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The Seeds of New York
John Haberin New York City
Summer Sculpture 2024
Sometimes found art is better than the real thing. When it comes to art in the parks, how could it not be? It came in response to the park, in the form of blossoms and bird nests. Talk about site-specific sculpture.
So it was in Madison Square Park in spring, where yellow markers just off the ground rose to almost the exact size of the pigeons that moved freely among them. They could just have alit themselves, and their spare fabric or plastic could have been taking flight. Now if only they could have nibbled on what Rose B. Simpson calls her Seed, and maybe they will. 
Summers in New York, art sows its seed everywhere, including the first ever Harlem Sculpture Gardens—but I leave that to a separate review. This year's tour runs instead from Brooklyn and Queens to the very tip of northern Manhattan, with stops along the way for Park Avenue, the High Line, and City Hall Park, starting on the Met roof. What, though, could be nicer than the found art of the city itself?
A child is born
A child was born in Gaza after her mother's death, to an uncertain fate. Soon she, too, lay dead, I read in The Times, but what if she had lived, and what is it like to be a child in time of war? The question has become a staple of wartime journalism, with good reason. Articles like this one are crowd-pleasers—poignant, humane, hopeful, a bit of a cliché, and all too close at hand. So, too, is what I came to see, sculpture on the Met roof by Petrit Halilaj. He treats casualties of war not as numbers, but as budding lives and artists themselves.
Halilaj pictures not them but what they see, and he should know. Born in Kosovo in 1986, he was just five when a decade of Balkan wars began. He spent a year in Kukes II, a refugee camp in Albania, and an inscription along the base of one large work reads Return to Kukes. It is, though, the outlines of his remembered home, now destroyed. Sculpture since David Smith, Alexander Calder, and Gego has boasted of "drawing in space." And here a child's drawing translates easily into slim, jagged lines of bronze and steel.
Halilaj, now based in Berlin, calls the show his Abetare, after an alphabet primer in Albania. On one trip home, he visited a museum of ethnology (a former museum of natural history) that had salvaged classroom desks from the Balkans, and he takes his imagery from what children had drawn or carved there, as children will. This is not just his home, but also theirs. Nor is it just his spider in a second sculpture, with the nasty smirk of a knowing child. Its shadows cling to the Met roof like graffiti, and so do smaller works, like one reading HERE. And here we are.
Other pieces include Batman (alas, not Spiderman), a proclamation that 2 + 2 = 5, a large flower, and a star, in what aspires to a child's whole universe, but this is not just for children. Batman hangs upside-down like an actual bat, the math could be an act of rebellion or a refugee's loss of years of school, the house looks near to collapse, and the giant spider owes a debt to Louise Bourgeois. (Her spider in Dia:Beacon was long my laptop's lock screen.) Nor is the roof altogether suitable for children—not when it serves as a bar during summer. Art in past summers has been more site-specific, like table settings by Adrian Villar Rojas or a curved wall by Héctor Zamora, but Halilaj uses every inch he can. Two pigeons on the roof of the roof might have flown in from Central Park.
It pays to look up, all the more so because the Met has raised hedges atop the roof's low walls. They add to the summer's greenery and, just perhaps, public safety, but hide the view. And Halilaj is, at heart, always looking up. An angel poses on his spider, as if looking over its shoulder, and the pigeons could doves of peace. An eye could be a child's or the ancient Egyptian symbol of prosperity and protection. The tilted house will survive as a work of art.
Still not quite ready to enter Central Park? A bright pink-purple missile defends the park entrance by the Plaza Hotel, as Parabolic Light. Fred Eversley stands with the California "Light and Space" artists of the 1960s, like Larry Bell and Doug Wheeler, although he owes his translucent materials to more high-tech materials. Just hope he does not start a world war over who will inherit Minimalism. If he does, I am rooting for the spider. I am also set to leave Manhattan altogether in search of art.
Totems, coils, and trees
Huma Bhabha may seem a strange choice for Brooklyn Bridge Park, overlooking the New York harbor and a gateway to the New World. This artist looks out on nothing but the pitiless depths of the human heart. She has an uneasy relationship with a park's natural growth as well. The Pakistani American called a solo show "Unnatural Histories" and appeared among others in "After Nature," and the work itself has an unnatural darkness. She carves four plinths from cork before casting them in bronze—and their heads from skulls. She sets them in a secluded lawn, facing one another or looking within.
Unless, that is, they are staring down the viewer. For all her pretension, she is not turning away. The carvings bring fullness to their bodies and the spirit life at their base. Their title, Before the End, quotes a medieval writer's apocalyptic visions, but eternity has already arrived. Bhabha brought her strange beings to the Met roof in 2018, and the whole point could be the interplay of weekend pleasures and spiritual aspirations. Were the four mythic women not so far apart, one could almost call them a community.
Jorge Otero-Pailos has modern sculpture tied up in knots. His welded steel on Park Avenue's median strip looks back to David Smith in its industrial materials and sharp edges, like farm equipment no longer able to produce anything but art. Still, his spikes and coils have a clear sense of direction, at facing ends of a block and a mile north—perhaps an artifact of its original site in Oslo. The Spanish artist invites viewers to start crossing the street only to stop dead in the middle. Most artists would bring more than three works, to fill more of the avenue, but Otero-Pailos sticks to such classy neighbors as the Seagram Building and Park Avenue Armory. Call it classicism run wild.
