At this point in the season most galleries have cut back their Saturday hours, and few exhibitions of note will open before September. But there is one art contingent that’s just entered its busiest moment, colonizing New York City streets and parks with family-friendly distractions from the everyday urban landscape. Summer is prime time for public art, and here are some of the highlights.
In Madison Square Park, the California artist Charles Long has installed a circuit of goopy, brightly colored sculptures called “Pet Sounds.” Pipe railings encircle and divide the lawn, occasionally swelling into amorphous blobs with just enough figurative character to charge the benches and picnic tables they occupy with happy, extraterrestrial energy. (On view through Sept. 9.)
The Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, is an annual competition that enlists new talent to design and build a temporary structure in the museum’s courtyard, providing shade and amusement to visitors — and especially to those who pack in for Warm Up, the Saturday music festival, who desperately need to cool down. This year’s winning entry, “Wendy,” designed by Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner of the firm HWKN, is a massive, spiky blue structure that blasts cold air and mist onto bystanders. “Wendy” is coated in a titania nanoparticle spray that neutralizes airborne pollutants, and by the end of the summer she will have reportedly nullified the effects of approximately 260 cars on the road. (On view through Sept. 8.)
City Hall Park is the site of “Common Ground,” an exhibition organized by Public Art Fund featuring 10 international artists who riff on tropes of civics. The Argentine artist Amalia Pica contributed an outsize lectern in cast concrete. Christian Jankowski’s titular work, “Common Ground,” is a placard placed in the foliage that expresses the artist’s desire to be buried “Somewhere on common ground City Hall Park.” And on an altogether less morbid note, Paul McCarthy offers up monolithic, inflated bottle of “Daddies Ketchup,” based on an actual brand that epitomizes a comical slice of patriarchal Americana. (On view through Nov. 30.)
“People,” another ambitious Public Art Fund project, this time by the artist Oscar Tuazon, opened last week at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, one of the city’s newer green spaces. Tuazon has literally uprooted three hand-picked trees and resituated them along the piers here as three unique sculptures: one serves as a fountain, another penetrates a concrete cube, and is topped with a basketball hoop. There’s something only slightly uncanny about seeing these stark, natural forms in the stark, natural setting of a park and promenade, and something magnificent about seeing their silhouettes merge with the Manhattan skyline at sunset. (On view through April 26, 2013.)
The High Line has become one of the city’s premier tourist destinations for just about all purposes, and with a lively commissioning program, art is certainly one of them. As a counterpoint to the miniatures found in “Lilliput,” the curator Cecilia Alemani’s first big High Line installation, the Los Angeles-based, British-born sculptor Thomas Houseago has installed his “Lying Figure” at Little West 12th Street. Measuring 15 feet long, the bronze, headless giant serves as a kind of Gulliver napping along the former train tracks. (On view through March 13, 2013.)
Just around the corner, the newest monument to arrive on Manhattan soil, er pavement, was unveiled this weekend outside the Standard hotel in the meatpacking district. “Big Kastenmann,” which translates to “big box man,” is an 18-foot tall aluminum cast figure by the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. In keeping with Wurm’s tongue-in-cheek approach to formalism, and his proclivity for a certain shade of pink that democratizes his miscellany of creations, the sculpture is attired in a proper New York trench coat and its arms and head have been subsumed into a solid block of an abdomen, somewhat mirroring the hotel’s own rectilinear silhouette, but also bringing to mind a giant Popsicle.
