Artist: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor unleashes whale-like monster on Paris by Vicky Buffery

PARIS | Tue May 10, 2011 8:41pm IST

PARIS (Reuters Life!) - Entering Anish Kapoor's latest sculpture through a dark, windowless revolving door, visitors experience a momentary blackout before emerging into a womb-like cavity -- warm, oppressive and bathed in red light.

This is "Leviathan" at Paris's Grand Palais, the Mumbai-born British sculptor's first work in France for 30 years, to be unveiled to the public on Wednesday, and an experience one can only imagine is like being swallowed by a whale.

Famed for his critically acclaimed Cloud Gate in Chicago and Sky Mirror in New York, Kapoor is the fourth artist to be invited by the Grand Palais to create the annual Monumenta exhibition in its vast, glass-roofed central nave.

Previous exhibitors at the historic Art Nouveau building, erected for the 1900 World Fair, were Christian Boltanski in 2010, Richard Serra in 2008 and Anselm Kiefer in 2007.

"It's fabulous. It's a challenging space and that's the main motivation for me," Kapoor told Reuters on the sidelines of a preview of the exhibition.

In an interview with British media earlier on Tuesday, Kapoor dedicated his installation to artist Ai Weiwei, calling Ai's arrest and detention by Chinese authorities "barbaric" and urging museums and galleries to close for a day in protest.

Ai, an outspoken critic of China's human rights record, has not been heard of since he was detained at Beijing airport on April 3.

"This takes us back to a Soviet-style time when the voice of artists was seen as dangerous," Kapoor told the BBC.

ARCHAIC FORCE

Inside Leviathan, the viewer is invited to take part in a physical and mental experience, a sensory immersion in a translucent membrane designed to interact with the architecture of the building in which it is housed.

The red glow is created by daylight flooding from the nave's glass roof and through the sculpture's tent-like walls, and its intensity, as well as the temperature in the cavity, vary as clouds pass over the sun.

From the outside, however, Leviathan offers a completely different experience, a feeling of awe at the overwhelming scale of the bulbous, rubber-like installation, which stands 35 metres (yards) high and fills the entire 35,000 sq metres (376,700 sq ft) of the nave.

"For me, this huge archaic force is linked to darkness. It is a monster burdened with its corpse, which stands guard over some forgotten regions of our conscience," Kapoor explains.

Perhaps reminiscent of the intimate, womb-like interior, however, there is still something faintly erotic about the outside of the sculpture and it is hard to shake off the feeling one is looking at a giant, three-balled massage device, rather than a mythical sea-monster.

But as Kapoor says in a blurb on his work:

"I think there is no such thing as an innocent viewer. All viewing, all looking comes with complications, comes with previous histories, a more or less real past."

(Reporting by Vicky Buffery; editing by Paul Casciato)

Leviathan is 35 metres high and comprised of tautly-stretched PVC over a giant metal frame and is the highlight of the exhibition which opens tomorrow and runs until June 23.People can walk around it and inside it.

Kapoor said: 'My ambition is to create a space within a space, responding to the great height and light of the nave of the Grand Palais.

'People will be invited to enter the artwork to immerse themselves in its colour and it will be I hope a contemplative, poetic experience.'

http://gu.com/p/2p2xc

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1385590/Anish-Kapoor-Leviathan-sculpture-unveiled-Grand-Palais-Paris.html

Zodiac Heads and an ARTnews article

Librado Romero/The New York Times

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, at the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, features 12 animal heads in cast bronze.

The installation will be on display in Central Park from May 2nd- July 15th

The sculptural works are comprised of 12 monumental bronze animal heads inspired by the fountain clock at the 18th century Chinese imperial retreat of Yuanming Yuan just outside of Beijing. The heads will be placed at the historic Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza in front of the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street and 5th Avenue.