Further up the avenue, is that a totem, the old staple of public sculpture? A block further, is that one huge roll of toilet paper? But no, both are used tires. Betsabeé Romero embellishes the first with traditional Mexican garments, the second with gold and silver leaf. A third sculpture, a tire alone, bears images that I can only guess are ancient warriors or gods. They may respect their ancestry, but, they are begging to hit the road.
Only someone with a lot of nerve could welcome summer two years running with a bright pink tree bare of leaves—or only an artist. Pamela Rosenkranz is both, and she names her construction on the spur of the High Line Old Tree at that. If it seems as confrontational as the 2022 pretend drone airplane by Sam Durant, it is a lot more colorful. Besides, now it has company, in an entire Secondary Forest four blocks away. Giulia Cenci populates it poignantly, with figures in melted down scrap metal, the trees their skin and bones. They do not look sad, though, and one could almost call it a park.
Also on the High Line, Kapwani Kiwanga adds a single fern, in shifting colors behind dichroic glass. The tall glass and steel case has a beauty of its own. After so much artistry, it seems downright peevish for a ballerina to take her curtain call, roses in hand, for Karon Davis. The act continues with an entire rock band from Cosima von Bonin, of six smiling fish. Lily van der Stokker adds to the cutes with a billboard reading THANK YOU DARLiNG. If you, like the artist, find this a feminist statement, you are only taking the bait.
The last dance
Suchitra Mattai saves the last dance for herself and her memories. The Broadway billboard over the entrance to Socrates Sculpture Park is not, strictly speaking, sculpture—or even part of many a summer show. More often than not, it devolves to a different artist entirely. Here, though, the sculptor herself gets to introduce the park and her work, and it is an upbeat introduction. Mattai depicts little girls in a circle dance, with tapestries behind them and flowers at their feet to either side. It may not have you in the mood for a dance, but you can imagine dancing going on inside.
Queens residents flock to the enclave by the waterfront for the sunshine or the view. The BBQ pit by Paul Ramírez Jonas, is gone, but a flashy new construction offers shelter for movie nights. Still, this is Mattai's dance, to celebrate, she says, her "past, present, and future Indo-Caribbean ancestors." The girls may have darker skin than hers, but her celebration extends widely, from her birthplace in Guyana to "diasporic communities" and their "migratory oceanic journeys." Forget the refugee camps of Petrit Halilaj on the Met roof. Here We Are Nomads, We Are Dreamers.
Their art seeks shelter, under a dome of arched branches and leaves, and lurks in the trees, where fabric spheres descend like wrecking balls. Out on the lawn, six colorful works could themselves be tree trunks, were they not so thick and colorful. Mattai has sliced them all right through at a diagonal, in one clean cut. Squirrels may still seek their own shelter through small holes at their base, and the mirrored cuts shine. In spring, they glistened with water from sprinklers tending to the park's slightly ratty grass. I could imagine them fresh with dew.
Cannupa Hanska Luger counts himself a descendent of the Buffalo people, and he identifies the near extinction of the American bison with the loss to "extractive colonizers" of Native Americans as well. Now the hairy animals again once roam the plains, and he sees them as a symbol of sovereignty and resilience. You might not know it, though, from his ash-black bison in City Hall Park, dead on its back. Not that Luger ever settles for happy endings or, conversely, things as they are. He brought mythic creatures from the white desert sands of his New Mexico to Wave Hill in 2022. He brought, too, an inverted Lakota tent to the 2024 Whitney Biennial for "intergenerational protection" turned upside-down.
The ten-foot skeleton rests not on a lawn, but on a bed of grass from tribal America. Each summer, an artist gets free run of park's sparer grass and walkways. Luger prefers a single work. Alone it becomes a monument, even flat on the ground, on the path to City Hall. Alone, too, it can better stand for loss, with a work titled Attrition. Either way, he is making demands and pointing the way to change.
Summer sculpture as become more and more responsive to its surroundings. To end where I began, Rose B. Simpson has her heroine rise out of the grass and sod of Madison Square Park—unless she has sunk into it up to her waist. She has, though, "guardians" to protect her. That term harkens back to David Smith, as does their height, their steel, and their planar composition. Two more stand guard over a lonely corner of Inwood Hill Park, by the northern tip of Manhattan, for the determined few to find. But then Simpson has long since made up her mind about who is in touch with the city and the earth.
Petrit Halilaj ran on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 27, 2024, Fred Eversley in Doris C. Freedman Plaza through August 25, Jorge Otero-Pailos and Betsabeé Romero on the Park Avenue mall through October 31, Suchitra Mattai in Socrates Sculpture Park through August 25, Cannupa Hanska Luger in City Hall Park through November 17, and Rose B. Simpson in Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park through September 22. Pamela Rosenkranz ran on the High Line through fall, Kapwani Kiwanga through October 31, Karon Davis and Lily van der Stokker through November 30, and Cosima von Bonin through August 31, with Giulia Cenci through March 2025. Huma Bhabha ran in Brooklyn Bridge Park through May 9, 2025. I continue to follow summer sculpture as in past years going back to summer 2003.