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For at least six months, Harlem becomes a garden. At the very least it welcomes one, only not with flowers.

With Harlem Sculpture Gardens, from May through October, its parks become one long sculpture garden, with echoes all across the west side. The West Harlem Art Fund, NY Artist Equity, and community curators invite nineteen artists into three strips of playgrounds and greenery. And you can see them as a garden, from the lake and willow trees at its south to denser woods on every side. Sculpture will soon be gone, but Harlem may never look the same again.

Or so they hope, for change comes slowly, and even now the visitor in search of art may feel like a pioneer. The show feels thrown together on the cheap, with neither maps, photos, nor closing dates on its Web site and signs fallen away. If you cannot find the half of it, and I did not, you can still get better acquainted with the neighborhood. Just to see kids ascending a red, free-form jungle gym would be worth a trip to Morningside Park. To recognize the dignity and diversity of the community should be a requirement for all New Yorkers. If the art is largely detached and disappointing, that has its lessons as well.

When you think of Harlem, a garden may not come to mind. You may think first of a cultural history that did not end with the Harlem Renaissance and the stateliness of Strivers Row, concrete and crime, family histories, or racism and neglect. New York summer sculpture has come before to Marcus Garvey Park across town—featuring Simone Leigh, Maren Hassinger, and “InHarlem,” a home for local artists curated by the Studio Museum in Harlem. Those with long memories will take pride in the protests that blocked Columbia University from appropriating Morningside Park on behalf of a gym. They could not rescue the park from what were to be New York’s darkest decades. Yet the greenery is there.

That park, St. Nicholas Park, and Jackie Robinson Park add up to add up to practically a single landscape running a block wide and forty-five blocks long. Each rests on a cliff or terrace with a single long path below, making it a bit easier to find the art. Morningside Park, by far the lushest, accounts for the name of Columbia’s neighborhood, Morningside Heights. It has never looked half so open. A rec center easily upstages Jackie Robinson Park, which comes to a dead end in a rail overpass and stairs that you may hesitate to climb. Still, you can appreciate the art all the more should you find it.

Harlem Sculpture Gardens treats long-term sculpture outside the park, at City College and in plazas, as just part of the show. Three alone suggest the problems and potential of public art. Gabriel Koren and Algernon Miller serve up a monument to Frederick Douglass at the northwest corner of Central Park, outshone by triangular slabs for benches and a star chart caved into a black wall. A mile or so north, Alison Saar animates a statue of Harriet Tubman with an easy stride, a train of bronze behind her, and hands, feet, and symbols etched in her clothing and base. Richard Hunt, always at his best outdoors, has his usual elegance just west on 125th Street. Do not blame him if his claim to a uniquely black abstraction looks an awful lot like a bunker.

Public sculpture will always have a slightly defensive posture. If things loosen up with emerging artists in the parks, they still seem obliged to learn from the past. They are good students. Intersecting red steel loops by Miguel Otero Fuentes could have come from any of a dozen artists fifty years ago. Weathered steel from Michael Poast brings the rough edges of the city to David Smith. Steel for Iliana Emilia Garcia extends vertically, and it may take a moment to realize that it forms literal high chairs.

Each is adapting late modern sculpture to experience. For Carole Eisner, that means turning Smith’s welded planes into a mother and child, in bright yellow. For Zura Bushurishvili, it means lending a tall, gaunt man out of Alberto Giacometti the specificity of a village elder. What they cannot do is reach out to politics or community. If your image of Harlem is bullet-ridden, Margaret Roleke has a colorful screen of shotgun shells, Felipe Jacome and Svetlana Onipko a ballerina of bullet casings. Mine, I hope, is not. Still, the work looks good, and Roleke’s could pass for early interactive art by Daniel Rozin that flipped its shafts to mirror the viewer’s shadow.

When they do reach out, it is to their immediate surroundings. This is not site-specific art, but it takes much of its materials and imagery from the parks. That includes tree stumps and twigs from Jaleeca Yancy, a single curve of branches connecting aluminum on polished wood from Dianne Smith as Echoes of the Path, and a deer with branches instead of antlers by ByeongDon Moon. I Dream of Being a Tree, its title goes, and all in a way are dreamers. I am sorry that I cannot mention more of them. With luck, the gardens will return next year, with more professionalism and adventure.

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To wrap up from last time on New York summer sculpture, 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, through August 25.

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, through November 17. 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.

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To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, 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, through next May 9. 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, through October 31. 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, through fall. Besides, now it has company, in an entire Secondary Forest four blocks away, through next March. 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, though October 31. After so much artistry, it seems downright peevish for a ballerina to take her curtain call, roses in hand through November 30, for Karon Davis. The act continues with an entire rock band from Cosima von Bonin, through August 31, of six smiling fish. Lily van der Stokker adds to the cutes with a billboard reading THANK YOU DARLiNG through November. If you, like the artist, find this a feminist statement, you are only taking the bait—and I pick up the tour next time in Socrates Sculpture Park and beyond.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

A child was born in Gaza after her mother’s death, to an uncertain fate. Soon she, too, lay dead, I read in The New York Times, but what if she had lived, and what is it like to be a child in time of war?

To pick up from last time on New York summer sculpture, 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 through October 27. 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 often 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 through August 25 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, and I continue next time with Huma Bhabha in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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, through September 22, and maybe they will.

Summers in New York, art sows its seed everywhere, including the first ever Harlem Gardens—but I leave that to a separate review. This year’s tour of New York summer sculpture runs instead from Brooklyn and Queens to the very tip of northern Manhattan, with stops along the way for Park Avenue, the High Line, City Hall Park, and Simpson in Madison Square Park, starting with an extra post tomorrow on the Met roof. What, though, could be nicer than the found art of the city itself?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.