Art in the Parks

​The Generations Project and New York City AIDS Memorial partnered throughout 2021 and 2022 to present two storytelling projects at the Memorial that sought stories from folks of all ages and backgrounds who have experienced living with and surviving HIV/AIDS, as long-term survivors, friends, or family who've been impacted by the epidemic. This exhibition includes 12 image-based signs on the fence surrounding the Memorial Park with QR codes linking visitors to video documentation of these stories.

This exhibition is presented by the NYC AIDS Memorial.

Observer, Observed is a play on publicly accessible binocular towers commonly found at tourist and scenic destinations. Phillips crafts a custom shape set of binoculars, cast in bronze and attached to an adjustable metal support structure, installed on the Flyover at 26th Street. Visitors can interact with the sculpture by looking through the binoculars onto the adjacent streets and buildings—while a nearby LED screen transmits live footage of the visitor’s eyes, captured by a camera inside the binoculars. The title of the work, Observer, Observed, refers to the power dynamics at play between perception and spectatorship in public space.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the High Line.

For the High Line, Majeed presents Freedom’s Stand, an homage to the role of Black newspapers in the US. The work draws inspiration from a range of influential, community-driven work, including Chicago’s Wall of Respect and the Community Mural Movement, and emphasizes the importance of community-generated news and self-representation. Freedom’s Stand is named after Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned-and-operated newspaper in New York City, founded in 1827, which offered a counter-narrative to newspapers that attacked African Americans and encouraged slavery. The sculpture is modeled on the Dogon granaries of West Mali. The walls of the sculpture showcase headlines, articles, photographs, and advertisements from historical and contemporary Black newspapers, such as the ongoing South Shore Current in Chicago; these selections rotate monthly.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the High Line.

The CITYarts Our Voices mural is infused with the rich musical tradition and diverse culture of West Harlem. The borders contain personalized details by youth participants — small squares that tell the world about their identities, wishes, and dreams. 

This exhibition is presented by CITYarts.

Bharti Kher connects New Delhi and New York City with this nearly eighteen-foot-tall bronze universal mother figure, her most ambitious artwork to date. Its source is a miniature statue from the artist’s “Intermediaries” series, assembled by recomposing broken clay figurines. Kher finds these small objects in second hand markets in India, where she moved in 1992 after being raised and educated in the United Kingdom. This colossal sculpture reflects Kher’s cross-cultural identity and her appreciation for India’s rich material culture. She is an empowered force fostering a diverse community – a hybrid figure whose symbolic references to multiculturalism and plurality embody the possibility of an interconnected space of belonging and care.

This exhibition is presented by Public Art Fund.

This mural was created by twenty-nine NYC residents between the ages of 16 and 24 as part of a Creative Art Works (CAW) Public Art Youth Employment program. To ensure that the themes of the mural truly reflect the neighborhood, CAW youth apprentices surveyed community representatives and local residents. After an extensive period of brainstorming, sketching and color studies, every member on the team contributed ideas that were incorporated. Figurative elements include street musicians, a child smelling a flower, domino players, jazz musicians, and a young woman absorbed in a good summer book. The result is a love letter to Hamilton Heights.

This exhibition is presented by Creative Art Works.

Artist Jaime Miranda-Bambaren exhumes the truncated roots of plundered trees in the Peruvian highlands. They are centennial arbors, planted in viceregal times, razed by our degrading "modernity." By transforming such remains into “seeds”, Miranda affirms an ecological claim and a resurrectional act: to transfigure those fields of sown death into almost breathing images of life.

Artists Yvonne Shortt, Abigail Simon, Elena Grossman, Daria Dorosh, Lisa Brown, Kim Cardoso, Amira Brown, and Elizabeth White explored rituals for seven months in their communities, from Hell’s Kitchen to Oakland, California. Participants met weekly, calling in to discuss processes of intentionality, cultural practice, familial pattern, documentation, gratitude, and mapping. Each artist created a five-foot mesh, which is on display here. The work is traveling to eight locations from Washington, D.C. to California over a two-year period.