The original 18th century piece was created by two European Jesuits at the request of Manchu Emperor Qianlong and portrays the animals of the Chinese Zodiac each spouting water for two-hour intervals from their mouth. In 1860 Yuanming Yuan was pillaged by French and British troops during the Second Opium War and the heads were plundered. Today seven heads have been found including the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, horse, monkey, and boar. The location of the other five heads is unknown. (It should be recalled that the rat and the rabbit were offered at a sale of Yves Saint Laurent Collection at Christie’s in February 2009 and were purchased for $19 million by Cai Mingchao, an advisor to China’s National Treasures Fund who then refused to pay.)

Ai Weiwei has re-interpreted the 18th century works on an oversize scale addressing issues of repatriation and the looting of ancient artifacts. “My work is always dealing with real or fake, authenticity and value and how value relates to current political and social understandings and misunderstandings. However, because Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads is composed of animal heads, it’s a work that everyone can understand, including children and people who are not in the art world. I think it’s more important to show your work to the public. That’s what I really care about,” said Ai Weiwei in a recent statement.

His 12 heads are cast in bronze and placed on bronze bases each weighing approximately 800 pounds with measurements of 4 feet high and 3 feet wide. They stand at 10 feet high when the base and the head are brought together exerting a monumental presence for the gateway to Central Park. “It’s a busy area, so it can be seen by ordinary people, but also it’s not exactly an art center. I like that people can notice it and at the same time, not to bother them too much,” said the artist of the new location in recent interview with the NY Times.

Animal Circle/ Zodiac Heads are presented by the Chinese Contemporary Art Organization AW in cooperation with the City of New York. They were previously displayed at the 29th Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil this past September. “It is innovative and thought-provoking exhibits like Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads that keep New York one of the world’s great places to live, work and visit,” said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in a recent interview. After its New York City exhibition the works will travel to London’s Somerset House, Los Angeles’ LACMA, Houston’s Hermann Park, Pittsburg’s Warhol Museum, and Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Related Links:
Ai Weiwei Unleashes Animals of the Zodiac on Central Park for His First Public Art Project [Artinfo]
Plaza Hotel Fountain to be Home for Ai Weiwei Sculpture [NYTimes ]
Ai Weiwei’s Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals at the Sao Paulo Biennale [Artdaily]
Plaza Hotel Fountain to Be Home for Ai Weiwei Sculpture [Forbes]
Mayor Bloomberg Announces Acclaimed Contemporary Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Exhibits Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads at Central Park’s Grand Army Plaza to Launch Historic Global Outdoor Public Sculpture Tour [NYC Gov]
[NY Times ]

The twelve Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals by Ai Weiwei are cast in bronze and positioned on circular bronze bases.

ARTnews
this link brings you to Crossing the Line in China by Barbara Pollack

Nicholas Logsdail, director of the Lisson Gallery, talks about a forthcoming exhibition of the artist's work and his growing influence on the global stage.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011
The Observer, Sunday 8 May 2011

Ai Weiwei: ‘He’s committed and idealistic, and unaccepting of injustice to the point of self-denial.’ Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

My last conversation with Ai Weiwei took place in January. My colleague Greg Hilty and I went to Beijing for three days to make selections for the forthcoming show at the Lisson Gallery, and we got a sense of great foreboding from him. He had been placed under house arrest in November and had subsequently been released, but he was already worried about whether he'd get out of the country. He had all these commitments abroad – in Berlin, in New York, and with us in London – and he was very concerned about fulfilling them.

There was a discussion then about whether we should do the show now or delay it for a year so that he could produce an entirely new body of work. We decided to go ahead because there was an urgency to it, due to his situation at home, and we wanted to give a London audience a sense of the range of his work and the thinking behind it.

In my opinion, Ai Weiwei is one of the major artists of the early 21st century. My gallery avoided the gold rush for Chinese art in the boom years because, in my experience, it's almost always a false premise to group artists together by generation or nationality. What's important is the quality of the individual artist, and it was clear to us that Ai Weiwei stood apart. He's not just the most important Chinese artist of his generation but a truly international figure.

