Public art on parade in New York City this autumn
New York’s outdoor art landscape is full of surprises this season, from mounds of oysters on Governors Island and bathing birds near City Hall to a towering corn cob on the High Line and a gargantuan teddy bear in Queens
There is a surreal streak in the public art that sprang up in parks and outdoor spaces across New York City this summer, including small objects rendered monumentally, otherworldly abstractions and animals reclaiming popular green spaces. On Governors Island, Alan Michelson’s large installation commissioned by More Art (with the Billion Oyster Project and Governors Island Arts), The Oyster (2026), nods to Indigenous shell middens and the bivalve’s rebounding population in New York Harbor. In City Hall Park, Genesis Belanger’s Public Art Fund exhibition Heads or Tails includes a flock of sculptural birds bathing in a fountain.
On the High Line, Ximena Garrido-Lecca has erected a 9ft-tall bronze fountain in the shape of a cob of corn, its neon-yellow water referencing toxic chemicals often used in the farming of the grain. Elsewhere on the High Line are three figures from Derek Fordjour’s ARCHETYPES series depicting Black figures whose livelihoods are to one extent or another dependent on their bodies, a boxer, a burlesque dancer and a waiter. Another trio of sculptures on the High Line, by Patricia Ayres, evokes strange bodies wrapped and bound in cloth, elastic and other materials, looming ominously on the elevated walkway.
In Madison Square Park, the ceramicist Roberto Lugo has erected a giant orange fire hydrant as well as a 20ft-tall urn that pays tribute to Puerto Rican history and heritage , with portraits of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reggaeton sensation Bad Bunny, baseball legend Roberto Clemente, Lugo’s parents and others.
In MoMA PS1’s courtyard, the artist and poet Precious Okoyomon has planted Among the Flowers I Learned to Love: A Garden of Decreation , which in addition to weeds, flowers, pollinators and other plant life, includes a giant teddy bear sculpture that visitors can climb through. And a couple neighgbourhoods over on the Queens waterfront, Chakaia Booker has installed a trio of her otherworldly sculptures fashioned from recycled tyres in Socrates Sculpture Park, which marks its 40th anniversary this year.
