Central Park

The Daily Plant : Tuesday, October 4, 2005

NINE ISLAND-HOPPING TREES FIND NEW DIGS IN CENTRAL PARK

photo by Malcolm Pinckney

On Monday, October 3, a beech tree was planted in the southwest corner of Central Park’s East Meadow. This beech tree is one of nine trees from Robert Smithson’s Floating Island that will be sited throughout Central Park. Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe joined Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin, Central Park Conservancy President Doug Blonsky, Whitney Museum of American Art Director Adam D. Weinberg, Minetta Brook Director Diane Shamash, and Floating Island Landscape Architect Diana Balmori for the occasion. Art critics believe that Olmsted and Vaux’s Central Park was the inspiration for the Floating Island, conceived by Robert Smithson in 1970.

From September 17 to 25, 2005, the Whitney Museum of American Art and Minetta Brook, a New York-based arts organization that presents innovative public art projects, launched Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island by Robert Smithson. Floating Island was produced with the assistance of Parks & Recreation, the Central Park Conservancy, and the Hudson River Park Trust, and was presented in conjunction with a retrospective of the work of Robert Smithson on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through October 23, 2005.

In keeping with Smithson’s fascination with Fredrick Law Olmsted’s design of Central Park, Floating Island was made of three Manhattan schist rocks borrowed from the park and trees native to New York City. Over the next week, eight more trees from this project will be planted in Central Park: two weeping willows—one at the Harlem Meer and the other 100^th Street Pool; two river birches near the perimeter wall between West 100^th Street and West 97^th Street; one bur oak at the northeast corner of the North Meadow; two red maples at the Great Hill; and one sugar maple at the North Meadow Recreation Center.

Smithson developed the concept for Floating Island in 1970—the same year he created his best-known work, the ambitious earthwork Spiral Jetty at Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Efforts by Smithson to realize the project in the early 1970s were unsuccessful. He made a drawing documenting a site-specific public work that he proposed for New York City in which a tugboat would tow a barge planted with vegetation around the island of Manhattan. Likely an homage to Frederick Law Olmsted’s design of Central Park, Floating Island offers a displacement of the park—itself a man-made creation—from its natural habitat. When the barge made its trip around the island of Manhattan, New Yorkers had the chance to see a re-imagined fragment of their island floating by.

"To know another language is to have a second soul."

Charlemagne
(742-814)

Know Before You Go

Harlem Meer Center (formerly Lasker Rink)

Harlem Meer Center