The Great Outdoors

NY Garden Parties

New York’s museums are opening their outdoor gardens for more than just art this summer. Grab your blankets and friends and head to these venues for live music, dancing, and cultural fun.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

On ten Saturdays from July to September, P.S.1's courtyard is transformed into a summer dance party. The event, known as "Warm Up," comes complete with top downtown DJs and a chic art installation by Ball-Nogues.
www.ps1.org

El Museo del Barrio

Dance and groove to a range of Latin sounds at El Museo del Barrio’s popular annual concert series, "Summer Nights." Thursday evenings from June 21 to Aug. 23.
www.elmuseo.org

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

Every Friday night from July 6 to Sept. 7, Cooper-Hewitt presents its weekly music series, "Summer Sessions: Design + DJs + Dancing."
www.cooperhewitt.org

Museum of Modern Art

Enjoy avant-garde and traditional music at MOMA’s "Summergarden Concerts," featuring performers from Jazz@Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. Sunday evenings from July 8 to Aug. 26.
www.moma.org

Magdalena Abakanowicz Constantin Brancusi Joel Shapiro Frank Stella Andy Goldsworthy Louise Bourgeois David Smith The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway)

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“Frank Stella on the Roof” is the Met’s tenth single-artist seasonal. On display through Oct. 28 in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, the exhibition gathers recent monumental works in stainless steel and carbon fiber by this maverick artist.

Stella began his career as a painter in New York in the late 1950s, winning early recognition for his "Black" series. These minimalist paintings pushed the medium to its limits, and ever since he has progressively moved away from the flat, rectangular canvas, transforming his visions into three-dimensional structures. In the early 1960s, his experiments with shaped canvases culminated in the "Irregular Polygon" series (1965-67) and the curvilinear "Protractor" series (1967-71). In the 1970s, he began incorporating reliefs into his art, and from there he proceeded to fullfledged three-dimensionality.

Despite his varied output, the movement in Stella’s career appears steady and natural. Glimpse the first Black paintings, which comprise symmetrical bands of black separated by narrow slashes of unpainted canvas, and the path from painting to sculpture seems, with retrospect, almost predictable.

The spatial aspect of his work is the theme of the Met’s concurrent exhibition, “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture,” installed inside the museum through July 29. This exhibition explores the artist’s interest in architecture over recent decades with works ranging from small models to an enormous, full-scale mockup.

Among the models is an early version of Stella’s most recent work, Chinese Pavilion (2007), which was fabricated especially for the rooftop garden. The piece explores one of the artist’s recurring motifs, a kind of “leaf skeleton.” Multiple curved leaves form a natural-looking cage that arches delicately, despite its size and weight.

Elsewhere on the roof are two earlier works, adjoeman (2004) and memantra (2005), from the artist’s "Bamboo" series. The respective titles—Balinese for “decorative” and “mantra”—could not be more appropriate. adjoeman’s base and mast-like features give it the appearance of a sailboat, and the Met’s rooftop setting only adds to the effect. As sea breezes catch the looping spirals of steel tubing, the work moves along a circular track. It’s like a whimsical, pretty toy boat—except it’s big, very big.

memantra is a more improvisational work. Its swirling, swooping steel conduits support a molded carbon slab and suggest a type of sculptural calligraphy. It is perhaps a symbol of Stella’s own personal incantation.

Taking in the Local Color

With more open space at its disposal, the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, is mounting a wide-ranging outdoor exhibition that celebrates the culture and artistic vibrancy of the community. “L.I.C., NYC” features a broad spectrum of local artists and mediums and is on view through Aug. 5. Representing pioneering modernism are abstract sculptor Mark di Suvero, who helped found Socrates, as well as Isamu Noguchi and Joel Shapiro. Di Suvero makes his sculptures by welding together steel I-beams and heavy gauge metal. Despite their architectural feel, they are largely dissimilar to Stella’s organically inspired forms because of their materials and process.

A number of younger Long Island City artists also are participating in the exhibition, including Andrea Christens, Stephen Dean, Anne Deleporte, James Johnson, Kurt Lightner, Rachel Stevens, Nicole Tschampel and Amy Yoes. The Queens-based artist collaborative Flux Factor contributes its macabre Albatross installation, consisting of a yacht perched atop a mound of humanlike skulls.

“L.I.C., NYC” also includes more ephemeral works. A three-part video series curated by Andrea Salerno airs three times over the course of the exhibition. And you can also expect a limited run for Jason Hackenwerth’s intricate balloon sculptures. The artist has created a trio of pieces, the first of which debuted on May 6, while the other two are to be unveiled June 21, during Socrates’s annual Summer Solstice Celebration, and July 22.

In addition, the Socrates Sculpture Park sponsors several events and lectures associated with “L.I.C., NYC” at the nearby Noguchi Museum, also in Long Island City. The museum, dedicated to preserving and presenting the art of Isamu Noguchi, focuses its attention this summer on the artist’s apprenticeship with Constantin Brancusi in Paris in 1928. The exhibition “Survey of Paris Abstractions” contains roughly 30 gouache drawings and six surviving sculptures in metal and wood. It shows a young artist turning away from academic, figurative sculpture toward what Noguchi called “studies in sculptural outline.”

Looking Farther Afield

To see all the outdoor sculpture displays that New York has to offer, a trip outside of the five boroughs to the Storm King Art Center, in Mountainville, N.Y., is required.

The gorgeous venue, about a one-hour drive from the city, is well worth the travel time. A pristine 500-acre landscape of rolling hills and woodlands serves as stunning backdrop to site-specific sculptures by some the 20th century’s most influential artists, including Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Andy Goldsworthy, and David Smith.

Bourgeois’s 1972 sculpture Number Seventy-Two (The No March), which debuted in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, has been newly restored and reinstalled in the galleries at Storm King, which had until recently exhibited the work outdoors. To mark the unveiling, the center has organized an exhibition devoted entirely to her work. It remains on view through Nov. 15.

Much of the art in the exhibition touches on aspects of femininity and sensuality and highlights Bourgeois’s focus on the psychological and emotional effects of human relations. Number Seventy-Two (The No March), for instance, comprises 1,200 Italian marble and travertine cylinders. Clustered together, the many cylinders evoke the relationship between the individual and the group.

“The Great Outdoors” was originally published in the summer 2007 issue of Museums New York magazine.