Art in the Parks

Description:

With Lost Boys, Claiborne challenges established notions of cultural legibility and encourages viewers to delve deeper into the origins, embodiment, and sufficiency of Blackness, including its impact on mental health. Text superimposed upon the repeated face of an unidentified Black male youth takes center stage, sourced from a photograph captured in Harlem, New York during the early 1900s. The repeated image of the unidentified young boy carries a symbolic weight, representing not only the individual but also a broader collective experience. Painted in vibrant shades of blue and black, the boy's direct gaze confronts the viewer while the repeated patterning and overlay of text pushes and pulls the colorful faces between differing levels of visibility.

This exhibition is presented by BRIC and the Prospect Park Alliance.

Description:

Nicholas Galanin created this work with the same steel tubing used to construct the U.S.-Mexico border wall, also echoing its 30-foot height. The metal was cut and reassembled to spell out LAND in a format reminiscent of Robert Indiana’s 1966 sculpture, LOVE. The anti-climbing plate seen atop the border wall appears here on the upper letters, and the text repeats in four layers to create a dynamic, open structure. As our point of view changes, the text shifts between legibility and abstraction.

This exhibition is presented by Public Art Fund.

Description:

This fence-based mural depicts the people, places, and activities that are the heartbeat of the community. Inspiration for this mural comes from the youth in Brownsville who wanted to see a piece of art that reflects the things they love to see in their community. They mentioned how seeing elderly people motivated them, their love for activities like skelly, and identified areas of the community that brought back childhood memories. All of this is captured within layers of the artwork.

The Beat of Brownsville was designed in collaboration with Brownsville Community Justice Center’s Youth Leadership Council (YLC), a group of youth leaders from ten different NYCHA developments who organize to improve neighborhood safety.

This exhibition is sponsored by the Brownsville Community Justice Center.

Description:
For the fourth High Line Plinth commission, Ivan Argote presents Dinosaur (2024), a colossal, hyper-realistic sculpture of a pigeon cast in aluminum. The meticulously hand-painted, humorous sculpture challenges the grandeur of traditional monuments celebrating significant historical figures, instead choosing to canonize the familiar New York City street bird. Posed on a concrete plinth that resembles the sidewalks and buildings that New York’s pigeons call home, Dinosaur reverses the typical power dynamic between bird and human, towering 21 feet above the Spur, over the countless pedestrians and car drivers that travel down 10th Avenue. 

Description:
In California, a “Superbloom” of wildflowers that occurs every 2 to 3 years after record breaking winter rains. This surplus of nutrients leads to a spectacular show of spring wildflowers across barren deserts which can at times be visible from space. Harlem-based artist Naomi Lawrence replicates the naturally occurring event from the other side of the U.S. by crocheting oversized California poppies, blue, purple, arroyo lupine, and bright yellow fiddlenecks, and an array of wildflowers that are known to be part of this phenomenon. The artist’s freehand style allows her to capture the subtle shifts of color that happen in nature. 

Description:
This group of four murals by artist Zeehan Wazed are set behind the basketball hoops on the Grand Street Basketball Courts in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Together, the murals bring a sense of movement and brightness to the retaining walls surrounding the courts.