In celebration of its twentieth anniversary, the Madison Sq. Park Conservancy, a public/non-public partnership with the New York Metropolis Division of Parks and Recreation, has lined up a slate of initiatives by main modern artists and can prolong its programming to 2 further Manhattan parks.
The conservancy has lined up commissions by 4 ladies artists to mark its anniversary—sculptural initiatives by Nicole Eisenman and Rose B. Simpson, an set up by Ana María Hernando and a efficiency piece by María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Simpson’s and Campos-Pons’ initiatives will broaden past Madison Sq. Park into Inwood Hill Park and Harlem Artwork Park, respectively, marking the conservancy’s first-ever collaboration with different public parks across the metropolis.
The anniversary 12 months can even be marked by the conservancy’s first retrospective publication, an instructional report of the final twenty years of public artwork within the park, together with a brief documentary outlining the programme’s historical past. Alumni artists can even be showcased by way of audio interviews and a corresponding public arts symposium.
“The anniversary is a chance for the conservancy’s public artwork programme to evaluate the previous twenty years and in addition stay up for the following”, says Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the conservancy’s creative director and chief curator. “One in every of our targets is to have artworks skilled and seen in much more communities and to push out the programme in new methods, reminiscent of collaborations with different public parks in New York Metropolis.”
Nicole Eisenman’s commissioned work, Stopped Crane, (24 October 2024-9 March 2025) will supply viewers the chance to discover a toppled 100-foot-long industrial crane, full with sculptural “barnacles” as gildings. Rose B. Simpson’s Seed, (11 April-22 September 2024), a multi-park presentation of androgynous sentinel figures in metal and bronze, attracts upon Indigenous land contestation and private expertise. To Let the Sky Know/Dejar que el cielo sepa by Ana María Hernando (16 January-17 March 2024) centres the textural surroundings of luxurious material netting in a nod to clouds and waterfalls. María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Procession of Angels (September 2024) will encompass a seven-mile processional efficiency that ends with a poetry studying and musical celebration in Madison Sq. Park.
Anna Maria Hernando, Seidel Metropolis, 2023 Madison Sq. Park Conservancy
”Madison Sq. Park is a uniquely accessible venue for seeing work, new work, by dwelling artists,” Rapaport says. “Our artwork programme demonstrates the importance that artwork can play in an city public area and the impacts that it could have on individuals’s lives”.
The publication debuting alongside the following season of commissions, Public Artwork in Public Area, options essays from Brooke Kamin Rapaport in addition to the artist Joe Baker, the students Arlene Dávila, Nancy Princenthal and John Hanhardt, and curators Lowery Stokes Sims and Herb Hoi Chun Tam.
“It was essential for us to convene vital writing on what public artwork is, publicness and what it means for an artist to convey their work out into public area, how this can be a approach for an artist to stretch their follow, to convey new eyes and minds to their work,” says Rapaport. “It’s been extremely gratifying to work on this e book and that can come out within the spring.”
Since its inception in 2004, Madison Sq. Park Conservancy has commissioned round 50 initiatives by modern artists, together with Diana Al-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Abigail DeVille, Maya Lin and Alison Saar. In 2019, it served because the commissioning establishment for the US Pavilion on the Venice Biennale, that includes work by Martin Puryear, the primary time an organisation with a public artwork focus was concerned within the biennale.
