On June 1, Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias will unearth the forgotten terrains and geographic history of Madison Square Park in a newly commissioned public art installation, her first major temporary public art project in the United States.

Landscape and Memory will place five bronze sculptural pools, gently flowing with water arriving in different sequences, into the park’s Oval Lawn, harkening back to when the Cedar Creek—now buried underground—coursed across the land where the park stands today. Building on Iglesias’ practice of unearthing the forgotten and excavating natural history, Landscape and Memory resurfaces in the imaginations of contemporary viewers the now-invisible force of this ancient waterway. The installation will be on view from June 1 through December 4, 2022.

“Cristina Iglesias is renowned for sculpture and installation that engage closely with the spatial, cultural, and historical qualities of the spaces where they’re sited. With Landscape and Memory, Iglesias brings a new level of exploration to our commissioning program, creating sculptural cracks in the lawn that summon an unseen element of the park’s natural history,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. “Visitors who encounter the work will do so almost as archaeologists witnessing a living artifact from a centuries-old New York City, untouched by the present-day urban landscape.”