Tadashi Kawamata’s Tree Huts is an artist-in-residency program that culminates in a site-specific installation of twelve wooden huts in the park’s trees. Visitors are asked to witness, explore, and interpret the evolution of the outdoor project, fabricated entirely on site. Tree Huts also marks Kawamata’s first public work in New York City since his Roosevelt Island Smallpox Hospital project in 1992 where found wooden beams sourced from Manhattan and Queens engulfed the historic structure. His public installations, known as “displacements,” are complex and chaotic architectural growths of raw lumber, found objects, and construction scraps that bloom around existing urban landscapes. Playing on how construction and destruction characterize the life cycle of public space, Kawamata accommodates each individual site. By synthesizing art, architecture and the sociological experience of publicness, Kawamata constructs organic and improvisational work. Tree huts is an emerging focus of Kawamata’s work, uniting his interest in the architecture of shelter and in the insertion of private objects into public spaces. The exhibition marks the artist’s first exploration of this theme in North America following his tree hut exhibitions at Art Basel in 2007, the Generator program in Trondheim, Norway in 2007, and Galerie Kamel Mennour in 2008 in Paris.