Extraction, Extinction, Empathy, and Ephemera Intertwine in New Sculptures and Paintings Downtown
Lower Manhattan is home to four new public art pieces that are both hauntingly powerful and lyrically provocative. In City Hall Park, “Attrition” is a ten-foot-long, half-buried replica of a bison skeleton fashioned from ash-black steel. This visual presentation conjures the slaughter of millions of bison (almost to extinction) in the second half of the 19th century. But the material evokes sub rosa motifs: the eradication was part of a larger effort to facilitate westward expansion by weakening the Great Plains Indigenous populations, depriving them of a vital source of food, shelter, clothing and tool-making material. The bones of these noble beasts were ground into power and incinerated to create early industrial materials, like calcium bicarbonate (an important component to steel production). This process further accelerated the development of railroads, and thus added momentum to the drive championed by New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley (whose office was across Park Row from the site of “Attrition,” and who has his own statue elsewhere in City Hall Park), when he urged several generations, “Go West, young man!”
“Attrition” artist Cannupa Hanska, a Native American sculptor, says, “I live because my ancestors survived a war of attrition carried out by extractive colonizers, in order to subjugate tribal nations of the Great Plains for American progress. By the year 1895, across North America, bison herds had been systematically eradicated from numbers in the tens of millions to a mere 1,500. ‘Attrition’ is an effort to transform industrial processes and materials into a symbol of these buried histories, re-emerging in the 21st century.”
Starting in July, a few blocks north, Thomas Paine Park (at Worth and Centre Streets) will host “Look Down,” a large marble sculpture in the form of a human infant cowering in the fetal position. Created by the Italian sculptor Sago, the piece draws upon his experience living in New York, where his attention was initially drawn to the conspicuous sight of homeless people sleeping on the streets. “After a few months,” he recalls, “I became numb to their presence, passing by without noticing them anymore.” Troubled by this realization, and the insight that each homeless adult had once been an infant, he created the piece as a literal invitation for everybody to look down at—but not on—the people sleeping in our streets.
At historic Fort Jay on Governors Island, the “Other of Pearl” installation by interdisciplinary environmental artist Jenny Kendler uses the forms of whales and oysters to recall the extractive industries that underpin the climate crisis. This meditation on ecological entanglement between human and nonhuman beings, flowing water and flows of capital, transforms the onetime ammunition bunker of the fort into a venue for exploration, where a handblown glass instrument enables visitors to sing in the voice of a whale. Pearl sculptures grown inside oysters are on display, and vintage glass bottles containing whale oil (used for lighting until whales were hunted to near extinction, and their secretions were replaced by petroleum). When this exhibit concludes in October, the sculptures will be auctioned to raise funds in support of a new oyster reef being cultivated in the waters around Governors Island.
Finally, the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College (81 Barclay Street, across from 7 World Trade Center) is presenting “Volitia Turns Herself Inside Out in Order to See the World,” an ongoing work in progress by painter Melissa Marks (above). This installation consists of framed drawings in color juxtaposed with black and white murals being sketched directly on the walls of the gallery. Visitors are invited to observe for the next several weeks as Ms. Marks continues to cover the walls with her work, which will eventually spill out beyond the venue’s doors. This art will also be uniquely (and deliberately) ephemeral: the wall murals will be painted over at the exhibition’s end.