Pauline Eiferman
Nohra Haime Gallery.
About 350,000 people come through the Broadway Plazas of Times Square every day to see the neon advertising and crowd around the ticket booths. But this week, they will also stumble upon four monumental installations and 24 paper sheep.
It’s Armory Arts Week in New York and four galleries participating in the Armory Show were chosen by the Times Square Alliance to showcase their artist’s sculptures here in the heart of the city: Marlborough Gallery’s Tom Otterness, Nohra Haime Gallery’s Niki de Saint Phalle, Nina Menocal Gallery’s Grimanesa Amorós, Derek Eller Gallery’s David Kennedy Cutler, and Kyu Seok Oh with the West Harlem Art Fund.
“The work had to be contemporary, new, and have the strength to survive in Times Square visually,” said Glenn Weiss, Manager of Public Art and Design at the Times Square Alliance, who added that all the pieces had to be engineered to endure 100-mile-an-hour wind.
The Broadway Pedestrian Plazas between 45th and 47th Street are not your usual exhibition space. Crowded, loud, and smoky, New Yorkers tend to avoid Times Square. Still, Weiss insisted that beneath the neon lights, they are just regular plazas, and that people here are more attentive than elsewhere.
“When I thought about what kind of art I would want to show in Times Square, I thought about the space,” said Kyu Seok Oh, the artist behind the herd of paper sheep. “Times Square is so intimidating. There’s lots of people, lots of lights. It’s a place no one would think of as relaxing. So, I wanted to create a contrast between that chaotic atmosphere and something sweet and soft.”
Tom Otterness, on the other hand, is confident that his piece, Mouse, will fit in its own bizarre way. “A giant mouse has its place somewhere in 42nd street,” he said. Known for his small sculptures dotted around the New York City subway tracks, Otterness has made it his goal to get artworks out of galleries. Back in 1980, his art collective Colab took over a massage parlor in Times Square to showcase works from more than a hundred artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“It was our ambition to have a more populist approach,” he said. “We chose the area on purpose for its rougher edges. Still, today I love the atmosphere there. There are people from every class, every type. People are out of their cars and can engage with public art. I love New York for that.”
For Grimanesa Amoros, Times Square is the ideal exhibition space. Her work, The Uros House, is a 10-foot tall representation of a Peruvian island house, made of translucent spheres of colorful light. “My piece is all about lights,” she said. “It’s unbelievable for me to have it shown in the heart of the city where all the lights are. It feels great.”
But for David Kennedy-Cutler, showcasing Geologies, Cosmologies, Apologies #1, the area seems more of a challenge. “Times Square is invaded by a non-New York type environment,” he said. “It’s a hub of the commercialized New York, where corporate America has implanted itself.”
The young artist said that public art in New York City still had a stigma. “It needs to be non-challenging and fun,” he said. “It’s vilified if it isn’t.”
His piece, a haunting monolith made of compact disc data, compact discs, archival inkjet print, plexiglass, and ashes in acrylic medium all held together by UV epoxy resin, refers to the oil spill in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “I’m excited to see the grungy brooklyn aesthetic being exposed in Times Square,” he said, wondering if passers-by will get it. “But contrast is everything.
