Nicolas Holiber: Birds on Broadway displays ten oversized sculptures of New York City Birds that are endangered due to climate change all along the greenway between 64th and 157th Streets in Manhattan. Holiber crafted these sculptures entirely out of reclaimed lumber, to highlight the exhibition’s message about the urgency of environmental issues. Some of the featured birds include the American bittern, brant, common goldeneye, double-crested cormorant, and snowy owl. Pictured above are sculptures of the red-necked grebe, the peregrine falcon, and the American bittern.
Nicolas Holiber: Birds on Broadway, the Audubon Sculpture Project
Pieces of Poetry
Pieces of Poetry: a community mosaic celebration in Fort Greene Park is a celebration of Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, and Marianne Moore, three notable literary figures from Fort Greene. The mosaic depicts a bookshelf with the titles of the honored writers’ most famous works and is comprised of hundreds of glass shards collected from the park. Installed in the southwest wing of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument Plaza, the artwork is designed by Brooklyn-based artist Courtney McCloskey, who collaborated on the piece with students from neighborhood schools, including P.S. 20; The Greene Hill School; Science, Language, & Arts International School; and Brooklyn Technical High School.
The Washington Post: "US immigration agency to transfer citizenship paperwork from busy offices, hoping to reduce wait times."
Earlier this year in February, eighty-six members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) that demanded accountability for the agency’s increasingly lengthy processing delays. Now, USCIS is looking to transfer cases out of overburdened offices to even out processing times across the country. The strategy, however, will only apply to applications for permanent residency (green cards) and applications for naturalization (citizenship).
Read moreSeen and Heard
Behind The Walls
Standing at almost 25 feet tall, Jaume Plensa’s monumental sculpture Behind the Walls is currently on public display in the iconic Plaza of New York’s Rockefeller Center. Plensa is one of 14 internationally famous artists contributing their artwork to the inaugural Frieze Sculpture, a major public art initiative. Though Plensa hails from Spain, his many public artworks have been featured in various cities around the world such as Chicago and London. In regards to his sculpture, Plensa says, “Sometimes, our hands are the biggest walls. They can cover our eyes, and we can blind ourselves to so much of what’s happening around us… To me, it’s an obsession to create a beautiful object with a message inside.” The sculpture encourages its viewers to reflect on their own perspectives and actions as they relate to the world around them. Behind the Walls, along with the other public sculptures, will remain at Rockefeller Center until June 28, 2019.
The Atlantic: This Is Exactly What Privacy Experts Said Would Happen
According to a statement that the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency released last week, photos of travelers and their vehicle license plates snapped at a US border control point have been hacked. In an email statement to journalists, CBP confirmed that an undisclosed subcontractor transferred copies of license plates and travelers’ photos from federal servers to its own company network without CPB’s authorization. CBP reports that its own servers were unharmed by any cyber attack.
Read moreClosed Country
5 of the Most Important Federal Agencies Involved with US Immigration
We have previously written about the abundance of acronyms that are used by US immigration attorneys. At our office, some of those acronyms we use most frequently include: USCIS, CBP, DHS, DOS, and DOL, all of which happen to be five of the most important federal agencies involved in US immigration. (Immigration & Customs Enforcement—i.e., ICE—also has a large impact on some US immigrants, but our firm does not often work with this agency.) In this post, we provide a brief introduction to five of the federal agencies we work with most often, explain their areas of oversight, and how they are related.
Read moreThe Garden Court at The Frick Collection
The Frick Collection houses a number of distinguished European sculptures and paintings in the former residence of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919) on the Upper East Side. After browsing the Frick’s impressive galleries, visitors often like to enjoy the Garden Court and sit by the fountain. John Russell Pope drew inspiration for the design of this serene space from similar courts in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1930s, when the Frick was being converted from a residential space to a public museum. The museum’s special exhibitions currently include: Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at The Frick Collection, Whistler as Printmaker: Highlights from the Gertrude Kosovsky Collection, and Tiepolo in Milan: The Lost Frescoes of Palazzo Archinto.