Public Art in New York

NEW YORK—As the art world reluctantly rubs the midwinter sleep out of its eyes, ARTINFO presents its second holiday-season Weekend Picks. Last week we offered a selection of off-the-beaten-track museum shows. This week we present a guide to some of the city’s best—and in some cases, most overlooked—permanently sited public art. Our guide is Sandra Bloodworth, director of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit collection, who knows as much as anyone about commissioning, creating, and installing successful public art. In fact, when we invited her to come up with these recommendations, her initial response—intended not entirely as a joke, we suspect—was, “Of course it goes without saying that my first recommendation would be to take a tour of the Arts for Transit collection in the MTA system, the subway and commuter rail lines. The collection is detailed in the 2006 publication Along the Way, which I coauthored with Bill Ayres, and on our Web site.” (We also featured it here on ARTINFO.)

Bloodworth also made an important point about permanently sited public work: “I am often asked, ‘What is your favorite public artwork?’ That is a question that I cannot answer. You can’t classify public art in terms like ‘favorite.’ The whole point is that it is site-specific, speaking to particular places, and not comparable to other works, as their sites are very different. There is no standard of measurement.”

So how did she make her choices? “What immediately came to mind were those pieces that impressed me early on and greatly informed and influenced my thinking on public art.” One, in fact, is not public art at all.

1. Mary Miss, South Cove, in Battery Park City
2. Marisol, American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial, just south of Pier A, off the north end of Battery Park
3. Mags Harries, Topiary: A Twenty Year Project, in the Main Court of Prospect Park Zoo, Brooklyn
4. James Turrell, Meeting, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens
5. Andrea Spadini, George Delacorte Musical Clock, Central Park, between the Wildlife Center and Children’s Zoo

Click on the photo gallery at left to read more about the works Bloodworth selected.