Martin Puryear Big Bling, 2016-17 We begin on the Oval Lawn with Martin Puryear's Big Bling (2016). Here we see Big Bling with all its magnificence and complexity—"a portrait of New York" as Puryear stated. The forty-foot-tall sculpture was constructed from pressure-treated timbers, plywood, and chain link fencing. The brilliant golden shackle sitting near the top of the work is made of fiberglass with an applied gold leaf.

Puryear was reluctant to project an agenda onto the sculpture, leaving it to the viewer to conjure its potential meaning. Some have described Big Bling as an elephant or a Trojan horse. Many have compared its geometry to the army of windows that surround Madison Square Park. Others have extracted an intention from the structure’s chain-link fencing. For those on the inside, it is a privileged perch. For outsiders, a fence is an acute barrier that repels and prohibits access.

The shackle near the pinnacle of the sculpture is significant. As Puryear notes, a shackle is used as a tool meant to restrain people and animals and for industrial building, rigging, and hoisting. While the artist has been reluctant to ascribe any symbolism to the structure, it fostered a deep conversation about social discrepancies across history and when it was on view in the Park, especially during the angry 2016 political season in which issues of race, deportation, and restriction predominated.

Josiah McElheny Prismatic Park, 2017 The Oval Lawn also hosted Josiah McElheny's Prismatic Park (2017). Three sculptures consisted of a green Dance Floor for vanguard dance (left), a luminous red-and-yellow Poetry Pavilion for innovative poetry (center), and a curvilinear, translucent blue Music Wall for experimental music (right) at the heart of Park’s visual and social center. The three structures were built from painted wood and steel and custom-made prismatic, colored glass tiles. The Dance Floor measured 32 feet in diameter, the Poetry Pavilion’s dimensions were 14 feet high x 11 feet wide x 9 feet deep, and the dimensions of the Music Wall were 9 feet 6 inches high x 31 feet wide x 3 feet 9 inches deep.

From the outset, McElheny’s intention was to inspire and to gather community through culture. Prismatic Park’s structures were designed as open, stage-like platforms for choreographers, dancers, poets, and musicians to work on, under, and next to through rehearsals, workshops, and performances. Its lively color scheme brought a sense of optimism and hope.

Another objective for McElheny was to harness the concept of "publicness." The three cheerful structures aimed to delight the viewer and provide an opportunity for the public to generate their own performance or to simply enjoy their presence.

Erwin Redl Whiteout, 2017-18 Where McElheny harnessed the energy of Madison Square Park's "publicness" utilizing performers and the Park's diverse visitors as collaborators in Prismatic Park, Erwin Redl's Whiteout (2017) was, through the artist's choice, sited on the Oval Lawn which is closed to public access in wintertime. During the winter months, Madison Square Park's lawns lay dormant and begin a process of restoration. The artist drew on the opportunity to create a work in light across the Oval Lawn during the season with extended hours of darkness.

Realized with 900 suspended spheres that were animated with white LEDs using stainless-steel cables and low-voltage insulated wires, Redl found an alternate collaborator for the 12 feet high x 110 feet wide x 180 foot deep Whiteout: light. It's as if Redl handed nature a set of brushes made of light, and gave the environment the opportunity to perform and create. The result was a mesmerizing choreography of light—seductive to even the most frenetic passersby.

The artist reflected on this project in the context of his work:"... Whiteout is part of my recent series of works investigating emergence, the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of simple interactions. As with all of my installations, the most important parameter is site-specificity. In the case of Madison Square Park, I utilize the wind as the dominant ephemeral force that shapes the dynamism of the kinetic installation... The natural movement of hundreds of spheres in the wind is juxtaposed with the programmed movement of the light patterns. A plethora of parameters constantly changing—the natural light, the city lights, the strong aural component of the urban core, the leaves turning colors, snow, rain, fog, the waving branches of the trees—all of them become a canvas in flux for an artwork in motion."

Diana Al-Hadid Delirious Matter, 2018 Before we leave the Oval Lawn, we must introduce Diana Al-Hadid's exhibition Delirious Matter (2018), a set of six sculptures sited across the Park. Here we see The Grotto (front) and Gradiva (back), a pair of sculpted walls made of aluminum, steel, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, and pigment. The Grotto stood at 14 feet high x 36 feet wide x 1 foot deep while Gradiva stood at 13 feet high x 15 feet wide x 1 foot deep. In the next image, you will see one of the artist’s three sculptures titled Synonym. All three works portray a fragmented body approximately six feet high. The sculpted torsos appear to erode and spill onto their respective lawns. Al-Hadid achieves this effect by again manipulating polymer gypsum, fiberglass, and powder-coated pigment.

Art critic and professor Nancy Princenthal described Al-Hadid's project in the exhibition catalog accompanying the show: "The half-dozen sculptures that constitute Diana Al-Hadid’s aptly titled Delirious Matter, dispersed throughout Madison Square Park in her first major outdoor installation, together create a kind of painting in parts. Variously representing a figure bound by a mountain and a mountain pried away from the sky above, headless bodies and a bodiless head, they invite viewers to assemble an unstable whole, piece by suggestive piece. It is a process akin to remembering a dream..."

