Edited by: TJVNews.com
Public art is integral to the landscape of New York City. Sprouting up in parks, blanketing concrete walls and transforming street corners, these works have always been a true testament to the City’s uncontainable creative spirit. Read on to discover museum-worthy public art near your neighborhood and throughout all five boroughs—and remember that masks and social distancing are key to exploring responsibly.
Sam Moyer: Doors for Doris
Stone forms the foundation and framework of New York City. It is the bedrock that supports the structures we inhabit and it clads many of them too. To mark the threshold between Central Park’s boulder-filled terrain and Midtown Manhattan’s built environment, Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) has created a massive three-part sculpture, with a title that pays homage to Public Art Fund founder, Doris C. Freedman (1928-1981).
Moyer’s hybrid sculpture unites imported stone with rock indigenous to the New York region. The artist inlaid marble fragments into three double-sided vertical concrete slabs and framed them with contrasting rough-hewn bluestone monoliths. Their final arrangement demonstrates her impressive skill in composing sculptural forms, with its “doors” pivoted ajar to evoke the dynamism of the bustling city.
Doors for Doris examines how our culture values and utilizes materials. Moyer gathered its disparate collection of discarded marble remnants from various renovation projects and stone yards around the city.
These polished stones bear the markings and shapes of their original uses. They also display the unique colors, patterns, and geological history of their sources — quarries in Brazil, China, India, Italy, and beyond. Each stone in Moyer’s mosaic compositions takes on an even more striking hue against the others and the locally-quarried rock, an apt metaphor that encourages us to consider the diverse character of our city and our interconnected lives within it.
This exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Curator Daniel S. Palmer.
Public Art Fund & LaGuardia Gateway Partners: LaGuardia Terminal B Permanent Commissions
The recently transformed LaGuardia Airport Terminal B features four permanent site-specific art installations by Jeppe Hein, Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens and Sarah Sze. Working at an unprecedented scale and drawing on personal experiences, the artists captured the City’s creative energy, openness, diversity, democratic spirit and position as a beacon for arts and culture. Commissioned by Public Art Fund in partnership with LaGuardia Gateway Partners, the artworks transform the airport into a powerful new civic landmark.
Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment
Every night from 11:57pm to 12am, billboards throughout Times Square take a break from their regularly scheduled programming to display digital artworks. The program, ongoing since 2012, transforms the City’s famed intersection into a massive outdoor gallery space.
Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, is pleased to announce the new Summer Season of Midnight Moment, featuring video artworks by Kenneth Tam, Brandon Kazen-Maddox & Up Until Now Collective, and Jennifer West. Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition. Link here for the full schedule of artists.
Times Square Arts: Messages for the City
Launched as an artist-driven campaign to deliver messages of love, gratitude and solidarity with NYC residents, this ongoing exhibit, running at the top of every hour, appears on screens throughout Times Square as well as those above the Lincoln Tunnel and on LinkNYC kiosks across the City. The works currently featured have been curated by For Freedoms, an artist collective dedicated to creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. Artists on the roster include Carrie Mae Weems, Jenny Holzer and Pedro Reyes.
Rachel Whiteread: Cabin
Located atop Discovery Hill on Governors Island, Rachel Whiteread’s striking installation is a concrete cast of a rural shed, a sculpture that suggests moments of introspection and contemplation—think Thoreau—even as it overlooks bustling Lower Manhattan. Strewn about the grounds near the artwork are bronze casts of bottles, cans and other items, some of which came from Governors Island. First opened in 2016, the work was the British artist’s first major permanent commission in the US.
Maya Lin: Ghost Forest
Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest will be a towering stand of 40 tall, spectral Atlantic white cedar trees, a harsh symbol of the devastation of climate change. The dead trees, sourced from New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, will be spaced out on a grassy field in the park.
Nancy Baker Cahill: Liberty Bell
Liberty Bell reflects on the evolution of liberty, freedom and democracy and encourages viewers to do the same. This augmented-reality abstract drawing, whose movements are accompanied by the sounds of bells tolling, is to be experienced by heading to the specified outdoor locations and using the free 4th Wall app. The AR element leaves no environmental trace and can be enjoyed while social distancing.
The Laundromat Project: Mabuhay
Artists Jaclyn Reyes, Xenia Diente, Princes “Diane” De Leon, Ezra Undag and Hannah Cera have painted a bright mural on the side wall of Amazing Grace restaurant in Queens’ Woodside neighborhood. The word Mabuhay, a Philippine greeting meaning “cheers,” “welcome” or “may you live,” is interwoven with two different types of plants: calamansi and sampaguita. The former is frequently given as comfort for mourners and also produces a small citrus fruit used in Philippine cuisine; sampaguita, or jasmine, signifies purity and renewal.
David Hammons: Day’s End
This installation by influential NYC-based artist David Hammons will be a vast open structure that follows the outline, dimensions and location of the original Pier 52 shed on the Hudson River. The work takes its inspiration and name from Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 artwork, in which Matta-Clark cut five openings into the original shed. The piece, developed by the Whitney in collaboration with the Hudson River Park Trust, also nods to the to the history of New York’s waterfront and promises to be especially lovely at sunset.
Jill Mulleady: We Wither Time into a Coil of Fright
Jill Mulleady fashions a surreal landscape populated by multiple figures in a scene she has described as a sort of “dance.” Though the figures are clustered close to one another by the riverbank, they appear disconnected—even self-absorbed. The sense of modern-day life being both hyperconnected and isolating is set in greater relief by the lush natural surroundings in the scene. This site-specific work is part of a series of rotating public art installations on the facade of 95 Horatio Street, across the street from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sophie Calle: Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery
Near Green-Wood’s main entrance, artist Sophie Calle has created an ongoing site-specific installation in the form of a headstone. Visitors are invited to commit their secrets to paper and bury them in the artist’s plot. Over the project’s existence (through 2042), Calle will return periodically to exhume the paper and hold a ceremonial bonfire to dispose of the secrets.
Leo Villareal: Light Matrix
Villareal’s installations explore the concept of both time and space, resulting in forms that move, change, interact and grow into complex organisms. Light Matrix, on the third story of BAM Fisher, is a site-specific work of more than 3,500 LEDs that turns the grid of its surrounding windows into radial patterns. These movements nod to Villareal’s Stars, which is installed in the windows of BAM’s neighboring Peter Jay Sharp Building.
Scott Gerber: Peace, Love & Happiness
Scott Gerber created the colorful installation Peace, Love & Happiness, which comprises a trio of sculptural symbols, to foster healing through art. “Peace Sign” encourages passersby to be calm amid all that is going on in the world. With “Heart,” his intent is for people to remember to be kind to one another. Finally, “Smiley Face” is meant to evoke happiness.