His work is a very interesting blend of traditionalism and liberalism, with a revolutionary bent. He has an outspoken nature, which is what has got him into trouble, but my reading is that his primary impulse is less to overturn society than to improve it. He is unwilling to keep quiet in the face of ignorance and prejudice and he speaks out against injustice wherever he finds it.

I've met him on a number of occasions over the last couple of years. When we were preparing for the show, I found him to be highly practical and thoroughly professional. He is a serious man of few words but he has an ironic sense of humour. He's also a big guy, physically, with a barrel chest and a commanding presence. We had some very interesting conversations about the time he spent living in New York in considerable hardship. He was an exile, partly by choice, partly out of necessity because of his family's political problems in China. It was a gestation period, a time of growth. He was taking stock of the bigger world and putting his house in order, as an artist and an intellectual.

He may not think of himself as an intellectual, but I would certainly describe him as one. Although he can be irrational himself, he despises irrationality and tries to give a clear and logical approach to the issues that are important to him. He's committed and idealistic, and unaccepting of injustice to the point of self-denial – allowing himself to get into this position is surely a form of self-denial.

All the arrangements for the show had been made before his arrest, but it feels rotten putting it on in his absence. We've been praying, metaphorically speaking, that some news of his whereabouts would break, but nothing has: it's been total silence since his detention.

The outpouring of respect and admiration for him, his honesty, his bravery – maybe you could say his foolhardiness as well – have been completely astonishing. Many other artists have shown their solidarity, including Anish Kapoor who has dedicated his forthcoming Grand Palais show in Paris to Ai Weiwei. The best we can do now is to maintain our support for him and keep up the pressure. It's crucial that all the planned projects go ahead – his work is also showing in New York and, from next week, at Somerset House in London.

How do we put ourselves into the heads of the Chinese authorities who are responsible for his arrest? How do we reach them? What is it that we need to say to them? In arresting Ai Weiwei, I believe they have failed to understand what it means to be an artist. They have failed to be culturally aware. He is exactly the kind of person they should have onside. He's actually much more dangerous now, under arrest, than he ever was before. I think he is a great global cultural ambassador for the new China, but this arrest is making China's new cultural revolution look rather unrevolutionary.

They have accused him of tax evasion, bigamy and spreading pornography on the internet, but these charges are clearly trumped up. If you want to nail somebody and put them away for a while, you can probably find dirt on anybody on the planet, let alone a controversial artist like Ai Weiwei. Some people have commented that the Chinese government saw what was going on in north Africa and the Middle East and got nervous. That may well explain his arrest.

I am hopeful though – that he's in a reasonable state and can speak for himself; he's an intelligent man and should be able to provide arguments for his release. Although of course it's not going to get you anywhere if you're talking to a brick wall. What's so distressing about this situation is that there is no obvious authority that one can appeal to or challenge about what has happened.

It's so sad that this charismatic, larger-than-life, gentle guy has been arrested. I'm deeply upset. I'd get on the next plane to China if I thought there was anything I could do, and I'm sure loads of people feel the same way.

We have organised a very different series of events from the ones we had originally planned. Alongside the show, we will have a press conference and then a big open party to celebrate Ai Weiwei's work. We will also have a moment of silence to remember his situation, although until he is released I don't think it is going to be far from anyone's mind.

"indigo blue" by artist Ann Hamilton

“Indigo Blue” consists of roughly 18,000 items of blue cotton work clothing, neatly folded and stacked on a “floating” steel platform at the center of a room."

Salvation of 'Indigo Blue' a triumph for all to see Hamilton's 'Indigo Blue' -- free of cultural limbo

May 27, 2007|By Kenneth Baker

People who encounter an Ann Hamilton installation work tend never to forget it.

I can clearly recall pieces of hers that I saw in San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Pittsburgh and -- in two settings -- in New York.

