Serious business gets done in Lower Manhattan – politics at City Hall, construction at the World Trade Center site and financial dealings on Wall Street.
So the decision to place a whimsical, outdoor sculpture show there with art works that include giant concrete vegetables, a colorful glass kaleidoscope kiosk and appearances by a clown might seem unusual.
But curators say the Public Art Fund’s “Lightness of Being” exhibit has injected some welcome levity into the neighborhood. Pedestrians who come upon the quirky and unusual sculptures scattered through City Hall Park have embraced the show’s sense of fun.
“People are quite delighted,” said Andria Hickey, the art fund’s associate curator, who organized the exhibit with Nicholas Baume, the fund’s director and chief curator. “The show is really dedicated to the lightness in art work, and it’s also about the irony and different kinds of humor found in art and sculpture.”
The location was chosen, in part, because the art fund has a history of staging shows in City Hall Park, a triangle of landscaped elegance with flowers beds, old-fashioned, ornate streetlamps and a dramatic fountain facing City Hall.
The park also made sense as a backdrop for the show because it attracts different types of people — tourists passing through on their way to the nearby Brooklyn Bridge, office workers who compete for coveted lunchtime spots on the park’s benches and neighborhood families – who may have different reactions to the sculptures.
On a recent afternoon, a couple from Australia, touring the area on bicycles from the city’s new bike share program, stopped to photograph Alicja Kwade’s “Journey Without Arrival,” which consists of a bicycle bent around on itself so its front and rear tires meet. Perhaps the Australians were so enjoying their ride on borrowed bikes that they related to the sculpture’s message of a journey without an end point.
Another interaction witnessed that afternoon was a babysitter keeping an eye on her young charge, a girl of about 4 years of age, as she ran around a circle of funny-looking, rounded, cartoon-like figures that make up the Olaf Breuning’s contribution, “The Humans.”
“You are never quite sure how a work will hold up in a public space so I am happy to know our intention was mirrored in the response of the audience,” Hickey said.
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