Art in the Parks

This interactive and educational installation aims to connect participants to the humanity of individuals killed by police. Through an auditory and visual experience, the installation fosters a deeper connection to each celebrant and expands on the pervasive impact of policing and systemic racism in America. 1-800 Happy Birthday was originally created in 2020 by EVEN/ODD Founder, Creative Director and Artist Mohammad Gorjestani as an ongoing voicemail project to honor Black and Brown victims of police killings and systemic racism. The project exists online, at 1800HappyBirthday.com, and allows loved ones and the public to leave and listen to voicemails left on the birthdays of those unjustly killed.

This exhibition is presented by worthless studios.

Co-created by Joel Bergner (aka Joel Artista) and the residents of the Brownsville Houses NeighborhoodStat Team, this mural visualizes the bonds that contribute to Brownsville’s social fabric and celebrates the rich culture of this neighborhood. The Brownsville Houses NeighborhoodStat Team framed this composition within the “best of times” to visually communicate unity in the face of violence.

Van der Stokker presents Thank You Darling, a monumental, site-specific mural. The light blue background is dotted with multi-colored, simple flowers in a decorative all-over pattern that appear to float across the facade. Superimposed over this, read the words “THANK YOU DARLiNG,” spelled out in a juvenile, arbitrary blend of lower and upper-case lettering. Van der Stokker’s puffy bubble-letters are a classic example of playful adolescent penmanship, seemingly lifted right out of a teenager’s diary. Thank You Darling actively engages with its audience, expressing gratitude to all those who pass, while reclaiming, at massive scale, intimate language that is often mocked or disparaged as being feminine and unserious.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the High Line.

Davis creates a larger-than-life bronze portrait of a ballerina taking her final bow after a performance. Using a combination of 3D scanning technology and traditional sculpting techniques, the bronze figure was derived from Davis’ life-size plaster cast sculpture of ballerina Jasmine Perry. Curtain Call draws on the artist’s experience growing up on stage and behind the scenes of the dance and theater world, seeing firsthand the incredible mental and physical toll taken to create a flawless performance. The work is part of a new series, Beauty Must Suffer, which examines the life and labor of Black dancers in the historically European tradition of ballet.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the High Line.

“Sankofa” derives from Akan African folklore, symbolizing remembrance of things forgotten, and “in order to know our future we must look to our past.” The installation is simultaneously futuristic and ancestral, and draws upon intersectional cultures including African, Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous craft traditions as well as the everyday histories and contemporary life of the park.

The design concept for the pavilion comes out of working in community with members of the Marcus Garvey Park. The 32-foot circular structure incorporates a gathering space below a printed fabric mesh canopy depicting both archival images and AI generated “mythology” of Marcus Garvey Park and other motifs.

This exhibition is sponsored by Harlem Grown's Culture Creativity & Care Initiative.

This exhibition showcases a 65-panel crocheted mural featuring the diverse people and occupations that comprise this Harlem neighborhood as well as highlighting the natural beauty of the flowers, water fauna and sea creatures in our East River waterway.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the East River Esplanade and Memorial Sloan Kettering.

The concept for this artwork is a colorful background representing the human impact on the environment with superimposed silhouettes of the absence of animals. This mural was part of Korea Art Forum’s 2023 Shared Dialogue Shared Space program, with a theme of an Alternative Manhattan Project, which brings together artists who will be presenting their community-oriented and thought-provoking works of participatory art to engage the community in conversations on peacebuilding. The artists imagine an alternative history, inquiring what if peace-building efforts in the early 1940s were carried out through art and human interactions instead of the development of weapons of mass destruction.

This exhibition is presented by Korea Art Forum.

This piece depicts the legend of the alligator in the NYC sewers. It deals with two interesting aspects of our world; our need for gods, myths, and legends much like any other civilization prior to ours, and our habit of creating invasive species by moving animals from their natural habitats to human environments.

This exhibition is presented by Union Square Partnership and Mollbrinks Gallery.

For the third High Line Plinth commission, Pamela Rosenkranz presents Old Tree, a bright red-and-pink sculpture that animates myriad historical archetypes wherein the tree of life connects heaven and earth. The tree’s sanguine color resembles the branching systems of human organs, blood vessels, and tissue, inviting viewers to consider the indivisible connection between human and plant life. Old Tree evokes metaphors for the ancient wisdom of human evolution as well as a future in which the synthetic has become nature. On the High Line—a contemporary urban park built on a relic of industry—Old Tree raises questions about what is truly “artificial” or “natural” in our world. Made of man-made materials and standing at a height of 25 feet atop the Plinth, it provides a social space, creating shade while casting an ever-changing, luminous aura amid New York’s changing seasons.

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

For the High Line, Kiwanga presents On Growth, a sculpture of a fern encased in glass. The multi-faceted case is constructed from dichroic glass, which captures and transforms the light that passes through it, changing tone and color as it’s viewed from different vantage points. The work references Wardian cases, a predecessor of the terrarium, which were used to transport uprooted plants to Europe from overseas, allowing those species to continue to thrive amid London’s polluted air in the late 19th century. These enclosures resembled jewelry cases at the time and, similarly, often protected treasures from distant lands. On Growth draws on the colonial histories of institutional and commercial botanic nurseries that heavily influenced the scientific understanding of plants and horticulture of today.

This exhibition is presented by Friends of the High Line.