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AccessibilityArt in the Parks
Through collaborations with a diverse group of arts organizations and artists, Parks brings to the public both experimental and traditional art in many park locations. Please browse our list of current exhibits and our archives of past exhibits below. You can also see past grant opportunities or read more about the Art in the Parks Program.
Public Art Map and Guide
Find out which current exhibits are on display near you, and browse our permanent monument collection.
Search Current and Past Exhibits
2020
Manhattan
Bob Lobe, SUPERSTORM
May 20, 2019 to May 19, 2020
Duarte Square, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
Using the repoussé technique, artist Robert Lobe has recreated a tree that was torn out of the ground during Superstorm Sandy. Lobe hammered aluminum around the felled tree and corresponding bolder to replicate their shattered forms. Though the original tree was located in along the Appalachian Trail in Northwest New Jersey at Harmony Ridge Farm and Campground, this sculpture also acts as a temporary memorial to and reminder of the storm’s devastation in downtown Manhattan, the artist’s home.
This majestic sculpture embodies the current conversations around climate change and global warming. Though the crippled tree is ominous and threatening, Lobe has also captured the beauty of the original tree and its surrounding environment.
Krzysztof Wodiczko, Monument
January 16, 2020 to May 10, 2020
Madison Square Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
?For Monument, Krzysztof Wodiczko collaborated with twelve refugees who have been resettled in the United States. Their filmed likenesses and spoken narratives are superimposed on the historic 1881 monument to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut, lauded in his day as a Union naval hero during the Civil War. Pertinent to this project is current scholarship documenting how the American Civil War drove millions – soldiers, civilians, stragglers, enslaved Africans, free people, Northerners and Southerners – from their homes to generate a nineteenth-century refugee crisis. Similarly, each filmed participant’s home country has suffered the devastation of civil war which prompted Wodiczko to choose the Farragut location for this project to compare how select individuals are lionized in wartime and others are overlooked. With footage of people from Africa, Central America, South Asia, and the Middle East, the bronze monument emerges as a surrogate for refugees whose diverse plights, harrowing journeys, grueling fortitude, and quest for democracy have recently brought them to this country. Refugees are adults and children who flee their home countries because of war, persecution, and violence and who cross borders into the promised safety of another country. Most of the speakers in this project have spent years in refugee camps. The video projection encourages viewers to consider how history is memorialized and invites the public to acknowledge this country’s conflicted history of accepting and rejecting refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants.
The 25-minute video can be viewed from 5 to 8 PM Monday to Saturday and will be complemented by a series of public programs, lectures, and events that expand upon the
Nicolas Holiber, Nicolas Holiber: Birds on Broadway, the Audubon Sculpture Project
May 17, 2019 to May 9, 2020
Dante Park and Broadway Malls from 64th Street to 157th Street, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
Nicolas Holiber: Birds on Broadway, the Audubon Sculpture Project features ten oversized sculptures of New York City birds that are in danger of extinction due to climate change, displayed along the Broadway malls, a tree-lined greenway between 64th and 157th Streets in Manhattan. Each sculpture is made entirely out of reclaimed, untreated lumber, allowing for the city’s natural forces to affect it and highlight the environmental challenges faced by each species. Holiber gives meaning to materials that had no use is amplified when paired with the exhibition’s alarming message about climate change. The birds in this exhibition were chosen from the National Audubon Society’s 2014 Birds and Climate Change Report. From among the 145 threatened species that reside in or migrate through New York, Holiber decided to showcase the American bittern, brant, common goldeneye, double-crested cormorant, hooded merganser, peregrine falcon, red-necked grebe, scarlet tanager, snowy owl, and wood duck.
This exhibition is presented by Broadway Mall Association, Gitler &_______ Gallery, and the New York City Audubon Society.
Leander Knust, Re-Material Wall
April 14, 2019 to April 13, 2020
West 111th Street People’s Garden, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
The solar panel atop Leander Mienardus Knust’s Re-material Wall powers an electroforming process that slowly transfers copper molecules from suspended pipes to individual wires each floating in a solution-filled jar. Over time these molecules accumulate and take unique forms as a physical trace of their carrier electricity while the steel rusts, wood warps, vines grow, and piping disappears.
This project is part of NYC Parks GreenThumb’s Art in the Gardens program.