So it stunned me to learn from Hamilton that "very little of my installation work has survived in any way. The Hirshhorn (Washington, D.C.) has a piece, but there's not a lot. I think it's not perceived as the kind of thing that has a longer life. So to enter the conversation about what it means to revisit something like this and bring it forward is a really great thing for me to be able to do."

I recently spoke with Hamilton, 50, while she was working on reconstructing "Indigo Blue" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the work was originally made in 1991 for a citywide show in Charleston, S.C.

SFMOMA hopes to acquire "Indigo Blue" in its current manifestation, rescuing it from recycling and cultural amnesia. Score another sharp collection-building move for curator Madeleine Grynsztejn if it happens.

Critical and curatorial consensus as to Hamilton's importance got corroboration from the MacArthur Foundation in 1993, when it put her in the select company of visual artists who have received the so-called genius grant. "It was an enormous gift," Hamilton said, "because it said 'you can keep doing this work that you really love doing.' "

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art had already staged a major show of her work in 1988.

"Indigo Blue" consists of roughly 18,000 items of blue cotton work clothing, neatly folded and stacked on a "floating" steel platform at the center of a room on SFMOMA's second floor.

At one end of the platform stands an old wood table and chair. From noon to 4 p.m. each day -- except Wednesdays when the museum is closed -- a volunteer sits silently at the table, erasing, thus effectively destroying, the pages of a book: "International Law Situations," a Naval War College publication pertaining to legally defined land and water boundaries. The book connects in Hamilton's thinking with Charleston's history as a seaport but she is also interested in the invisible activity of reading as a reflection of the invisible labor represented by the work clothes. "The books we originally used," as Hamilton said -- she has a boxful -- "are legal documents that mediate the relationship between land and water. That in-between space, and how you occupy the space of the in-between, is still very interesting to me."

The Exhibition: The Parallax View

Lehmann Maupin announces The Parallax View, an exhibition of significant works exploring observation as conflict, curated by Manual E. Gonzalez. On view 10 February – 19 March, 2011, the Chelsea exhibition features works by Teresita Fernández, Dan Flavin, Gego, Mary Heilmann, Eva Hesse, Robert Irwin, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Smithson, all acclaimed artists who confront traditional notions of space, light and the nature of observation.

Grounded in the idea of a parallax, defined as “the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer,” this exhibition brings together stylistically disparate artists linked by the tension and romance between rigorous geometry and expressive chaos. The Parallax View explores the idea of observation as conflict: conflict between mind and object; analysis and fleeting insight; continuity and fragmentation; object and artifact; inner and outer.

The minimalist works by Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin provide narratives about light and landscape. Agnes Martin and Mary Heilmann suggest both the vastness and intimacy of nature, yet another source of conflict, but free of nostalgia or sentimentality. Bruce Nauman, Robert Morris and Teresita Fernández define perception, the physical and temporal relationships that a viewer encounters in relation to an artwork, setting the stage for interpreting a parallax as a prism that reflects the many facets of observation as conflict. Eva Hesse and Gego take a playfully minimalist approach to liberate sculpture from its traditional restraints, and straddle the line between figuration and abstraction.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition is a complex spatial proposition on the relationship between seeing and experience, an abridged history within the shifting paradigms that ushered art towards the present century.

TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ Untitled Installation view at Lehmann Maupin, New York, 1997 wood, scrim, mirror, pencil 120 x 120 x 9 inches 304.8 x 304.8 x 22.9 cm LM5225

Artist: Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991 - 2009

Ursula von Rydingsvard, Droga, 2009.

SculptureCenter is pleased to premiere Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991 - 2009. Organized by SculptureCenter, this traveling exhibition will include a selection of the artist's most significant sculptures, including wall reliefs and monumental cedar works created from 1991 to 2009. The SculptureCenter presentation will also feature several works not traveling including a new cast resin piece to be installed in SculptureCenter's outdoor exhibition court. Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture will be accompanied by a fully- illustrated monograph co- published by Prestel and authored by art historian Patricia Phillips. The exhibition will be on view January 24 - March 28, 2011. An opening reception will take place Sunday January 23rd 5-7 pm and is open to the public. The artist will be present.

Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from cedar beams, which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, glues, clamps, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work's textured, faceted surfaces. Her signature shapes are abstract, with references to things in the real world. Drawing on a range of sources, from the humble to the majestic, von Rydingsvard's work is recognized for its great psychological force and powerful physical presence. In wall sculptures such as Untitled (Spoon Shovel) (1991-1992) and Finger Spoon (2007), the artist lends a dignity to works resembling familiar household items; while the initially strange Maglownica (1995), a tall, bumpy cedar plank sheathed in cow intestines, turns out to have similar, personal associations. A maglownica is an object traditionally used by Polish farmwomen to soften sheets with a rubbing motion after washing. Von Rydingsvard's most enduring form is the bowl, which may appear as a shallow or towering form, and may alternately evoke nourishment, domesticity, the body, a simple enclosure, or a mountain, among other references. The exhibition includes the five undulating bowls that make up Krasawica II (1998-2001), Ukrainian for beautiful young woman, whose overall shape conveys a fluid sense of movement and vitality despite its substantial, weighty volume; as well as the large, low basin, ringed with bulbous, stuffed-intestinal forms, whose primal, physical gravity recalls the Ocean Floor (1996). The exhibition is organized by SculptureCenter and guest-curated by Helaine Posner.

After the New York presentation, the exhibition will travel to the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (May 16 - August 28,2011); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (September 23, 2011 - March 25, 2012) and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami (April 18 - August 4, 2012).

About the Artist

Ursula von Rydingsvard's first solo exhibition was presented in New York in 1975 and she has been exhibiting her work in museums and galleries internationally ever since. Her sculpture is included in the permanent collections of over thirty museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Detroit Institute of Arts. Major permanent commissions of her work are view at the Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Washington; the Bloomberg Building, New York; and the Queens Family Courthouse, New York. Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard was presented at Madison Square Park in 2006.

Artist: Mariele Neudecker's - proposal

German artist Mariele Neudecker’s design, It’s Never Too Late and You Can’t Go Back, is a fictional mountainscape sculpture

It’s Never Too Late And You Can’t Go Back is elevated above the Plinth and represents a fictional mountainscape. It is ‘specific in its dramatically modelled detail’ and if viewed from above reveals the flipped and reversed shape of Britain. From below, the map is the right way around and more familiar. The juxtaposition of different views shifts the observer’s perception of the mountain from majestic and generic landscape to territorial space.

Historically mountains represent monumentality, conquest, glory, ownership. In turn, the sentiments frequently attached to landscapes have often served as reminders of our more fragile, human, moral and mortal positions in the grandest considerations of the sublime.

Artist biography

Born in 1965 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Mariele Neudecker lives and works in Bristol. Neudecker uses a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, film and photography. Her practice investigates the formation and historical dissemination of cultural constructs around the natural world, focusing particularly on landscape representations within the Northern European Romantic tradition and notions of the Sublime. Central to the work is the human interest and relationship to landscape and its images used metaphorically for human psychology.

Mariele Neudecker has shown widely internationally, notably in Biennales in Japan, Australia and Singapore, also solo shows in Ikon Gallery, Tate StIves and Tate Britain. This year Mariele Neudecker has presented a solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, won the Ludwig Gies Preis for her participation at Triennale Fellbach 2010 (Germany), made a new commission for Extraordinary Measures, Belsay Hall, Castle and Gardens, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and has been invited to spend three month at the Headlands Centre for the Arts, San Francisco (USA). She is represented by gallery Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/index.html

Elmgreen & Dragset and Katharina Fritsch chosen for Fourth Plinth commissions

London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, has announced the winning artists of the next two commissions for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.

