Throughout his 40–year career, Penone has employed natural materials and forms in an exploration of the contrasting and fundamental relationships between man and nature. Penone was a member of the Italian Arte Povera movement, which was comprised of artists who sought to dissolve divisions between art and life by using commonplace subjects and materials in their work. Trees as living sculpture is a recurring theme for Penone. He often manipulates these natural forms by twisting, deconstructing, hollowing, and uprooting the organic figures. He incorporates traces of fingerprints, nails, wires, carvings, and precariously placed boulders as remnant evidence of the sculptures’ manmade composition and the effect of human interaction with the natural world. Penone addresses concepts of weight, balance, and scale, while merging the manmade and the organic.

This exhibition is presented by the Madison Square Park Conservancy.