Ruth Ewan, Silent Agitator
April 3, 2019 to March 31, 2020
The High Line, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
For the High Line, Scottish artist Ruth Ewan presents a monumental-scale, double-sided clock on the park at 24th Street, also visible from street level. The clock is based on an illustration originally produced for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union by the North American writer and labor activist Ralph Chaplin. The illustration was one of many images that appeared on “stickerettes,” known as “silent agitators,” millions of which were printed in red and black on gummed paper and distributed by union members traveling from job to job. The clock nods to the round-the-clock organizing work of the IWW, and the ubiquity of the clock in labor struggles: both the ways that factory owners separated private and public time and the fights for the now-diminishing labor rights we have today, such as the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. The installation is Ruth Ewan’s first public artwork in the United States.
This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line .
Various Artists, En Plein Air
April 19, 2019 to March 30, 2020
Multiple locations
The High Line, Manhattan
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
?En Plein Air, inspired by the unique site of the High Line, examines and expands the tradition of outdoor painting. The title refers to the mid-19th century practice of en plein air painting (French for “in the open air”). The inclination to paint outside was one reaction to the overwhelming transformations of life in urban centers, as nature and cities redefined each other under the pressure of modernization—a history that connects to that of the High Line, a remnant of the industrial era of the neighborhood. The artists in the exhibition not only bring painting outside but imagine nature as context, subject, and collaborator. They approach the history, methodologies, and content of outdoor painting from a variety of perspectives. The High Line is an apt site for the consideration of the importance of landscape painting in our time, as the natural features of the park juxtapose with the artificial scenery of the surrounding billboards, building facades and walls, and variety of advertisements. Through the participation of an international group of artists, En Plein Air challenges the kinds of work traditionally associated with public art—sculptures and murals—by presenting freestanding, outdoor paintings that can be viewed in the round and in dialogue with the surrounding landscapes.
Artists who are part of this exhibition include Ei Arakawa, Firelei Báez, Daniel Buren, Sam Falls, Lubaina Himid, Lara Schnitger, Ryan Sullivan, and Vivian Suter.
This exhibition is presented by the Friends of the High Line.
Anina Gerchick, BIRDLINK
June 10, 2019 to March 2, 2020
Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
BIRDLINK is an interactive habitat sculpture whose mission is to support migratory birds by inserting native plant systems throughout the urban and suburban corridors through which they travel. There, people can learn about the challenges facing bird populations, and enjoy more space. BIRDLINK attracts the wild birds that reside or migrate through the city with native plants at the empty lower and middle canopy levels. It responds to community interests, highlights the shared the urban ecosystem and bridge cultural differences through the universal of birds. This park in a busy, economically and culturally diverse neighborhood also hosts the African M’Finda Kalunda Garden and the Chinese Hua Mei Bird Garden for exotic caged songbirds.
MODU and Eric Forman Studio, Heart Squared
January 30, 2020 to March 1, 2020
Times Square
Father Duffy Square, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
?MODU and Eric Forman Studio’s Heart Squared is the winner of 2020 Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition. Tilted in various directions within a steel frame that evokes the outline of an anatomic heart, the 125 mirrors of Heart Squared transform the spectacle of Times Square into kaleidoscopic images of people, buildings, and brightly-lit billboards. While the position of each mirror seems random, the designers developed a specialized technique to calculate the specific angles in order to hide a playful surprise. As viewers move around the structure, those hundreds of reflections suddenly coalesce, revealing a pixel heart of urban life surrounded by a field of mirrored sky.
The 12th Annual Valentine Heart Design Competition is presented by Times Square Arts and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Queens
Jeannine Han and Dan Riley,, Another way it could go
October 20, 2020 to October 15, 2021
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
This work pays homage to the incredible universe of possibilities present at every moment. The reality we find ourselves in is just a glimpse or sliver of an epic landscape of decisions that constantly eludes us. This work illustrates a bit of this conundrum by constructing a living model from a computer simulation in which multiple dimensions of decisions have been overlaid. It is dedicated to the infinite histories taken and untaken that have led everywhere and nowhere. The embedded hand-laid mosaic refers directly to the location of the sculpture in Corona, Queens and illustrates a hand placing a cube and “sprinkling some sauce all over,” as a local resident described.
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.
Shantell Martin, Big Yard Mural
October 11, 2020 to October 10, 2021
Seaside Playground, Queens
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Please note: This is a past exhibit that is no longer installed in the park.
The artist is best known for her dynamic, category-defying, larger-than-life drawings. Her work explores identity as a critical pathway to self-expression and often asks, who are you? Martin uses her signature lines, iconic shapes, and primarily monochromatic black and white imagery to reflect the vibrancy of Rockaway’s community and urban beach landscape. The transformed 16,000 square foot outdoor recreational space is now a 360-degree activation where text and images appear out of her fluid and interconnected lines.
This project was made possible by Friends of Seaside Playground (FOSP), in collaboration with 7G Group, and The Rockway Hotel.
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