Scheduled for unveiling in 2012, Elmgreen & Dragset’s Powerless Structures, Fig.101 portrays a boy, ridding his rocking horse, cast in bronze. In the context of the iconography of Trafalgar Square the boy is elevated to the status of a historical hero. The work is intended to celebrate the heroism of growing up, gently questioning the tradition for monuments predicated on military victory or defeat. Here, there is not yet a history to commemorate—only a future to hope for.

Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn / Cock will be installed on the Fourth Plinth in 2013, showcasing a giant cockerel in ultramarine blue. Surrounded by Trafalgar Square’s genteel Georgian architecture, its unnatural scale and bold color aims to render the situation unreal in an effort to bring a sense of hallucination and uncertainty to the context.

The selection was made by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group chaired by Ekow Eshun. Ekow Eshun said: "Elmgreen and Dragset and Katherina Fritsch are distinguished artists with major international reputations. Their selection further underlines the importance and reputation of the Fourth Plinth as the most significant public art commission in Britain. Both have created imaginative and arresting artworks that fully respond to the uniqueness of their location and I can't wait to see their sculptures in Trafalgar Square in 2012 and 2013."

Trafalgar Square is a square in central London, England. With its position in the heart of London, it is a tourist attraction, and one of the most famous squares in the United Ki

ngdom and the world. At its centre is Nelson's Column, which is guarded by four lion statues at its base. Statues and sculptures are on display in the square, including a fourth plinth displaying changing pieces of contemporary art. The square is also used as a location for political demonstrations and community gatherings, such as the celebration of New Year's Eve in London.

Public art has always been surrounded by debate. This came to a head as three sculptures by British contemporary artists were temporarily placed on the empty fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, which had remained unoccupied for 158 years.

Designed in 1832 by Charles Barry, the square was always intended to give "scope and encouragement to sculptural work of a high class" and to give "distinctive and artistic character to the square." This aspiration was again addressed with the commissioning of new pieces of sculpture to be placed on the plinth.

The project was the brainchild of Prue Leith, who in her role as Deputy Chairman of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, began to seek out ideas about what should be done to enliven the fourth plinth and to put it to good use. She also looked for sponsorship for the fourth plinth project. The foundation's way forward was to fund the project in the manner of its own commissioning process - the provision of funds to realise the works for exhibition and which would ultimately be sold. The project took place from July 1999 and ran until May 2001.

The first sculpture to occupy the plinth was Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo: Behold the Man, installed in July 1999. A life-size figure in white marble resin standing at one end of the giant plinth, it portrayed Christ at the moment he was handed over to the crowds by Pontius Pilate. Wallinger stated, "Trafalgar Square has a tradition of being a place for crowds and it seemed to me to be the perfect context for this statue". Amidst the proud military Victorian heroes, the clean-shaven figure, with hands bound behind him and eyes downcast, portrayed an air of intense vulnerability, deliberately dwarfed by his formidable central London surroundings.

The second sculpture to be placed on the plinth, beside Nelson atop his 172 foot column, was Bill Woodrow's Regardless of History, installed in March 2000. This is the largest and most complex bronze sculpture ever undertaken by Woodrow, a great idea for a big civic sculpture. It is now installed in the sculpture park in Goodwood and looking for a good home. Cast in 130 pieces and weighing eleven and a half tonnes, the epic Regardless of History continued to spur on the debate about what should permanently occupy the plinth.

The third piece for the plinth was Rachel Whiteread's Monument. The transparency of the inverted cast of the plinth resulted in, as Whiteread stated, it "sometimes being present, sometimes being ephemeral, depending on the quality of daylight and the weather."

