A new installation by Cj Hendry brings together under one roof more flowers than you could find people in a massive football stadium. Such is the latest spectacle by the artist and Instagram sensation, who just unveiled Flower Market on New York’s Roosevelt Island, as the follow-up to her hallucinatory Public Pool project this past April.
Entering “Flower Market”. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Hendry has partnered with French skincare brand Clé de Peau to erect an elegant white tent at New York’s Four Freedoms State Park, on Roosevelt Island. Inside, Hendry revisits her fascination with flowers, which were the basis of a 2022 installation in London. Bins stuffed with 21 varieties of blooms line three long rows. Pull one out, though, and you’ll find they’re actually made of plush, with stiff stems that can stand in a vase. Hendry’s manufacturers put their own playful spin on nearly 40 different types of blooms, from familiar sunflowers and roses to more niche, alien-looking lilies and poppies.
Those were all winners. But Hendry scrapped nearly half of the prototypes presented to her for Flower Market. “There’s some flowers [that] didn’t go into production because they looked fucking ridiculous,” she told me over the phone. “Like the bird of paradise. It looked so heinous.”
The plush flowers. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Tickets to the installation’s three-day public run this weekend are free. What’s more, Hendry is letting every guest take one flower home free of charge. Want to round out a full bouquet? She’s selling subsequent flowers for just $5 a pop. There’s a counter in the tent where they’ll wrap your haul up in authentic floral paper, just like a real flower market.
A white wall at the back end of the tent glimmers with two rows of dramatically lit opalescent bottles suspended above a row of white plush flowers in vases. The setup is so pretty that it might take a second to realize they’re all Clé de Peau’s signature serum, which now features white lily concentrate.
Guests get their flowers wrapped at the checkout counter. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
“We chat to brands a lot,” Hendry remarked of her team. “90 percent of the time, nothing ends up happening because it always just feels a bit wrong.” Hendry says she’s loved since Clé de Peau she was a teen, though—and the brand has shown that it is willing to go, as she put it, “pure art.”
On the other side of that wall, in an intimate space sequestered from the hubbub, Hendry is presenting her latest series of 12 drawings, all depicting specific flowers. As I entered this chamber lined with bins of white lilies at the VIP opening on Thursday night, I heard one woman remark to her group, “The man I was talking to thought these were photographs.” You really can’t blame him.
Martha Stewart chats near a display of Hendry’s drawings. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Lifelike as they might look, though, you would be hard-pressed to find actual botanical classifications for this installation’s 21 flowers. Hendry’s drawings are all named after supposedly floral-based skincare ingredients—sometimes accurately (squalene does, in fact, come from chamomile flowers) and sometimes not (in the case of benzoyl peroxide). Hendry has priced each of these unique drawings at $22,900, and they’re available only to her existing collectors. Most sold before the market opened, she said.
Fans craving a Flower Market memento beyond a bouquet—or hoping to get in on the action from afar—can purchase plush flowers and merch through Hendry’s website upon the installation’s conclusion on Sunday night. She’s also dropping some little floral editions—again, only for existing collectors of her work—that come in cute, colorful briefcases, for a cool $990 each. So it’s not hard to see how $5 for a flower might be a momentous draw.
Guests mingling and planning their bouquets.n Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
The real fun of Flower Market, though, is being there. At first, Hendry wanted to stage the installation in the new atrium at Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory, but the site was fully booked for fashion week. Roosevelt Island, however, offered a dreamy location. By way of thanks, Hendry will donate the installation’s greenhouse for the park’s future use.
This weekend, however, wind off the river will ruffle the structure’s drapery while fans pluck plush bouquets that will never wilt. It has all the fun of a toy store meeting a meadow. Hendry’s work, ultimately, courts the inner child. Flower Market will make visitors feel freer than a 10-year-old roaming a Sephora store.