Artist Abigail DeVille’s “Light of Freedom” at Madison Square Park is meant to reflect the “despair and the exultation of a turbulent period of pandemic and protest.” In the piece, DeVille has filled a torch (a reference to the Statue of Liberty’s torch which was on view in Madison Square Park from 1876 to 1882) with a bell (to summon freedom) and mannequin arms (as if to beseech viewers.) The scaffold surrounding the torch prevents access physically and metaphorically but its golden color summons “the glory of labor and the luminosity in the struggle that can lead to change.” DeVille describes creating the piece: “In my research, I have found that the first Blacks to be brought to New York City were eleven Angolans in 1626. That makes people of African descent the second-oldest group of settlers in New Amsterdam, after the Dutch. Unfortunately, history has erased the contributions and victories of this group. I want to make something that could honor their lives and question what it means to be a New Yorker, past, present, and future.”
Point of Action
Point of Action by Studio Cooke John invites residents and visitors alike “to contemplate the experience of seeing one another—and being seen.” The installation consists of six-foot circles affixed onto the Flatiron Public Plazas that create nine “spotlights,” each with its own vertical metal lighted frame. Lights embedded on each metal structure illuminate and frame the viewer who can step into the spotlight and connect with viewers across the plazas. “We are at a threshold during this pandemic,” Nina Cooke John, Founder and Principal of Studio Cooke John, says. “Now that our eyes have been opened to realities that have been with us all along, how do we move forward? My hope is that Point of Action makes people think about how we connect to the people we see every day so that we can move forward together.” Point of Action is on view through January 1, 2021 in the Flatiron Public Plazas on Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street in Manhattan.
Delirious Matter
Delirious Matter by artist Diana Al-Hadid consists of six new sculptures in Madison Square Park. Al-Hadid, who was born in Syria and lives and works in Brooklyn, elegantly combines sculptures and plantlife to create a distinctive look that according to her is “a blend between fresco and tapestry.” Inspired by mythology, history, and, in one sculpture, an early Netherlandish painting, the pieces include two wall works combined with rows of hedges, three reclining female figures atop plinths, and a sculptural bust of a female figure on a fragmented mountain. Brooke Kamin Rapaport, deputy director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator of Mad. Sq Art, says: “Al-Hadid’s work summons sculpture and painting, architecture and literature in a beauteous, atmospheric narrative.” The installation will be on display through September 3, 2018.
Big Bling
Big Bling at Madison Square Park is a forty-foot high, multi-tiered wood structure wrapped in fine chain-link fence with a gold-leafed shackle secured at the top. The installation, by renowned American sculptor Martin Puryear, is "part animal form, part abstract sculpture, and part intellectual meditation. The artist’s signature organic vocabulary appears in a graceful, sinewy outline and an amoeboid form in the work’s center." According to Hilarie M. Sheets in The New York Times, the structure “will command Madison Square Park in New York like a kind of Trojan horse.” But instead of bringing death and destruction, the structure is sure to impress and delight. “Our goal is to bring world-class art to the public for free," Keats Myer, Executive Director of Madison Square Park Conservancy, says. "Madison Square Park is truly a neighborhood park with a far-reaching cultural perspective.”
Fata Morgana
Fata Morgana by Teresita Fernández.
Madison Square Park has been transformed with the largest and most ambitious outdoor sculpture in the park to date. Fata Morgana, by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández, consists of 500 running feet of golden, mirror-polished discs that create canopies above the pathways (which, by the way, all lead to the newly renovated and re-opened Shake Shack). A "fata morgana" is a mirage seen above the horizon line, and this sculpture "perforated with intricate patterns reminiscent of foliage, will create abstract flickering effects as sunlight filters through the canopy, casting a golden glow across the expanse of the work, paths, and passersby." It really is quite lovely, and in the park until this winter.