Art in the Parks

Abigail DeVille’s Light of Freedom reflects the despair and the exultation of a turbulent period of pandemic and protest. DeVille has filled a torch with a timeworn bell, a herald of freedom, and with the arms of mannequins, beseeching viewers. The scaffold, which prevents access physically and metaphorically, recalls a work site, an insistent image on the urban landscape. But the scaffold is golden, summoning the glory of labor and the luminosity in the struggle that can lead to change.   The torch refers to the light of democracy and its foundation in ancient systems of government by citizens. In this project, DeVille conjoins significant crossroads in African-American history in New York to create a sculpture that is inspiring and introspective. She recognizes and hallows the earliest enslaved Africans who were brought to New Amsterdam, critiques the unfulfilled promise of American liberty and justice for all, and summons the current Black Lives Matter movement as a source for the work.

This exhibition is presented by Madison Square Park Conservancy.

This is an artistic tribute to the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, honoring the lives of people from the local community and around the world who have died of COVID-19. The piece is inspired by a range of traditional memorials from around the world, including Day of the Dead altars and New York City street memorials. The title combines the word “COVID” with Vida, meaning “life” in Spanish.

This original sound-based installation in recognition of World AIDS Day will be broadcast from within the New York City AIDS Memorial nightly at 7 p.m. through December, accompanied by a distinctive lighting installation. The hour-long soundtrack composed of historical texts, poetry, speeches, music, and more that capture the history of the epidemic is preceded each day, beginning at 10 a.m., by a recording featuring the names of over 2,000 New Yorkers lost to AIDS. The names are read by What Would an HIV Doula Do?, a group of activists, caregivers, friends, long-term survivors of HIV/AIDS, and people living with HIV today.

Hear Me is the third exhibition under the NYC AIDS Memorial Arts and Education Initiative. This initiative supports interactive, experiential, digital, and site-specific educational and arts programming and furthers the Memorial’s aim throughout the world.

This exhibition is presented by the NYC AIDS Memorial.

This exhibition captures how students are coping with the pandemic. In their own unique, visual voices, they have incorporated many things: still images, poetry, words, drawing, and whatever else they needed to communicate their ideas. In reaction to the murder of George Floyd and the swell of protests all over the world, they are also speaking loudly about race in this country.

Nacinimod Deodee has created a colorful three-part public art exhibition in this small triangular park, with the aim to activate the park during the cold winter months and compliment the arrival of warmer weather in the spring. A Long Walk to Freedom is a fence installation measuring 100 feet in length and runs along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. The horizontal, abstract composition is bookended by the numbers 1619 which refers to the year when American slavery began, and an infinity symbol. The artist has also created colorful yarn installations for the park’s lampposts and benches to make the space more inviting. This installation is part of Harlem Needle Arts’ larger We the People | Disrupting Silence textile series and public art initiative honoring African Diasporic peoples past and present.

This project is presented by Harlem Needle Arts.

This project is part of NYC Parks GreenThumb’s Art in the Gardens - Shed Murals project, an initiative that provides local artists with the opportunity to collaborate with community gardens as a platform to create and display their art.

For the inaugural High Line Plinth commission, Simone Leigh presents Brick House, a sixteen-foot-tall bronze bust of a Black woman. The torso is a combination of the forms of a skirt and a clay house. The figure stands tall and monumental atop the Plinth, gazing resolutely down 10th Avenue.  Brick House is the first monumental work in Anatomy of Architecture, Leigh’s continuing series of sculptures that combine architectural forms from regions as varied as West Africa and the American South with the human body. The sculpture references numerous architectural forms: Batammaliba architecture from Benin and Togo; the teleuk of the Mousgoum people of Cameroon and Chad; and the restaurant Mammy’s Cupboard in the southern U.S. All three references inform both the formal elements of the work—the conflated image of woman and architecture—and its conceptual framework.

Leigh’s Brick House will be centered on the Spur, standing in sharp contrast to the disparate elements of the immediate architectural landscape. The Plinth is the focal point of the Spur, a site whose architectural and human scales are in constant vertiginous negotiation, surrounded by a competitive landscape of glass-and-steel towers shooting up from among older industrial-era brick buildings. In this space, Leigh’s magnificent Black female figure challenges visitors to think more immediately about the architecture around them, and how it reflects customs, values, priorities, and society as a whole.

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

The Studio Museum in Harlem presents Chloë Bass: Wayfinding, the conceptual artist’s first institutional solo exhibition. This monumental commission features twenty-four site-specific sculptures that gesture toward the structural and visual vernacular of public wayfinding signage. The exhibition begins with and revolves around three central questions, poetically penned by the artist and featured throughout the park in billboard form: How much of care is patience? How much of life is coping? How much of love is attention? Through a combination of text and archival images, Bass’s sculptures activate an eloquent exploration of language, both visual and written, encouraging moments of private reflection in public space.

This exhibition is presented by the Studio Musem in Harlem.

The El Barrio Bait Station melds art, function and community by providing a useful working bait station for the local anglers, and by bringing innovative design to a waterfront in need of investment and reinvention. Not only a necessary amenity for the fishermen that line the edges of the East River day and night during the fishing seasons, the project will also serve as a catalyst for activating the neglected stretch of the river. The sculptural kiosk serves as a place to cut bait, or gut and prepare fish that are caught in addition to providing additional lighting, orientation, and educational information about fishing in the area. The bait station also includes a helpful illustration by Clarisa Diaz depicting the fish of the East River, provided courtesy of Gothamist/WNYC.

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the East River Esplanade (60th-120th Streets) and JACOBSCHANG Architecture with funding provided by NYS Sea Grant.

This exhibition is presented by Public Art Fund.