The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s public art program has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art throughout the five boroughs. Robert Lobe recently joined a long list of distinguished artists who have exhibited in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, among them, Roxy Paine and Mark di Suvero.
A Conversation with Zimoun: With and Between Contradictions
Zimoun combines ordinary objects (including cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and old furniture) with mechanical components (such as dc-motors, wires, microphones, speakers, and ventilators) to create extraordinary hybrid sculptures that fuse the normative order of generative systems with the disorder of random events.
Ghosts of Things: A Conversation with Diana Al-Hadid
Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria, spent most of her childhood in Ohio, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent work draws inspiration from sources as varied as Renaissance tapestries, with their unusual spatial tensions, Jacopo Pontormo’s strange fresco of the Visitation in the atrium of SS.
Not Vital’s Recent Sculpture: Forms That Speak Through One Another
Like much post-conceptual art, a new group of works by the nomadic, Italian-born Not Vital rejects explicit interpretation in favor of an open approach to meaning. These sculptures, which recall landscapes, animals, and body fragments, exist in a half-familiar, but distorted world beyond the everyday.
Arnaldo Pomodoro: Voyage Through the Labyrinth
Arnaldo Pomodoro’s most significant “sign” is personal but recognizable, though many people—including perhaps the artist himself when he began his exploration more than 50 years ago—are unable to explain its meaning. The image of the labyrinth surfaces in Pomodoro’s earliest works, including Moon, Sun, Tower (1955), Sun Nutriment (1955), Horizon (1956), and Mark (1957).
Dressing Up Sculpture: A Conversation with Pepe Mar
Pepe Mar’s sculptures pulse with vivid color and small elements—cut-up slivers of paper, tiny objects—that when assembled form quasi-creatures. The New York Times described his early exhibition “Hunga Bunga” as personifying “the visually devouring soul of modern mass media.”
Marsha Pels: Drastic Alterations and Transformations
From early 2008 to the middle of 2010, Marsha Pels spent her time as a professor of sculpture in Detroit. It was not a happy experience, neither in terms of the institution, where she established new facilities, nor in terms of the troubled city to which she had been transplanted, nor in terms of her
Live Media: Hope Sandrow
A flock of rare Paduan chickens cluck and flap in Hope Sandrow’s Open Air Studio, an installation that she created in the backyard of her century-old home in Southampton, New York. Sandrow, known for intermingling an eclectic range of media, from photography to performance, is also quick to pounce on oddball happenstance, as she did when an exotic white cockerel followed her home from a morning walk, and then stayed.
The Less Content, The Better: A Conversation with Charles Long
Charles Long lovingly stroked Pet Sounds, the music-making, pastel-colored shapes that he created for Madison Square Park, as guests at an opening night dinner awaited his arrival.
Public Art in Switzerland: Stimulating the Senses
Swiss artist Peter Regli uses a concept that he calls “reality hacking” to make short, temporary interventions into the everyday. These incredibly fleeting works happen surprisingly and without advance notice. Incidental viewers may not be certain of their perceptions.
