Art in the Parks

The work is one of Lachaise’s best-known, monumental works dating from the late twenties. The buoyant, expansive figure represents a timeless earth goddess, one Lachaise knew and sought to capture throughout his career. This vision was inspired by his wife, who was his muse and model, Isabel, that “majestic woman” who walked by him once by the Bank of the Seine. This work is a tribute to the power of all women, to ‘Woman,’ as the artist referred to his wife, with a capital W.

Gaston Lachaise devoted himself to the human form, producing a succession of powerfully conceived nude figures in stone and bronze that reinvigorated the sculptural traditions of Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol.

This exhibition is presented by Hunters Point Parks Conservancy and the Lachaise Foundation.

Liberty Bell is an animated, monumental, and richly sonorous augmented reality (AR) drawing in 360 degrees. The public artwork will be geolocated at a series of sites and experienced on smartphones and tablets through Baker Cahill’s free 4th Wall app. This project, which is two years in the making, lives at the vibrant intersection of public art, social consciousness, and tech. It is being presented simultaneously in six cities in the United States: Boston, MA, Charleston, SC, Philadelphia, PA, Rockaway, NY, Selma, AL, and Washington, DC.

In this polarized and tumultuous election year, many concerns persist around the founding principles of American freedom and democracy. Inequality, structural racism, injustice, and the ability to vote are chief among them. Inspired by the original cracked Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the drawing hovers beyond viewers, swaying with the rich and layered sound of bells tolling. The Liberty Bell soundscape morphs from the rhythmic lulling of a tolling bell, into a harmonious and dissonant sequence of ringing as it becomes increasingly unpredictable and arrhythmic. The richly textured brushstrokes and bell sounds resemble loosely knitted threads that unravel and come together in an uncomfortable, but cohesive moment. They reflect the evolution and transformation of liberty over time into the complex reality we face today. This exhibition is presented by Art Production Fund, in partnership with 7G Foundation and the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy, a project of the Fund for the City of New York.

In this turbulent moment when we find ourselves reevaluating American identity and values, the MONUMENTS NOW exhibition seeks to address the role of monuments in society and commemorate underrepresented narratives such as diasporic, Indigenous, and queer histories.

The exhibit evolves over three cumulative parts. Part I opens summer 2020 with major new commissions for contemporary monuments by acclaimed artists Jeffrey Gibson, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Xaviera Simmons. Then Part II and Part III of the exhibition open together on October 10, 2020. Part II encompasses ten monument sculptures by the Park’s 2020 Artist Fellows and Part III features a multi-faceted monument project collectively realized by high school students. The park’s Broadway Billboard will also feature a monuments-related artwork by artist Nona Faustine. Furthermore, in acknowledgment of how monuments are shaped by society as well as by artists, the public is invited to share their reactions on-site and online over the course of the exhibition. All three parts of the exhibition remain on view through March 2021. This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

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.

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.

An augmented reality app that encourages participants to explore and experience local, ecological networks present in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Cell phones and headphones are used to experience this artwork, which includes mixed-reality animations and storytelling as an overlay to the actual park. The experience is an embodied one, designed to connect humans empathetically with the biodiversity, symbioses, and unseen worlds in public park spaces.

Fantastic ecologies exist everywhere on earth and at many scales, many of which are invisible to us. This artwork is a guided tour which will allow us to inhabit the worlds of multiple species along the trail, allowing them to become visible and “sense-able” to us. The viewer re-enacts stories from the perspectives of non-humans; playing the part of a plant calling out to a bird to help with pest control, an ant planting spring flowers while simultaneously feeding her babies, an underground fungal network delivering goods to struggling trees, and a cormorant searching for a meal in a man-made lake.

There are 8 scenes, each takes place at Willow Lake, on the South end of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The starting point for the app tour is the East entrance of the Pat Dolan Trail.

The free app can be downloaded for iOS or Android. Links here: http://hypernatural.com/bb/

Collaborators include Josh Rodenberg, Danielle McPhatter, and Jayne Kennedy, with additional support from Harvestworks, the New York City Urban Field Station, and the Ohio State University.