The Pamela Council set a deadline and said a prayer. It’s been almost seven months since the artist’s monument to pandemic survivors first appeared in Times Square, with a case of 400,000 hand-painted acrylic nails enveloping a bubbling fountain. , where visitors can reflect on perseverance through Covid-19.
But when her commissioned exhibition with Times Square Arts ended in December and the 18-foot-tall cave was moved into a storage facility in Brooklyn, Council was shocked to receive a bill for 5,000. dollars in monthly fees and insurance, an expense that quickly depletes the artist’s bank account. Times Square Arts will pay for the first five months of storage, but the organization says it’s up to her to continue working on or choose to dismantle the work.
Without a gallery representative, the artist decided crowdfunding was the best chance to save”A fountain for survivors“Buy time to raise $26,000 to pay for storing the £20,000 sculpture until a permanent home can be found.
“There is a history of freakish and black artists creating work and destroying it,” Council, who identifies as Black and Nonbinary, said in an interview. “I would hate to see my work suffer such a fate.”
Public art commissions, dozens of which are awarded annually, represent one of the highest honors an artist can receive in a city like New York, where sidewalk space is limited. limited, expensive materials, and fierce competition for commissions. The city’s most prestigious commissions are distributed by nonprofit organizations, often awarding established artists, whose galleries are willing to shoulder the production costs and guarantee an effective afterlife for sculptures. But many emerging artists have no representation at the gallery, who lack the resources to ensure that every monument and sculpture has an afterlife, which can lead them to try to save their work. your product – or, in the case of Zaq Landsberg, choose to destroy it.
In 2019, he grabbed a shovel and unearthed the anchors holding his exhibit,”Islands of Unisphere, ” Posted on the lawn of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The show includes a series of table-sized sculptures modeled after the park’s famous globe. His sculptures – sketches of Japan, Cuba and Madagascar – have been used by visitors as makeshift benches and tables. The Parks Department has commissioned them as part of its public arts program, providing New Yorkers with cultural encounters across the city.
“Most of the islands are in landfill,” says Landsberg, adding that he has turned Cuba into a factory inside his apartment. “I try to be Zen about it, but honestly, it hurts when I have to destroy something.”
Now, the artist saves whatever he can. Landsberg is currently marking a tomb dummy he created last year in honor of Revolutionary War hero Margaret Corbin inside his Brooklyn studio, to save money on storage. The coffin, commissioned by the Parks Department, was on display in Fort Tryon Park for nearly a year until June, but now its final resting place may be beneath the artist’s desk.
In May, he started a Kickstarter campaign to subsidize the relocation of another work, “Freedom on Side,” which imagines the Statue of Liberty stepping off her pedestal in New York Harbor and taking a nap. The artwork survived a year when visitors climbed its copper-painted rust in Harlem’s Morningside Park, but now it requires a hitchhiking across the Hudson River to reach Liberty State Park in the City Jersey, where Landsberg arranged another year-long exhibition. The hour-long drive required $11,000 to cover the cost of a rigging company, two vans needed, and maintenance work on the sculpture after it arrived at its new location.
“Artists are responsible for the artwork before and after the display,” Megan Moriarty, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department, said in a statement, adding that “our employees” works closely with artists and can make recommendations to other organizations, venues and agencies that they may work with outside of the exhibition term. “
For example, Diana Al-Hadid was able to arrange a tour of her Madison Square Park Conservancy 2018 exhibit, called ““Great problem. With help from her conservator and agent, the Kasmin Gallery, the sculpture traveled to Williamstown, Mass., and to Nashville for the next two years. “Immediately it comes to life and that is when the artist can sell the work later,” Al-Hadid pointed out in an interview.
Kara Walker liked a similar arrangement for her 2014 exhibition with Creative Time: “A subtlety. That work centered on a giant sugar sphinx that lurks inside the interior of the old Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. When the show was over, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the artist’s gallery, arranged for a film crew to document the uninstall. The agent also helped preserve the sphinx’s left hand, which is then on display in 2019 by the Deste Foundation on the island of Hydra in Greece.
But even with a gallery in the artist’s corner, getting involved with the public art system can get expensive. In 2020, Sam Moyer created the sculptures for the Public Art Foundation in honor of the nonprofit’s founder, Doris C. Freedman. The artist embedded imported marble slabs into the concrete to create monumental doors, only slightly ajar so viewers could walk through them. She estimates that she and her art curator, Sean Kelly, paid close to $200,000 to produce.”Door for Doris“While the Public Art Foundation provides $10,000 in fees for artists.
“When a new work is able to survive an exhibition, the artist’s gallery will often contribute to direct fabrication costs. .
Moyer arranged for the sculpture to go to Philadelphia for another exhibition, but the deal fell through during disassembly in New York, leaving her with 90,000 pounds of the sculpture spread across six cars. flat load.
“It’s a nightmare scenario,” Moyer said. “Without a gallery representative, it would result in me having to destroy the work.”
Instead, she and her agent made a deal with a shipping company to store the sculptures at their facilities in the Bronx until another cultural institution agreed to buy them. They are still there.
“The logistics of public art are absolute bananas,” adds Moyer. “It’s hard to come to terms with that terrible time.”
The director of the Public Arts Foundation, Nicholas Baume, says his organization tries to help. “A lot of the public art projects we do are site-specific, and they are conceived for a specific time and place,” he said. “Often they can have a longer life and be relocated, but sometimes they are not meant to last long.”
But many sculptors, who have gone through the challenges of creating public artwork, find it difficult to choose what might already be. Had the Council understood the challenges involved in hosting the “Fountain of the Survivors,” the artist could have adopted a more discreet style.
“I would have designed something low-maintenance, one-color, one-material, bronze and boring,” the Council said.
“I just hope it all gets easier,” the Council added.
But, the artist said, Times Square Arts continues to support; the team paid nearly $20,000 for the first five months to have the fountain in storage and are helping to find the project’s next home.
Jean Cooney, director of the nonprofit, acknowledges the asymmetry of public art production, saying it is a reflection of backward economy nature of the art world. “The system is poised to cause inequality, so we need to continue to work with emerging artists and build partnerships with organizations that have the resources to tackle these problems,” she said. We don’t do it.”