Delirious Matter also takes us to the reflecting pool, where Citadel emerges and takes the shape of an imposing female figure with a mountainous skirt in the form of a pyramid. Her face, made of bronze at the peak of the sculpture, cascades into contours that round and extrude outwards near the surface of the pool. Here the work gives the illusion that it is floating over the body of water or as Al-Hadid says, "its protective moat."

Arlene Shechet Full Steam Ahead, 2018-19 The Reflecting Pool Plaza was reimagined through Arlene Shechet's Full Steam Ahead, a constellation of works on view in 2018 and 2019 that invited Parkgoers to new interactions with one another and with the Park itself.

Shechet's goal for these public works was, as she said, "to capture people’s imaginations and surprise them. Without seeking an art experience, passersby would suddenly find themselves in the middle of an installation."

"In Madison Square Park, Shechet’s objects become transformed stand-ins for the expected works in a museum sculpture court, conceptually and formally altered for the outdoor setting: ancient heroic nudes in marble and Renaissance busts of prominent citizens, often with a central flowing fountain, are nowhere in sight. Instead, Full Steam Ahead allows the quotidian to become sculptural: seating areas, natural forms, and suggested body fragments are refreshed, and these objects compel us to look again," wrote Lilian Tone in describing the project.

Leondardo Drew City in the Grass, 2019 We return to the Oval Lawn for Leonardo Drew's City in the Grass (2019) a 102 feet long x 32 feet wide project created from aluminum, sand, wood, cotton, and mastic. The project, inspired by famous imagined and actual cities like Oz, Metropolis, and New York itself, takes the form of an interactive cityscape that invites visitors to bring life to the inanimate.

With City in the Grass, Drew captures the energy and imagination of his audience. His intention is met without any prompting. People sat, rested, and ate on and across the cityscape. Younger visitors took the opportunity to leap and run up and down the work's folds. For others, learned behavior regarding art was overcome by Drew's intention for public sculpture to be engaged with physically.

The artist described his perspective on realizing his first major outdoor work: "Imagining that my philosophy of viewers being complicit in the completion of the art could be made whole is truly a revelation in this particular work. While they walk on it, lie on it, climb on it, they add to (and subtract from) the new iteration 'the new self of the work.' Could not and would not have it any other way..."

Krzysztof Wodiczko Monument, 2020 Our next work takes an unlikely stage. Krzysztof Wodiczko's Monument (2020) projects testimonies of displacement onto the statue of the historic Admiral David Glasgow Farragut Monument (1881).

Wodiczko's intention was to utilize the history and prominence of a nineteenth-century American Civil War monument for resettled refugees, those who had suffered and experienced the trauma of contemporary global civil wars as a platform to convey their stories. Initially, the viewer is captured by the sight of an inanimate figure coming to life. They are then quickly held by the emotional, personal accounts of twelve individuals from Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Iraq, Liberia, Mozambique, Myanmar, Somalia, and Syria, who recently resettled in the United States.

"The terrible sight of civil wars, no matter their cause, is the unimaginably painful lived experience of these refugees. They are the living monuments and memorials to their own civil war trauma, but they are mostly silent and speechless,” the artist stated. “It is a time to publicly acknowledge them for their potential contribution to the informed memory and understanding of civil wars, as living war monuments and memorials. To do so, as in this project, it is important to help them gain or regain their voices and find words and expression to speak of their experience with emotion in a public space, in a symbolic urban environment, a place of collective memory—such as a municipal park populated by historical statues, city residents, and visitors...," he emphasized.

Abigail DeVille, Light of Freedom, 2020-2021 In the final stop of the public art tour, we take you through the journey of Abigail DeVille's "Light of Freedom". This was the Conservancy’s 40th art project and likely the most accelerated, planned and implemented in the history of the art program. During the turbulent period of the pandemic, the presidential election, and protests for racial justice, the Conservancy posed the question of how public art can respond to this period of turmoil. The artist answered with a powerful project made of her signature materials of found objects.

"Light of Freedom" was a thirteen-foot-tall reference to the torch and flame of the Statue of Liberty, on view in Madison Square Park between 1876 and 1882. The artist filled a contemporary interpretation of the 19th-century monument with a timeworn bell, a herald of freedom, and with the arms of mannequins, beseeching viewers. A scaffold surrounding the sculpture’s interior prevented access physically and metaphorically and recalled a work site, an insistent image on the urban landscape. But the scaffold was golden, summoning the glory of labor and the luminosity in the struggle that can lead to change. DeVille shared her inspiration for this 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 wanted to make something that could honor their lives and question what it means to be a New Yorker, past, present, and future.”

The artist typically mines untold histories in public space for the subject matter in her work. In this piece, she conjoined significant crossroads in African American history in New York for a sculpture that was truly inspiring and introspective. Future Exhibitions Madison Square Park Conservancy looks to artists like Abigail DeVille to realize works in the public realm that inspire, sustain, and challenge Park-goers. To learn more about Madison Square Park Conservancy's upcoming art exhibition Ghost Forest by Maya Lin, visit our website here.