Art in the Parks

Colony Expanse, a new installation by artist Matthew Willey as part of the global initiative The Good of the Hive, draws attention to the issues surrounding bees, pollinators and the environment we share. The intention is to stimulate dialogue and awareness of how the health of the honeybee impacts our own health and food supply. Willey has created a symbolic honeybee swarm “resting spot” on the park’s gazebo structure and four abstracted, hand-painted wooden honeybee hives for the sculpture platform.

This exhibition is presented by The Good of the Hive.

ArtBuilt Mobile Studio, Queens Museum and NYC Parks invite local residents and immigrants to the launch of the trilingual newspaper project, Round Robin, in Seward Park with resident artists Art Parley, an art collective formed by Sue Jeong Ka and Melissa Liu!

Come by during Art Parley’s Open Studio hours to learn about the next six weeks of activities and workshops around Round Robin, an ongoing socially-engaged project to build spaces for cross-cultural solidarity and understanding through storytelling, conversation, and empathy resonant to participants from diasporic communities in Chinatown, LES, and Two Bridges.

The Round Robin Neighborhood Archive and Library will be available during all Open Studio hours, activities, and workshops. Come read the first ever trilingual issues of Round Robin along with other collected materials related to issues of immigration and gentrification.

Open Hours:
Tuesdays and Wednesdays: 3:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Saturdays and Sundays: noon - 6:00 p.m.

ArtBuilt Studio in the Park is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, Surdna Foundation, and The New York Community Trust. 

Hell Gate Cairns is a series of stacked stone pillars, or cairns, that stand watch over the western coastline of Riverside Park. By focusing on the forms of natural stone, the piece draws attention to the boulders that line the waterfront, remnants of the great earthmoving projects of the 20th century that cleared the city’s waterways, including the perilous “Hell Gate”. The monument’s placement at the water’s edge recalls these feats of human engineering, while further calling upon the cairns’ symbolism as an ancient sign of treacherous waters. Their verticality a reflection of the nearby skyline, the Hell Gate Cairns aim to embody the human impulse to imaginative construction – stacking stones first in play, then as architecture.

This exhibition is presented by Hudson Square Connection and Magic Box Productions.

Out of Thin Air, a sound installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Sari Carel, invites New Yorkers to think about breathing in all its intimacy and enormity. Visitors will experience an immersive soundscape—expanding to and informing the environment, creating a rich sensory journey up to City Hall, while addressing important issues relating to air quality and wellness. The recording is a rather unusual composition drawn from such sounds as rustles, crackles, beats, huffs, and delicate inhaling and exhaling, which fade in and out of the sounds of the city. A series of public programs, including guided sound walks and programs for youth and families, will take place in the park throughout the exhibition.

This exhibition is presented by More Art.

Over the past three years, artist John Raymond Mireles has worked to unite Americans across their geographic, racial, political, cultural and other differences by photographing individuals from all 50 US states and publicly exhibiting their portraits. Mireles connects with his subjects up close and enlarges the resulting portraits to larger-than-life scale in order to encourage viewers to intimately relate to and empathize with their fellow residents of the United States of America. This exhibition contains 86 portraits of individuals from all 50 US states plus Washington, D.C. Included also are several portraits taken in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City where Mireles lives and works.

This exhibition is presented by First Street Green .

Through her colorfully crocheted, intensively worked, and oversized flowers, Naomi Lawrence believes that small artistic gestures can lead people into a new imagination about their home environment. She uses ubiquitous chain-link fences to frame color and texture in surprising ways, creating interaction between fiber, color, fence, sidewalk, and passing pedestrians and validating under-recognized and unappreciated corners of neighborhoods. At Anibal Aviles Playground, she created a giant magnolia–a seasonal Parks flower–which was installed in June. A crocheted hibiscus tree to be installed on the fence of J.H.S. 054 Booker T. Washington across the street in September, following a series of community workshops to make the leaves.

Constellation is an architectural sculpture, performance, and panel series that activates the underused plaza in Seward Park as a transformative community public space. The site-specific sculptural pavilion is composed of interlocked wooden modules that will be re-arranged and transformed seasonally in three different configurations over the course of the exhibition.

This exhibition was made possible by the Art in the Parks: UNIQLO Park Expressions Grant.

From 2008 to 2012, Capucine Bourcart walked every street in Manhattan, from State Street to 220th Street, taking photographic details of walls along her route. This collection of photographs is used to create a photo-assemblage made of 4,170 metal squares that hang from a chain link fence in a design inspired by those of Native Americans’, the island’s first inhabitants.

This exhibition was made possible by the Art in the Parks: UNIQLO Park Expressions Grant.