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New-Found Land
John Haberin New York City
Summer Sculpture 2022
Has freedom turned its back on liberty? It might seem so from the rhetoric of conservatives demanding freedom from government—at the expense of the powerless, the majority, and the democratic process itself. It might seem so, too, as a tall black statue strides confidently ahead, its back to New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. Yet it cannot turn its back on its new-found land or memories of what African Americans have left behind.
It is one of six works by five artists in Brooklyn Bridge Park, as "Black Atlantic." Blacks, they make clear, have had a long and difficult crossing, and so has America. 
Can there be good news in a terrible crossing? It has brought a greater diversity and a greater thoughtfulness to New York summer sculpture, which shows every sign after Covid-19 of coming back. That park has never had so many examples over so much of its extent, just in time to explore the city. After a look at Cristina Iglesias in Madison Square Park and what it means to be monumental or site specific, I run through those who did not return—before looping back to Maren Hassinger in Socrates Sculpture Park, Wyatt Kahn in City Hall Park, and "Black Atlantic" in Brooklyn.
Summer takes time
Some art is site specific. Other art takes time to grow into its site and to stand out. For Cristina Iglesias, the site takes time to grow into her art, in Madison Square Park. On its May opening, it lay behind a fence, protecting the oval lawn subsequent to replanting. That reminder of seasonal growth fits perfectly with summer sculpture—and with a work called Landscape and Memory. One might well wonder if it were there.
Iglesias thinks in both human and geologic time, and she is prepared for the long haul. She has inserted five "sculptural pools," already an affront to those who think of sculpture as vertical and monumental. They recreate a time when Cedar Creek flowed above ground, before its burial laid the foundations for a public square of commemorative statues and a park. The Spanish artist has also laid out bronze reliefs illustrating native rocks and plants. All one saw at first, though, was the raised grass in which they nestle snaking across the lawn. The mowers might have given Madison Square a mohawk.
As memory, it may not work. It may feel a pale cousin to recreations of the watershed at the Queens Museum, and who can guess what Iglesias thinks of past human intervention. As landscape, though, it courses through the lawn like a living river, a fitting successor to Maya Lin, Hugh Hayden, and their not quite living trees. With the bronze as a rusted carpet, it evokes a post-industrial landscape as well. Can sunbathers and pedestrians live in peace with her green river? One has six months of human time to find out.
Iglesias only seemed late (and, spoiler alert, while her additions never do become evident, her plantings have come into bloom). For once, the Met roof must do without summer sculpture—not because of the pandemic, but because the artist and her work were just not ready. Talk about supply chain issues. Summer may not feel the same without it, but New Yorkers will just have to set their sights wider and to explore that much more. They could just as well skip the southeast entrance to Central Park, where winter art by Gillian Wearing, in conjunction with her Guggenheim retrospective, overstays its welcome. Her statue of Diane Arbus looks awfully girlish and literal for such an adult photographer.
Art abdicates its usual spot on the Park Avenue median strip as well, only to surface south of midtown. Idriss B. brings Rexor the T-Rex, Manny the mammoth, and cuddlier creations in bright colors suitable for children. Wearing seems downright mature by comparison. A white drone still lingers over the spur of the High Line without flying anywhere, thanks to Sam Durant. Otherwise, that park, too, has ditched summer sculpture apart from a sad fountain of cartoon nudes by Nina Beier at its southern end and a Statue of Liberty with cartoon masks by Paola Pivi near its center.
Maren Hassinger cedes the very center of Socrates Sculpture Park to an uncertain arrival. Hélio Oiticica never did complete his Subterranean Tropicália in Central Part in 1971, and he did not live to see it in Astoria, as PN15. Its fashioners describe it as an immersive experience or a maze, with concentric circles set into a shelter forty feet across. He meant performances and video projections to reflect his queer and Brazilian identity. It looks more, though, like a barren, uninviting block. Do not be surprised either if you find it locked.
Steel objects from life
No one belongs in Socrates Sculpture Park if not Maren Hassinger. She took up conceptual art in LA, on themes of black identity and revolution, and no park has a greater commitment to art and the community. The grill from a group show two years ago, by Paul Ramirez Jonas, still stands—and the Broadway billboard still proclaims the site's original community, the Lenape nation. The park does not have a true playground, but one might think of her work as child's play. She began more than fifty years ago as a dancer, and her sculpture is at its most grounded when it leans daringly into space. She has also composed with nautical rope, as if for climbing.
Hassinger has made the transition to the great outdoors before, in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park. In fact, she made it from the start, without leaving the gallery. She turned to wire in search of simple materials and drawing in space. And it appealed to her all the more for its sense of organic life. She has bundled twigs and vegetation as well, and two examples sneak into Socrates Sculpture Park along with her latest. Yet she throws to the winds the very distinction between art and nature.
Where her work indoors gives the illusion of life, outdoors brings out her roots in Minimalism. It was obvious in Harlem, and so it is once again with the bare frames of geometry in standing zigzags and curves, as "Steel Bodies." Yet she calls each of the ten works Vessels. They take the form of pottery and baskets from many cultures, but with a simplicity all their own. While larger than life, they do not immerse the visitor in their presence. Rather, they offer every chance for discovery, while leaving intact the view onto greenery and the East River.
