Podcasting

Conversations with Artists is a podcast series across 2024, the twentieth anniversary year of our public art program. Beginning on January 24, listen on the third Wednesday of each month to twelve artists who reflect on their work in the park, consider experiences with communities of viewers, recognize democratic ideals as central to civic space, and offer guidance to future artists on the significance of a commission in Madison Square Park.

To listen to this podcast series, scroll down and select the conversation of your choice, or listen here on Spotify.

In 2017, McElheny’s Prismatic Park featured minimal painted wood and prismatic glass structures forged new spaces for cultural production: a curvilinear, translucent blue sound wall for experimental music; a circular, reflective green floor for dance; and a luminous red and yellow pavilion for poetry.

Hemmer’s 2008 commission in Madison Square Park, Pulse Park, interacted with the biology of visitors, monitoring their heart rates through a sensor that then activated pulses of narrow-beam light that moved sequentially down rows of spotlights placed along the perimeter of the Oval Lawn. The exhibition was on view from October 24 – November 17, 2008.

Iglesias’ Landscape and Memory placed 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. The installation was on view in Madison Square Park from June 1 through December 4, 2022.

Hayden’s Brier Patch, which was on view in Madison Square Park from January – May 2022, featured one-hundred wooden elementary school-style desks erupting with tree branches, cohering into tangled assemblies with complex and layered meanings. Referencing folklore traditions around the world, the work called on the notion of the brier patch as a place protective for some and dangerous for others.

Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon, which was on view in and around Madison Square Park from April – May 2010, consisted of thirty-one life-sized body forms of the artist cast in iron and fiberglass are installed on the sidewalks and across the parapets of skyscrapers in and around the park. Gormley discusses how sculpture can free us from daily patterns and automatic responses to the world we inhabit.

Teresita Fernández’ Fata Morgana, which was on view in Madison Square Park from June 2015 – January 2016, consisted of 500 running feet of golden, mirror-polished discs that created canopies above the pathways around the park’s central Oval Lawn. In nature, a fata morgana is a mirage that forms across the horizon line. Alluding to this phenomenon, Fernández’s project introduced a shimmering horizontal element that engaged visitors in a dynamic experience.

Abigail DeVille’s, Light of Freedom, which was on view in Madison Square Park in 2020 – 2021, answers the question of how public art can respond in civic space to pandemic, protests, and political turmoil. Her work carries cogent symbols. She fills a torch — referring to the Statue of Liberty’s hand holding a torch which was on view in Madison Square Park from 1876 to 1882 — with a timeworn bell, a herald of freedom, and with the arms of mannequins, reaching to viewers.

In Diana Al-Hadid’s 2018 exhibition, Delirious Matter, six female figures — the freestanding 14-feet high walls titled The Grotto and Gradiva; a conical work, Citadel; and three figures called Synonym — communed as they faced the central Oval Lawn and formed a kinship of women throughout the history of art and on site in the park. Their synergy and the artist’s observation of the unexpected prompt the framework of Delirious Matter. The organic plan of park walkways, distinctly opposed to the geometric grid of Manhattan streets, confirms Al-Hadid’s idea of delirium, or a restless excitement that grips individuals.