Art in the Parks

Description:

As we are inundated daily with media, Gina Goico reminds us of the power of cleansing ourselves and holding space for our community. In this case, she invited neighbors to reconnect through conversation and collaboration creating traditional Dominican pellizas that read “reconocer para sanar”/ “recognize to heal” in her installation Sanar (Heal). Sanar (Heal) is one of two artworks presented as part of the exhibition Persuasive Visions. Inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s conviction that propaganda through the arts can create social change, Persuasive Visions presents the work of two local artists, Gina Goico and Nick Kozak who respond to today’s constant deluge of (mis)information. Persuasive Visions was curated by Stephanie A. Lindquist.

This exhibition is presented by the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance.

Description:

For the High Line, Barlow presents a new iteration of a sculpture presented outside the British Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, re-imagined for the High Line. Throughout her career, Barlow has constantly revisited works to reconfigure them, often in consideration of a new context. The work consists of two large concrete panels, with holes cut from their centers; set on stilts, the work appears like a character teetering among the planks at its base and emerging from the planting beds below. The sculpture stands on a railway spur at 16th Street that used to run directly into a refrigerated warehouse immediately north of Chelsea Market, formerly a Nabisco cookie factory. As with much of Barlow’s oeuvre, the work points to the area’s industrial past and how architecture, like art, is perpetually cannibalized from one generation to the next. Barlow’s work will be the first artwork ever presented on the Northern Spur Preserve, a location that allows for unique views both from the High Line and the avenue below.

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line. 

Description:
The six large-scale, figural sculptures in this exhibition mark the internationally known artist Kathy Ruttenberg's first major outdoor sculpture installation. Ruttenberg is admired by critics and curators for her fantastical narrative sculptures that combine human, animal, and plant forms. Taken out of the gallery and onto the streets, her characters embrace even greater significance as they interact with the urban environment. Ruttenberg has painstakingly studied the sites along Broadway, and her carefully placed polychrome players blur the lines between dream and reality. In the Broadway malls installation, she explores a broad mix of sculptural media including patinated bronze, glass mosaic, transparent cast resin, and carefully orchestrated LED lighting. The interaction between color, form, opacity, transparency, and light itself as an artistic medium highlights the inherently theatrical nature of the visual storyteller’s art. 

Description:
Dorothy Iannone’s mural features three colorful Statues of Liberty. Between them runs the words, “I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door,” which is the final line from Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” the ode to the freedom promised by immigration to America engraved on a bronze plaque mounted inside the statue at Liberty Island. Iannone’s piece was conceived before the recent months of upheaval in the United States around immigration, an already contested topic; these recent debates have raised the Statue of Liberty anew as a symbol of the openness of New York City and the United States to those seeking asylum, freedom, or simply a better life. Iannone’s vibrant Liberties bring a bit of joy to an often exhausting and demoralizing political debate.

This exhibition is presented by High Line Art.

Description:
Our Memories is an evolving audience participatory installation. Recognizing the need to record one's personal experience, these neuron-inspired sculptures contain cavities in which participants place a color-coded "memory stone". The memory stones are classified into six emotive categories: joy, anger, love, sadness, fear, and surprise. This active act of recollection not only stirs up personal memories, it also physiologically generates a new collective memory. The Our Memories project is both a larger memorial piece, made complete by thousands of individual memories from people all over the world, and an experience that connects us to our core and to one another.

Description:

Kitchen Trees is the debut public art commission by New York-based artist B. Wurtz. This playful exhibition temporarily transforms the civic space of City Hall Park with five imaginative arboreal sculptures. They appear to grow like an oasis around the park’s historic fountain, echoing its circular forms and the spray of its jets with a splash of whimsy. Their composition is poised between meticulous order and energetic spontaneity, just as they simultaneously mimic and contrast the natural flora nearby.

This exhibition is presented by Public Art Fund.

Description:
Once You Hear Me, You Won't Forget Me is a colorful 30-foot landscape along the fence at Howard Bennett Playground. The installation depicts the imagined journey of a coqui, a small frog native to Puerto Rico known for its unique call, and his journey to New York. Funding for this project was made possible by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as part of an initiative to create health-inspired public art installations that encourage park use and strengthen community connections. 

Description:

This installation consists of six carved wood and mixed media sculptures placed throughout Sherman Creek Park. Drawing on his family and childhood recollections, New York-based artist Peter Bulow has created a garden within a garden: a personal garden of his childhood, populated by monumental statues of his family. Visitors will find his great aunt Trude and great uncle Oskar from Berlin, his Hungarian mother Giselle, depicted when she was living in India and wearing a sari, and the artist himself as a five year old boy next to Oskar, wearing identical suspenders, showing a tiger he had made out of clay.

This exhibition is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Additional funding provided by The Puffin Foundation.

Description:
?Adam Pendleton’s monumental Black Dada Flag (Black Lives Matter) (2018) is planted on the bank of NYC Parks’ Randall’s Island near what is now officially called Scylla Point – noted on historical maps as “Negro Point”, positioned close to Hell Gate – where the East and Harlem Rivers meet. Previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale’s Belgian National Pavilion in 2015, the new, larger scale flag dances over its new territory, indexing unlikely correlations: state-sanctioned violence and Modernist abstraction, the street march and the Bauhaus, Negro and Scylla.