You may not think of Wyatt Kahn as a sculptor, but he plays the part to perfection. He has the rusted surfaces so familiar from David Smith and Richard Serra, with all their natural warmth and their reassurance that no artist, however skilled, can disguise sculptural materials and the passage of time. As artists used to say back then, what you see is what you get. Like Smith, too, he makes work that looks as if he had taken it apart and reassembled it, as if to see what has changed. More even than Smith, he retains the outlines of the steel cube with which he must have begun. He might be giving the master a lesson in sculpture's stasis and weight—but then Smith did call his most prominent work Cubi.
Kahn may have taken from painting his own lessons in sculpture. On the Lower East Side in 2013, he fit the pieces of painting together in much the same way, like a jigsaw puzzle. His panels fit neatly together, but never so snugly as to distract from their construction. It let in daylight as well. Now he seeks out just that, with freestanding sculpture for the summer's great outdoors, like David Smith at Storm King, but in City Hall Park. In stepping out of the galleries, he lets in something else as well, the tools of everyday life.
In truth, the park is more a pedestrian triangle than an expanse of greenery, so how could he leave his daily habits behind? Kahn leans an oversized comb and a pair of glasses up against his cubes and incises a clock and cell phone into steel. He calls the latter Friends, whether because those absorbed in their phones are in touch with friends or because the phone is the only friend they have left. The relation between abstraction and representation here is never all that clear. I never could find evidence to support another title, Umbrella, but that could be the point. His incisions have the look of freehand drawing while his 3D geometry is firm, from an artist with allegiances to both.
Freedom turns its back
The crossing is not over yet, by any means. The curators of as "Black Atlantic," Hugh Hayden with Daniel S. Palmer of the Public Art Fund, speak of how "individuals can create a new vision within the context of American culture that is expansive, malleable, and open to all." Hayden's own contribution rests on the rocks near a pier and the East River, as if washed up on shore. The African Diaspora might have made it across the Atlantic in little more than a rowboat. Hayden models it after the boat in The Gulf Stream and Kerry James Marshall, who plays off its hull's resemblance to a rib cage. Blackness, Hayden says, need not turn its back on anything—including, as in Homer, a black seaman in a deadly storm by a white American artist.
The black statue is just as malleable. What looks at first like a striding figure is the back of a head, its hair borne in the wind. Kiyan Williams models it after the Statue of Freedom atop the dome of the Capitol in Washington. He calls it Ruins of Empire, which sounds chiding enough—but it, too, absorbs what it criticizes. Its headpiece verges on the crown of the Statue of Liberty. These are not just ruins, and freedom is not just a cover for empire.
This is public art and not the place for scolding, however deep one's convictions. Abigail DeVille in 2020 played on the Statue of Liberty, too. More often, Hayden has nothing like shelter from the storm, just as with his classroom in Madison Square Park in 2021. Here he gives blond wood a unity and literal polish that Marshall lacks. The show extends to just three of the park's six piers, but still with a greater ambition than the usual lone work of New York summer sculpture. Only a diehard art fan could ask for more.
It is also site specific, which enhances its art more than polish ever could. Tau Lewis lays three plaques against a hill nestled in the trees, as if sunk into rock. Its five-pointed stars derive from crinoids, a class including starfish and sea cucumbers, and West African designs. It has its origins on both sides of the Atlantic many times over. Leilah Babirye positions totems in hacked wood, nine feet tall, at the far ends of pier one, framing the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. They began as hollowed (and hallowed) tree trunks, whether African or the park's.
I walked right past a couch by Dozie Kanu, the sort one might associate with Sigmund Freud, mistaking it for the usual park seating. Someone else may have left the scrap of a dried branch resting there. Kanu cast the couch in concrete, but then psychoanalysis makes some people uncomfortable, too. A glass cylinder pulses with dark liquid, but it could pass for park equipment as well. It still throbs with the rhythms of the heart. Babirye brings one back to a view of the harbor, even as her totems look to her birthplace in Uganda and to you.
Site specificity is never easy, and the work's parts never do add up. Why does the couch rest on a fancy car's wire wheel rims? What, for that matter, marks Babirye's standing figures draped in found metal like jewels as lesbian or trans? Did I belong there myself? One can enter the park from its public face beneath the bridge, with its ferry stop and eateries—or further south from Brooklyn Heights and the borough's most exclusive residential streets. Only you can choose where to turn your back and when to look away.
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"Black Atlantic" ran in Brooklyn Bridge Park through November 27, 2022, Cristina Iglesias in Madison Square Park through December 4, Gillian Wearing in Doris C. Freedman Plaza through August 14, Sam Durant on the High Line through August 31, and Hélio Oiticica in Socrates Sculpture Park through August 14. Maren Hassinger ran there through next March 5, 2023, and Wyatt Kahn in City Hall Park through February 26. I continue to follow summer sculpture as in past years going back to summer 2003 and continuing through summer 2023 and summer 2024.