The Fourth Plinth Programme is funded by the Mayor of London with support from Arts Council England and sees new artworks being selected for the vacant plinth in a rolling program of new commissions.

www.london.gov.uk/fourthplinth/

Artist: Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington and the Lincoln Sculptures

When we lived in Bethel this is how the Lincoln sculpture looked in the downtown I always loved looking at it. Then when we moved to the mid-west and stumbled upon it again in Illinois I now think of it as something I was supposed to see and remember.

Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington (March 10, 1876 – October 4 ,1973) was a prolific and innovative American sculptor. She was a master of naturalistic animal sculpture. Particularly noted for her equestrian statues she was active over a period of 70 years.

Huntington is recognized as one of America's finest animaliers, whose naturalistic works helped to bridge the gap between the traditional styles of the 1800s and the abstract styles of the mid-twentieth century. Her prominence also enabled other female artists to succeed. Her innovations in technique and display, as exhibited through her aluminum statues in Brookgreen Gardens, guarantee her place in the annals of art history.

During the 1940s and 1950s, she was increasingly distressed by modern art and what she considered a tasteless machine age. However, despite widespread public interest in abstract sculpture, Mrs. Huntington continued to win recognition and awards. She did her last equestrian statue when she was 91.

Huntington, along with her husband, Archer Milton Huntington, helped found nearly 20 museums and wildlife preserves as well as America's first sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.

In anticipation of the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth in 2009, the 2006 Springfield City Ornament depicts Abraham Lincoln:On the Prairie, the sculpture at the entrance to New Salem where he lived as a young man. The sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington portrays young Abe on horseback, reading a law book. Springfield artist Stan Squires interpreted the statue for the ornament design, silhouetting Lincoln and his horse between wisps of prairie grass and a split-rail fence.

The Public Warhol in a Public Square

Although winter hasn’t even started, there is already a lineup of public art projects scheduled for New York this spring. The Public Art Fund will be installing three sculpture exhibitions: at Union Square, City Hall Park and Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street.

“These aren’t site-specific installations; they are site-responsive,” said Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, the nonprofit organization that presents art around the city. “They are all linked because they use New York City as a context.”

Perhaps the most surprising will be a 10-foot-tall bronze sculpture of Andy Warhol in Union Square (March 30 to Oct. 2). This will be only the second time the Public Art Fund has installed art there: the last project was “Woman’s Work” in 1993, the artist Rhonda Roland Shearer’s eight bronze sculptures of women scrubbing toilets, vacuuming and shopping for groceries while clutching squirming children to their bosoms.

But the New York artist Rob Pruitt chose this bustling area for the Warhol sculpture, called “The Andy Monument.” He had a particular corner in mind, at 17th Street and Broadway, just outside the building that once housed Warhol’s Factory. The sculpture depicts Warhol as he looked in the 1970s, in his signature fright wig, blue jeans and a tweed jacket. He is posed with a camera around his neck, carrying a shopping bag full of issues of Interview magazine, the publication he helped found.

“It’s conceived as a classical monument although it’s very contemporary,” Mr. Baume said. “It’s a real public Andy from the period where he would stand in Union Square giving out the magazines.”

By contrast, the London-based sculptor Eva Rothschild has claimed the plaza at the entrance to Central Park for a delicate work that she said would take “the form of a multidirectional arch.” The piece, which will be on view March 1 to Aug. 28, will rise nearly 20 feet and spill over the center of the plaza. Fashioned from red, green and black steel tubing four inches in diameter, it will echo the branches of trees in the park and be, as Ms. Rothschild put it, “another gateway between two different worlds of urban experience.”

Back downtown, in City Hall Park, more than 20 sculptures by Sol LeWitt will be installed from May 25 through Dec. 2. LeWitt, who died in 2007, was known for his Minimalist geometric work, and Mr. Baume has assembled large-scale pieces dating from the 1960s through 2006, including many that will be seen in this country for the first time. They will come from private collections and museums both here and abroad.

“There hasn’t been a career overview of his structures,” Mr. Baume said.

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 25, 2010 - New York Times

Artist Portfolio - Pamela Ayres