The Art of Park Avenue

One of the primary benefits of being a New Yorker is the sheer access to breathtaking works of art—both modern and classical—that are available to everyone who lives in the city. What a lot of people don’t realize is that you don’t have to visit Museum Mile on the Upper East Side to get a taste of the art world: there is a dazzling array of public installations (see the latest Banksy-related hype).

In recent years, Park Avenue’s ongoing commitment to bringing large-scale sculptures to NYC means that a variety of renowned exhibits have taken place, right there on the mall, between busy lanes of traffic and surrounded by luxury Park Avenue apartments. Here are some of the most memorable.

Rafael Barrios
When Rafael Barrios was chosen to display a collection of his huge geometric sculptures along Park Avenue in 2012, it was obvious in advance that the artist’s impact on the City would be immediate, thanks to his famous commitment to playing with human visual perception. For three months, the ten massive, brightly-colored structures weren’t just eye-catching, they were mind-bending optical illusions that, in some cases, literally stopped traffic.

No Limits, Alexandre Arrechea
The title of the collection said it all. But as Arrechea played with images of the most iconic buildings in Manhattan, using large-scale sculptures that embraced a disorienting level of fluidity, Arrechea was happy to elaborate. “With this installation,” he explained, “I have created a set of works that confront dynamism vs. static, the whole vs. the fragmented, control vs. chaos, utopia vs. reality. The series provides a new point of access from which to understand the dialog between art and architecture”.

Night Presence IV by Louise Nevelson
Pioneering modern artist Louise Nevelson may have been born in Czarist Russia in 1899, but by 1972, she had spent five decades dwelling in New York City creating groundbreaking works of art. She celebrated her life in the City and all of the pieces she had created here, by presenting New York withNight Presence IV—Park Avenue’s only permanent sculpture. Though currently undergoing restoration, the Citywide Monuments Conservation Program will be returning the iconic steel structure back to its rightful home at 93rd Street as soon as they have raised enough funds to complete the project.

The Roses, by Will Ryman
One of the most surreal collections ever put on display on Park Avenue was by Will Ryman—a contemporary artist who uses absurdist means to ask questions about the contradictions inherent in the human condition. What that meant was that, for over four months in 2011, Park Avenue was lined with insanely huge sculptures of roses. These beautiful blossoms somehow shrank the luxury condominium buildings around them and made any human between 57^th and 67^th Streets feel positively tiny.

Albert Paley
Architectural artist Albert Paley is based—and works from his headquarters—in Rochester, New York, and is best known for his gigantic, imposing steel sculptures that play with abstract organic forms, in combination with geometric concepts. In 2013, 13 of these giants, specially created for Park Avenue, were put on display for four and a half months. Patterson Sims, a member of the Sculpture Committee for the Fund for Park Avenue said: “This is the most ambitious project that any sculptor in the last decade of this program has come up with.”