Art in the Parks

Description:

Nick Kozak’s installation Opposition Position challenges us to examine our education system and to stage our own educational interactions in this classroom in the park. Here all are welcome to attend free workshops led by local students on the first Saturday of the month through March (rain date on second Saturday). Opposition Position 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:

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:
Taking its titular form with two crossed aluminum planes, X explores how love emerges within communities where difference meets equality. An “X” evokes many expressions of interpersonal and civic love, including the written symbol for a kiss, and even the mark of a vote. People from all backgrounds cross paths in Times Square, and Reddymade’s design offers them a meeting point for further exchange and connection. Round openings at the centers of the planes combine into heart shapes when viewed from different angles. X’s glowing light grows brighter as people gather underneath its intersection.

This exhibition is presented by Times Square Arts and AIA New York

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:

Rigged is a visual commentary on our social, political, and economic systems. It asks viewers to investigate such systems with the installation’s series rabbits and carrots placed on a 3-dimensional maze. The maze has windows that provide a glimpse inside the maze structure, along with a series of staircases that lead from one level to the next, yet there is no perceptible entrance or exit point. The maze was designed by the arts non-profit RPGA Studio, Inc., and the community was invited to design the rabbit/carrot sculptures.

This exhibition is presented by RPGA Studio, Inc. and Friends of MacDonald Park.

Description:

Yvonne Shortt’s Pavilion Landing tells the story a group of intergalactic children whose spaceship has landed in the park, after a long journey seeking a ray of hope generated by the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. Shortt spent several days in the park working collaboratively with park visitors to build four 16”-tall sculptures of children out of clay. She then made molds from the clay forms, which were used to cast concrete sculptures placed at David Dinkins Circle.  Their spacecraft, inspired by the Tent of Tomorrow’s iconic suspension roof, is fabricated in concrete and aluminum with a clear plastic top that enables visitors to see the ship’s control center with several children at the helm.

This exhibition is made possible by the Art in the Parks: Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park Grant, which supports the creation of site-specific public artworks by Queens-based artists for two sites within Flushing Meadows Corona Park.