Art in the Parks

Begun in 2010, Good Neighbors became a way to celebrate and preserve the history of a place by photographing its residents and business owners. This year, in the midst of a pandemic, a project that began in admiration of a neighborhood and its inhabitants has new significance. With support from the Columbus-Amsterdam BID, El Taller Latino Americano, and City Artists Corps, this project has expanded to bring a larger sense of optimism to our minds as we face this moment, unclear of when it will end and what our return will look like.

Black, Trans, and Alive (Return Home) is made possible in part with funding from ArtBridge, and Facebook Open Arts.

Reclining Liberty is a mashup of the Statue of Liberty and the giant reclining Buddha statues of Asia. The piece, coated in plaster resin, is sturdy enough to allow viewers to touch, climb, sit atop, lean up against the figure, and interact with the monument at a human level. Finished with copper paint and an oxidizing acid, the patina mimics the actual Statue of Liberty. 

Reclining Liberty is made possible in part with funding from: Friends of Morningside Park, LMCC, Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, and Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation (UMEZ).

For the High Line, Ibrahim Mahama presents 57 Forms of Liberty, an inverted industrial tank from a defunct manufacturing facility in Wilmington, North Carolina. The work is inspired by a rusted smokestack the artist saw at the locomotive workshop in Sekondi, Ghana that now has a tree growing from its mouth. For Mahama, the workshop is an important reference to the British use of railways to divide and exploit resources until the country regained its independence in 1959. While the British railways, a former industrial tank from North Carolina, and the High Line have very different industrial histories, Mahama notes that it’s often when we zoom out, and remove ourselves from a specific space and time, that we can come to see our shared history all the better. The sculpture on the High Line also has a tree growing from its top, an important image for the artist that mirrors the torch of the Statue of Liberty to the south, and the non-human agents that continue to reinvent the conditions for living on this planet, even among the structures built and abandoned by humans. 

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

Be Heard is a large-scale megaphone made of plywood panels arranged to create the conical form of the megaphone and assembled to create the structural framework that holds it up. The plywood was previously used as a barrier, providing security to businesses from the perceived threat of the protests on one side, and a canvas for expression to street artists and protesters on the other. By transforming the plywood to a megaphone, a device for amplifying people's voices, the project builds on these layers of use and meaning. It aims to elicit a hopeful and optimistic reaction, highlighting the resilience of New York City by showcasing how a material once used as a barrier during protests can be transformed to celebrate free speech and civic engagement.

The Plywood Protection Project is an initiative to collect the plywood used by NYC businesses to board up their windows during the protests of 2020 and redistribute it to artists, extending and repurposing the life of this material. Arts not-for-profit worthless studios collected over 200 boards of plywood and initiated an open call for artists, eventually selecting five local makers to participate in a unifying public art project across all five boroughs of New York. This piece is one of the five created by the project, each installed in a different borough of New York City.

This exhibition is presented by worthless studios.

This exhibition is presented by TAFETA (London) in partnership with the Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance for Armory Off-Site.

Joanne Howard’s public art installation The Elders is comprised of small brass sculptures cast from carved apples. Howard carves faces into apples before letting them sit for a period of time. As the apples dehydrate, their faces take on the role of wizened elders. Howard sees these miniature characters as guardians of nature, here to protect the natural environment and also to gently remind passersby of the preciousness and precarious state of our green spaces. The artworks can be found on the fences near the park entrance at East 86th Street and East End Avenue and the Hoop Garden.

FACES OF HARLEM is a multi-site outdoor photography installation curated by founder Sade Boyewa El and Kate Sterlin, featuring portraits of friends and neighbors in Harlem; a documentation of who we are today, 100 years after the Harlem Renaissance. In early 2021 Sade Boyewa El, a longtime Harlemite invited nine other photographers to create portraits of people from this beloved neighborhood in hopes of inspiring meaningful conversations, fostering connection, and bridging some of the many visible gaps in the community.